Three separate times during Thursday night’s debate, CNN moderators asked Donald Trump whether he would commit to accepting the legitimacy of the 2024 election results regardless of who won. He never did.
Instead, Trump said he would accept the results if he thought they were “fair and legal and good” — while repeating the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged (a claim that moderators let stand). )
Put together, the former president is openly telling us that he is ready to repeat the campaign of lies and incitement that produced a mob attack on the Capitol less than four years ago. (He offered to reject political violence.)
That it all felt normal, even expected, shows how much Donald Trump has warped our sense of what is tolerable in America. Here was an authoritarian lying, babbling incoherently about policy, issuing thinly veiled threats against democracy, and we had come to accept it.
We are all so used to this behavior that we have trouble reminding ourselves how dangerous it is. I can guarantee Trump’s comments about the election will not make the top headlines of any major newspaper in the country.
That honor would probably go to Joe Biden’s poor performance, and I can understand why. The president of the United States just stringing together a coherent answer for the first hour of a nationally televised debate is a really major story. It seems that the critics Caveats about Biden’s age There was a point.
But there’s something quietly obscene about Trump’s bare authoritarianism falling out of frame. These were not just a few comments about the election results: it was his entire performance, Horseman of lies That betrayed an astonishing contempt for the intelligence of the American public.
On Thursday night, an authoritarian made his distaste for democracy public. Opposite him was a man Demands to take care of democracy after all, but seemed entirely unable to consider whether there might be some tension between his future and his own ambitions.
Blame Biden for running again. Blame the Democratic Party for failing to stop him. Blame CNN for burying questions of democracy through controversy. Blame the Republicans for nominating Trump. Blame Trump, after all, for acting the way he likes to act — and his voters for standing by him when he does.
Trump reminded us tonight that he is uniquely unfit for office and hostile to our democracy. That qualities have lost their power to shock shows how much the man has bent our politics to his will.
