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www.theatlantic.com › podcasts › archive › 2024 › 10 › trump-and-the-january-6-memory-hole › 680353
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The way Donald Trump talks about January 6 has evolved over time. Directly after the insurrection, he condemned the rioters, although he added that they were “very special.” For the next few years, he played around with different themes, implying that the protests were peaceful or that the people jailed for their actions that day were “political prisoners.”
But these descriptions are mild compared with the outrageous ways he’s been talking about January 6 in these weeks leading up to the election. Recently, he described the day as “love and peace” and upped the metaphor from political prisoners to Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Why is he leaning so hard into the political revisionism? And what exactly should we be afraid of?
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who has a unique view of that day. Raskin explains what January 6, 2025, might look like and what is historically unique about Trump’s claims. And I ask Raskin the question I’ve been pondering: When might it be appropriate to let January 6 go?
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: Over the last many months, I’ve been thinking a lot about January 6 and about how memory can become a weapon in an election. Just the other day at an economic forum in Chicago, candidate Donald Trump described that day as “love and peace.” Love and peace! Can you imagine? You wanna hear some sounds of “love and peace” from that day?
[Noises from January 6]
Rioter: Start making a list. Put all those names down. And we start hunting them down one by one.
Person on bullhorn inside Congress: We had a disbursement of tear gas in the Rotunda. Please be advised there are masks under your seats. Please grab a mask.
Rosin: In the last couple of weeks of the campaign, Trump has been really digging into this bizarre sentiment. He compared the jailed rioters to Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II. He reposted a meme, saying January 6 would go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up a fraudulent election. He said, “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns.”
Now, if you follow the work of Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, who was on this show just last week, you know what it means when a leader starts to rewrite history in such a shameless way. It’s a thing that wannabe dictators do and have always done.
But January 6 has also been on my mind because, for the past year, I’ve been spending a lot of time with people who are hard at work doing what Trump has been doing—distorting our memories of that day.
It started like this: Last fall, my partner and I were walking our dogs, and we passed a car in our neighborhood that had a bunch of militia stickers in the back window and a huge j4j6, which means “Justice for January 6ers.” And at first, we had a nasty altercation with the person in the car. And then we decided to get to know her and her friends.
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you want to know how that attempt to get to know our neighbors worked out, you’ll have to listen to the podcast series we made about it. It’s called We Live Here Now.
This episode is about the bigger picture. We, in the U.S., have not had a lot of experience with this kind of real-time memory distortion. And there’s only one person I want to talk to about how that might play out in this upcoming election: Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, who was a member of Congress’s January 6 committee, and his memories of that day are more potent than most people’s. Raskin’s son, Tommy, had died by suicide about a week before, and in the months of sleepless nights that followed Raskin wrote a book called Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, which interweaves his son’s suffering with the nation’s suffering, which he believes drove thousands of people to the Capitol that day.
I started by asking Raskin what was foremost on my mind, which is what we should expect this coming January 6, 2025, which is when Congress will certify the next election. Here’s our conversation.
Jamie Raskin: I mean, I’ve been to Arizona, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, California, Colorado—and everybody is asking about January 6 and whether we will see a repeat.
But we will not see an exact repeat of January 6, 2021. For one thing, Donald Trump’s not president. Joe Biden’s president, which means, if you had a similar scenario unfolding, the National Guard would be there. Joe Biden would not be eating hamburgers and french fries and watching it on TV like an all-pro-wrestling match.
Rosin: And saying, So what?
Raskin: And saying, So what? And in general, we are physically fortified in a way we weren’t. We will have nonscalable fencing, and we’ll be ready for violence like that. But fundamentally, what was January 6, 2021? It was a certification crisis. It was an attempt to block the receipt of Electoral College votes in the so-called certificates of ascertainment sent in by the governors.
And we will see multiple certification challenges by Donald Trump, because they’ve already begun, in essence. They’re already suing. But it won’t happen at the end of the process, which is what January 6 is. They will happen at the beginning. They will be at the precinct level, at the county level, at the state level. They will try to dispute the authenticity and the veracity of the vote, and there will be challenges to, you know, any popular-vote majorities. And I’m assuming and hoping there will be many of them across the country for the Harris-Walz ticket.
Rosin: Okay. You started by saying people ask you, so clearly people are worried. And then you answered by saying it’s not going to be the same. So is your general answer to them, No need to worry? Like, Don’t worry. There won’t be violence? Is that how, like—do you feel secure? It will be okay?
Raskin: It will not be an instant replay of what happened on January 6, 2021. It will look very different. In some sense, the new crisis has already begun, with lies that are being told by Donald Trump about the hurricanes and about FEMA. This is equivalent to the lies he was telling about COVID-19 last time to try to condition his followers to accept his Big Lie about the election. And he’s already trying to undermine people’s faith and confidence in the electoral process in the electoral system.
So that part of it has already begun. When I’m out campaigning around the country, I say we have two urgent tasks: One is to win the election, and two is to defend the election. Because as we saw from the last time around, Donald Trump doesn’t remotely consider it over once the ballots have been tallied if he loses the election. And that, of course, is a hallmark characteristic of an authoritarian, and an authoritarian mindset. Authoritarian political parties don’t accept the results of democratic elections that don’t go their way.
Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, is not running what I would recognize as a real election campaign, which is about canvassing, door knocking, organizing people. I don’t see that happening. I see it happening on the Democratic side everywhere I go. I don’t see it on the Republican side almost anywhere I go. They’re running a campaign of raising a lot of money. A lot of it disappears into different mystery boxes, but basically, they’re running a campaign on TV and then getting ready to attack the election process.
Rosin: Yes. He says, Cheat like hell, in almost every state. If we lose these states, if we lose this state—Wisconsin, Michigan, whatever state—it’s because they cheat like hell.
So I’m trying to give listeners an accurate picture. There’s one picture: Oh, we’re just going to have violence the way we had before. There’s another picture, which is: It’s going to be fine. So I’m just trying to prepare readers, listeners for what is realistically the thing that you should be vigilant and watch out for and what might actually happen.
Raskin: Well, I think it’s going to be a fight to certify the actual election vote. And remember, this is something that, for most of our lifetimes, we’ve taken for granted: simply that people will vote and that the votes will be counted fairly—they will be tallied fairly—and then the majority will be translated through an electoral system that has integrity to it.
You know, the Trump methodology here is to attack the electoral system, to disrupt the electoral system, and then try to blame everything on his opponents. I mean, this is an absolute historical anomaly. And so we need to have clarity about what’s going on.
And we have to, as citizens in a completely nonpartisan way—we have to be defending the integrity of the electoral process against this kind of attack.
Rosin: He has said many times that he would pardon the J6ers. He could pardon the J6ers, right? There’s nothing, if he wins, that would prevent him from doing that.
Raskin: Certainly not under the Supreme Court’s decision. I mean, the pardon power would be a paradigm example of a core function of the presidency that the president could exercise without any fear of criminal prosecution. I mean, when Trump figures that out, he’ll probably end up selling pardons.
They came close to doing it last time, but there’s no reason he wouldn’t go on eBay and just start selling them under that rancid opinion issued by his justices.
Rosin: I didn’t realize you could do that. You probably just gave him an idea.
Raskin: Yeah. (Laughs.) But look—let me say something about that. They call the January 6 insurrectionists convicted of assaulting federal officers or destroying federal property or seditious conspiracy, which means conspiracy to overthrow the government, “political prisoners.” So they liken them to, you know, [Alexei] Navalny. They liken them to [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn or to Nelson Mandela. These were people who were fighting for freedom and democracy against authoritarian regimes. These people were fighting for an authoritarian coup against a constitutional democracy, and they’ve had every aspect of due process, and they’ve been convicted for their crimes against us.
A lot of the Trumpian revisionist assault on January 6 is internally contradictory. It’s just illogical. Half of the time, they’re saying that the people who attacked the police and who attacked the Capitol were not MAGA—they were antifa dressed as MAGA. Then the other half of the time, they’re down in the D.C. jail demanding the release of these alleged antifa fighters. Why are they demanding the release of the antifa fighters? It makes no sense. So there’s just incoherence replete throughout the propaganda assault on January 6. The point for them is to confuse people and to destroy the moral clarity of what happened, but it was perfectly clear what happened on that day.
There were people of both political parties and all political persuasions standing by the rule of law and acting under the Constitution, and then people trying to destroy the Constitution in order to overthrow an election and put Donald Trump back in power unlawfully.
Rosin: I mean, yeah. If you’re a student of autocracy, like The Atlantic is, the point is to say something, in some ways, as an autocratic leader that’s patently untrue and dare you to believe it as a loyalty test. I mean, that’s one, as Anne Applebaum—she’s been doing a series about that. It has really enlightened me on what the lies are about. They’re a test, you know? And so the more absurd they are—like, they’re about Haitians eating pets or whatever—like, the more ridiculous they are and the more you are willing to believe them, the more that seals the lock between the leader and the follower.
So that’s why I sometimes get a little despairing around, like, Well, we’re just going to keep telling the truth, because that’s not the game they’re playing, you know? So what does fact-checking and journalism and, like, recording things really help? Sometimes, you know, I feel that way about it.
Raskin: I mean, Trump’s lies are not about illumination or even contests over the facts. Trump’s lies are about coercion and obedience and submission of his followers.
Rosin: But that’s difficult. That’s difficult to counter. Like, how do you get in between it? The truth doesn’t really get in between it. The truth makes you an enemy.
Raskin: Well, when you look at the way that cult leaders operate, they tell lies all the time. Nobody really feels like it’s necessary to contradict their lies, because they’re so self-evidently ridiculous. And we can see the way that their lives are just meant to regulate and control their followers. And so it’s just a question of naming what’s actually happening.
Rosin: And continuing to do that, with some faith that the majority of people will eventually sort of drift over to the side of truth.
Raskin: Yeah, and also to make sure that a majority of the people are going to stand up for the facts, the truth, and for democratic institutions.
Rosin: Jack Smith’s case. Any thoughts about that?
Raskin: Well, Jack Smith is now paddling upstream because of the Supreme Court’s outrageous ruling that the president has immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits under the rubric of his office.
You would think those would be the worst kinds of crimes, but no. Those are presumptively immune from prosecution, and if they’re within his core functions of office, then they’re absolutely immune.
Donald Trump was never acting in his official capacity as president when he tried to overturn an election, simply because that’s not part of the president’s job. It’s not part of the president’s job to have anything to do with the presidential election. When he’s trying to set up counterfeit elector slates, he’s not involved with the Electoral College. That’s done at the state level, and the state legislatures do it. And then the results are sent in to the House and the Senate and the archivist. They’re not sent to the president.
When he called Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia, and said, Just find me 11,780 votes, or called other election officials to harangue them—that’s not part of the president’s job. He was calling as a candidate, not as a president. And as a candidate, he was acting as an outlaw candidate and really as a tyrant, somebody trying to topple the whole constitutional order.
You know, a tyrant, in the Greek sense of the word, is someone who rises up from outside of the constitutional order to try to attack the constitutional order. And that’s a pretty accurate description and definition of what Donald Trump has done.
[Music]
Rosin: There’s a last thing I want to talk to Raskin about, and it pushed against everything he had just told me: When is it time to start moving on from January 6? That’s after the break.
[Break]
Rosin: In the year I spent reporting my podcast about January 6, I came across a very interesting idea for how to approach the memory of that day differently. It was in an essay by journalist Linda Kinstler called “Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion.” Kinstler’s argument—or at least one part of it—is that we are a culture saturated in memories.
We have videos and body cams and security cameras. Almost every inch of January 6 is recorded, which is a good thing for, say, a trial. But also, it makes it harder for us to forgive and forget. Back in the day, American political leaders called it “oblivion.” It was used in certain moments in American history, like after the Civil War, when obsessively remembering might just bring on more and more cycles of recrimination and vengeance.
So I ran this question by Raskin. He’s a constitutional lawyer and also a philosophical thinker. Might there ever be a time when oblivion might be the appropriate strategy for January 6?
[Break]
Rosin: All right—last thing: Whether he wins or loses, we have a culture to deal with, a culture of Americans, 30 percent of whom still think that the election wasn’t fair, was stolen in some way. So that’s with us. That’s the state of our nation right now, whoever wins and loses.
I’ve been reading about a—it’s a philosophical, legal, political theory of oblivion. Like, is there a time when cycles of recrimination or justice have to yield to something else? Is there ever a moment when you’re remembering too much? Does that make any sense to you?
Raskin: Mm-hmm. Well, it will be important for us always to remember these events and the facts of what took place. But I suppose, you know, human beings are made up of a mixture of thoughts and passions and emotions. And just like the passions and emotions have diminished somewhat from the Civil War, perhaps the passions and emotions around January 6 will begin to subside.
But at this point, with the republic still so much under attack, and with so many lies and so much propaganda and disinformation and revisionism out there, I believe that the passions and the emotion surrounding January 6 are still very much there, and they should be there until we can actually dispel this threat of authoritarianism in our country.
Rosin: So a potentially useful idea for healing, but just not yet. Is that where we land? Because I’m very taken—I find this theory interesting, that there’s a history post-Civil War of oblivion. You know, that it’s talked about by politicians: It’s time for oblivion. And right now, you know, we have video memories. Everything’s taped, recorded. So it’s very hard, actually, to do something like that.
Raskin: Well, thank God it’s all taped, and thank God there are videos, because you can see the way they’re lying about it, even in the face of the videos and the absolute factual documentation.
Look—I would say that historical memory is essential to establishing our values and principles for the future. One hopes that in the case of a society or a nation, that we’re not disabled by a memory the way that individuals can be disabled by a memory through post-traumatic stress syndrome or something like that. I’m hoping we’re able to integrate this into the true American story.
But as long as people are out there lying about January 6 and claiming it was really antifa or it was really the FBI or something, it’s going to be important for us to insist upon the facts and bring passion to the project of making people see the truth and remember.
[Break]
Rosin: That was my interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin. My thanks to him for taking the time to chat with me. Now, before we end, I want to share a bit from the other podcast I made recently, We Live Here Now.
I can’t say that we managed to convince our neighbors of our version of the truth. I hope you’ll listen to the entire series to hear what happened. It starts with the ridiculous way we met them, and it moves through a lot of characters in their alternate universe, including some J6ers who’d been just released from prison.
But here, I’m going to share with you something from the final episode of the series because it’s kind of in the spirit of oblivion. Even though we didn’t change their minds, something softened.
The two people you are about to hear are Lauren Ober—she’s my partner, who co-hosted the series—and Micki Witthoeft—she’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the only person shot and killed on that day. Micki is our neighbor. This is from Lauren’s final interview with Micki.
Lauren Ober: Is there anything that I don’t get? Is there anything that you need to clarify? Is there any critique or anything that you need to say before, you know, we’re done with our interviews?
Micki Witthoeft: I think the only thing I can say that I haven’t said to death, because this has been an ongoing—it’s been quite something. I don’t know—you might know more about me than—
But no. I think that people like you and people like me that admittedly come from completely different places in our upbringing, geography, experience, and way of looking at things—I think that if we can sit down and have a civil conversation and just see that you can meet in the middle, at least somewhere, you know, people don’t have to stand on opposite sides of the fence and throw stones. I didn’t mean to cry when I said that. Let’s do—(Claps.) take two!
Ober: I mean, why are you trying to pretend like you’re a hard-ass? (Laughs.)
Witthoeft: No, but it’s just—people don’t want to hear that shit all the time. Eww. (Mock cries.) Nobody likes that.
Ober: Well, I beg to differ. (Laughs.)
Witthoeft: It is what it is.
Ober: I beg to differ. I know I agree with you.
Rosin: You can listen to We Live Here Now anywhere you get your podcasts.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › trump-duluth-georgia-rally › 680354
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Tucker Carlson’s eyes narrowed as he conjured the image. A Donald Trump victory, he said at a campaign event in Gwinnett County, Georgia, last night, “will be a middle finger wagging in the face of the worst people in the English-speaking world.”
Trump maintains that he’s running for president a third time to restore and unite the country. But many Democrats and even some Republicans have expressed profound concern for democracy and overall safety if the former president wins this election. Last night at the Gwinnett County event, sponsored by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, I asked Trump’s supporters to consider the inverse: What do you think will happen if Trump loses?
The more Trump rallies I attended, the more this question had been gnawing at me. He has framed this presidential contest as a “final battle,” and he may well win. But if he doesn’t, I wanted to know if he and his supporters would really go quietly. I heard a range of answers last night, from promises to accept the outcome to predictions of a new Civil War.
I approached the former Trump-administration official Peter Navarro, who was signing copies of his book The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform. Earlier this year, Navarro spent four months in prison. Like another Trump ally, Steve Bannon, Navarro had been found in contempt of Congress after failing to comply with subpoenas from the House Select Committee on January 6. If Trump loses the election, Navarro told me that “the country will disintegrate,” and he warned of “very hard times.” I asked him if he thought something akin to another January 6 might occur. “By asking that question you’re trying to stir up shit, man,” he said. He told me that my query would be better suited for President Joe Biden and the Democrats. “Those assholes put me in prison,” he said. “Do you hear me?”
[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]
Another former Trump-administration official, Ben Carson, took a more conciliatory approach to my question. “I think we’ll have to regroup and try to figure out how we can save our country,” Carson said. He told me he doubted that another event like the storming of the Capitol would take place. “I think regardless of who wins or loses, we’ve got to tone down the dissension and the hatred that’s going on in our country, or it’s going to be destroyed,” Carson said.
Rank-and-file Trump supporters had varying opinions on the matter. I chatted with one attendee, Joshua Barnes, while he waited in line to buy strawberry smoothies for himself and his wife at a food truck outside the arena. The couple had driven four hours that morning from their home in Alabama to hear Trump speak live for the first time. “If she does become president, as much as I would hate it, you kind of do have to accept it,” Barnes said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He told me he did not want another insurrection to occur, but he acknowledged the possibility of something worse: a period of postelection unrest, or even civil war. (He pointed me to a Rasmussen survey from the spring that had shown a distressingly high percentage of respondents saying the same thing.)
A man from Gwinnett County named Rich who works in construction told me that this was his fourth Trump rally. “I’m a pretty good judge of character, and when people are trying to shovel me a load of garbage, it’s like, No, it stinks, okay?” he said of Harris and the Democrats. He predicted protests no matter who loses, but did not anticipate another January 6, which he referred to as a “situation” and not an insurrection. As for something closer to a civil war? “I think anything’s possible; I don’t think it’s out of the question, and I really can’t elaborate on that,” he said, adding only that he was hoping it wouldn’t happen.
In the parking lot, I met a man named Mark Williams, who told me he ran the biggest political printing business in Georgia. I took a seat in a folding chair behind his table of yard signs and other wares, and he offered me a red-white-and-blue can of Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right 100% Woke-Free American Beer. (“Eat steak, lift weights, be uncensorable, drink a little beer,” read the slogan.) Though Williams supports Trump, he was levelheaded about both the current election and the previous one. He did not believe Trump’s claim that he’d really won in 2020. “I think we’re more accepting than the media gives us credit for,” Williams said of he and his fellow Republicans. “The actions of a few get painted with that big brush,” he said, pointing to January 6. “So, yeah, there’s going to be some crazy people that do some crazy shit; that just happens. But the actions of most of us, I mean, we’ll bitch about it and scream at each other and all that kind of stuff, but we’re not going to break into the Capitol and stuff. I’m as big a Trump supporter as anybody, but I didn’t feel compelled to go breaking into the Capitol. And those people that did that did wrong. And I don’t know that all of them did wrong, but the ones that did, they needed to be punished.”
Williams told me he had never considered a new civil war seriously until he attended Kid Rock’s Rock the Country festival in Rome, Georgia, earlier this year. He described some of the chatter he heard at the festival, such as When we have to go out on the field and fight these people, y’all going to be there with us? “It did surprise me a little bit, the tone that some of these guys were taking; I think there’s people that are absolutely ready to take on a civil war,” he said. “I think that if there was an overwhelming view of a crooked election or something like that—yeah, I could see it happening.”
Many of the Trump supporters I interviewed sounded worried about future political violence. Some identified as pacifists. Others believed that unrest was almost a given. A 23-year-old named Ben told me he had skipped his classes at the University of Georgia to attend yesterday’s rally. I asked him if he thought January 6 could happen again in the event of a Trump defeat. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’ll be real this time.” He told me that he wasn’t sure what he, personally, would do if Trump lost. “I wouldn’t want to act on instinct, but I would be angry,” he said. He volunteered that he believed that Church and state needed to be remarried. “If Trump was dictator, I would support him,” he said. He insisted that he wasn’t trolling me.
[Read: Why are we humoring them?]
When Trump addressed the crowd, he made no secret of his authoritarian aspirations. He raised the possibility of suing 60 Minutes over its editing of an interview with Harris, and made the baffling claim that gang members were taking over Times Square with weapons that the U.S. military doesn’t have. (“But we have guys that want to confront them, and they’re gonna be allowed to confront them, and we’re gonna get ’em the hell out of here.”) Once again, he promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in history. He also said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which would grant him authority to detain, relocate, or deport foreigners deemed an enemy, and called for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen.
That last point is a particularly charged issue in Georgia. A 63-year-old attendee I met named Linda told me her daughters had been in the same sorority as Laken Riley, the 22-year-old student who was murdered earlier this year while jogging. Riley’s alleged assailant is a man from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally, and her death has become a conservative rallying cry, especially for Trump, as it was again last night. (“I feel like we’ll be more like Venezuela if the Democrats get in there,” Linda told me.)
After losing Georgia in 2020, Trump tried to overturn the state’s election results. In the four years since, he’s only grown more unstable, and he’s predicated his 2024 campaign on retribution. This time around, Trump has been encouraging his supporters to vote early, and he’s pushing a new catchphrase: “Too big to rig.” He’s not thinking about what happens if he loses; he wants a landslide victory.
www.theatlantic.com › health › archive › 2024 › 10 › abortion-roe-dobbs-election-hangover › 680332
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In the fall of 2021, Tammi Kromenaker started looking for a new home for her North Dakota abortion clinic. For more than 20 years, Red River Women’s Clinic had provided abortion care to the Fargo area, most of that time as the state’s only provider. But now Kromenaker, the practice’s owner and director, was moving it just across the state line to Minnesota. “We had seen the writing on the wall,” she told me. A few months earlier, the Supreme Court had announced that it would take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and North Dakota had a trigger law that would almost completely ban abortion if the justices ruled in favor of Dobbs.
“We closed on a new building at 3 p.m. the day before they overturned Roe,” Kromenaker recalled. Over the next 47 days, with the help of $1 million raised through GoFundMe, she oversaw a frantic move and remodel, sneaking around in a hat and sunglasses to keep the new location a secret; another planned clinic had just been set on fire in Wyoming. Meanwhile, Kromenaker’s clinic sued the state of North Dakota to block the trigger ban.
Last month, a North Dakota judge struck down the state’s abortion ban in response to Red River’s suit. Kromenaker could now return to providing abortions in Fargo, but she told me she has no plans to. That leaves the state with no dedicated abortion providers.
In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, abortion access has been all but obliterated in 14 states. Perhaps the most obvious consequence is what has happened to brick-and-mortar abortion providers: Clinics have closed, while physicians have fled restrictive states or left medicine altogether. In communities across the country, abortion pills have also been heavily restricted. A push to expand the rights of a fetus has coincided with a rise in pregnancy-related prosecutions, most of which have nothing to do with abortion—210 women were criminally charged in 12 states in the year after Dobbs, the highest number of such cases in a single year since 1973, according to one report.
The backlash has been forceful. Since Dobbs, citizens in six states have voted for ballot measures protecting abortion access. Next month, abortion rights will again be on the ballot, in 10 states. In the first presidential election since Roe was overturned, abortion has become a defining issue. Many Republican politicians, including the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, have attempted to court female voters by wavering on their previous anti-abortion positions. (Trump’s wife, Melania, released a memoir this month, in which she underscored her support for abortion rights.) Meanwhile, Democrats, especially the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, have campaigned heavily on restoring national reproductive rights. But a Democratic woman in the White House or new federal abortion protections won’t turn back the clock to 2021. Call it the Dobbs legacy, or the Dobbs hangover—the effects of America’s eroded abortion access will linger for years, if not decades.
[Read: Kamala Harris’s biggest advantage]
This summer, on the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, a coalition of groups including Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union announced that they were committing $100 million to Abortion Access Now, a campaign to pass federal legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion. Harris has floated one potential path: scrapping the filibuster to push reproductive protections through Congress. (That would probably require Democrats to control both chambers, which does not look likely.) If new federal protections were passed, “you would see overnight relief in a lot of places, depending on the nature of the legislation,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, a co-chair of Abortion Access Now and the executive director of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, told me.
New federal protections, however, wouldn’t instantly undo the tangle of abortion restrictions that some states began enacting even before Dobbs was decided. Reproductive health in America is governed by a complex web of laws, regulations, and court decisions at the local, state, and federal levels. When the Supreme Court ended constitutional protections for abortion on June 24, 2022, trigger laws designed to ban abortion went into effect. By the end of the year, states had enacted 50 new abortion restrictions, many of them resulting in near-total bans. No federal law could immediately undo all of these restrictions at once. Around the country, clinics closed, moved, or quit providing abortions; as of March, the U.S. had 42 fewer clinics than in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research and policy group.
With so many barriers in place, some medical providers have decided that living and working in states with restrictions isn’t worth the emotional and professional toll. In one recent study of ob-gyns in Texas, where abortion is banned with few exceptions, 13 percent of respondents said they plan to retire early, 21 percent said they either plan to or have thought about leaving to practice in another state, and 2 percent said they have already left. An analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that applications for ob-gyn residency programs in Alabama, which has a total ban except in cases of “serious health risk” to a pregnant woman, dropped 21.2 percent in the first full cycle after the Dobbs decision.
[From the October 2024 issue: ‘That’s something that you won’t recover from as a doctor’]
None of these policies has reduced the number of abortions performed nationally since Dobbs—in fact, the number has increased—but their consequences have ricocheted far beyond abortion. As obstetricians have fled restrictive states, for example, access to other gynecological care has become strained, too. And this month, Louisiana reclassified the two drugs used in medication abortions as Schedule IV controlled substances, a category typically reserved for drugs with a potential for dependency, such as Xanax and Valium. Mifepristone and misoprostol, which can be prescribed by telehealth, have played a significant role in abortion access since Dobbs. In Louisiana’s bid to further restrict the drugs, the state has potentially limited their use in other routine applications, such as treating miscarriages, inducing labor, and stopping potentially fatal postpartum hemorrhaging.
Even if new federal abortion protections were passed into law tomorrow, restoring nationwide access would still likely take significant time. Clinics, for instance, need real estate and doctors and lots and lots of capital to open or move—that’s partly why, after a 2016 Supreme Court case struck down a Texas law designed to force clinics out of business, the number of providers in the state a year later remained a fraction of what it was before. After Alabama banned abortion in 2022, WAWC Healthcare, in Tuscaloosa, remained open to provide contraception and prenatal care but eventually lost its abortion provider, says Robin Marty, WAWC’s executive director. Such positions might be filled by recent graduates, but the pool of qualified providers in restrictive states will remain small for years thanks to plummeting residency enrollments—most doctors tend to stay in the state where they do their residency.
Recent legal fights in Ohio provide a glimpse of how even sweeping abortion protections don’t automatically undo the effects of restrictions, and could lead to new ones. Last year, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to an abortion. But pro-abortion-rights advocates in the state are still fighting to throw out the state’s six-week ban and a law banning telemedicine in medication abortions, among other restrictions. Meanwhile, a state legislator has introduced a new bill that would withhold state funding from cities and counties that provide funding for local groups that provide abortion-support services such as gas money for patients. The immediate result of any national abortion protection would probably be a protracted legal battle. “Every state has a different assemblage of abortion restrictions,” Inez McGuire said. “A lot of that is going to be fought out through our judicial system. That is a daunting prospect.”
Roe’s downfall also opened up space for anti-abortion activists to renew their battle to recognize the rights of the fetus as a person. In February, when the Alabama Supreme Court found that IVF embryos are legally children, anti-abortion activists widely celebrated the decision as a sign that the country was ready to engage in this debate. As support for fetal rights has grown, pregnant people have found their bodily autonomy curtailed even when they’re not deciding whether to continue a pregnancy: According to the nonprofit group Pregnancy Justice, of the 210 cases of pregnant people who faced criminal charges, just five mentioned abortion. The majority alleged only substance abuse. In one, police charged an overdosing pregnant woman with child neglect after administering Narcan.
[Helen Lewis: The women killed by the Dobbs decision]
Abortion advocates, too, are adjusting to the new reality. Abortion access had been whittled away for decades before Dobbs was decided. But now the constitutional right to an abortion in America is no longer being infringed upon; it just doesn’t exist. Several clinic directors told me that it’s clear to them now that no new law will ever provide unassailable protection. When North Dakota’s ban was struck down by a district court last month, it wasn’t the first time; the same judge blocked a nearly identical abortion ban in 2022, eventually prompting the state legislature to repeal it and pass a new one with minor changes. Just this month, Georgia’s Supreme Court restored a six-week abortion ban that a lower court had overturned while it considers an appeal. “There is no finish line here,” says Katie Quinonez-Alonzo, the executive director of Women’s Health Center, which opened a branch of its West Virginia clinic three and a half hours away in Maryland after Dobbs. “This is work that needs to be done forever.” Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of media and policy for Students for Life of America, told me that the group already has a “Roe 2.0 Rollback plan” in place, ready to deploy at the state and federal levels after the election. “We are prepared legislatively and legally to address the human rights issue of the day, no matter which way the election turns out,” she told me.
Some clinics are tired of fighting. “If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said we were completely ready to go should abortion somehow return to Alabama,” Robin Marty told me. Now she’s not so sure. “We worked in extraordinarily hostile conditions” before Dobbs, Marty said. Clinic staff faced daily protesters, in the parking lot and sometimes even at the back door. Anti-abortion activists filed malpractice complaints against them, reported them to the fire department for allegedly having too many people in the clinic, and alleged health-privacy violations after digging through the clinic’s dumpster and finding a piece of paper from a patient’s file. “Having abortion become illegal and then having it return would be even more dangerous right now. If it comes back, they’re going to be even angrier,” Marty said.
When Red River first opened, in 1998, the threat of extinction was already in the air. The previous director had chosen to name the clinic after a body of water that runs between North Dakota and Minnesota, so that the reference would still make sense on the other side of the state border. When Kromenaker finally made the move, her life became easier virtually overnight, because Minnesota was among the states that had passed abortion protections after Dobbs. “We ended up in a state where providing this care is more straightforward, more patient-centered and with less stigmatizing restrictions,” Kromenaker said. “We would never take a step back and re-inflict those restrictions on ourselves.”
[Read: Abortion pills have changed the post-Roe calculus]
The United States cannot easily go back to the pre-Dobbs status quo. In the past two years, too much has changed—more than 100 new legal provisions, dozens of clinics closed, and a cultural gulf that has grown ever wider. For both abortion-rights supporters and opponents, only one possibility remains: to inhabit the reality we all live in now.
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I hesitate to speak for other Never Trumpers, but we’ve gotten used to losing, haven’t we? In three consecutive presidential elections, our doughty gang of dissidents has failed spectacularly in its attempts to shake Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP. At this year’s Republican National Convention—that great festival of Trumpian celebration—Never Trump Republicanism was invisible, for the second convention in a row. Never Trump writers and pundits have frequently contributed to national media outlets (including here in The Atlantic), but in the GOP itself, the group has been derided and purged.
Now some Never Trumpers are finding a place elsewhere: Last night in Wisconsin, I was invited to moderate a discussion between the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, and her new ally Liz Cheney. The two had spent the day on a campaign tour through the so-called blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Seeing them together felt surreal: As I said at the event, Harris and Cheney make an odd couple—and their alliance is a sign of a not-at-all-normal election. It also marks a crucial shift in the focus of the Democratic case. When Harris launched her campaign this summer, she leaned heavily into a message of joy and good vibes. Her vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, rose to prominence by calling the Trumpists “weird,” rather than an existential menace, as Joe Biden had argued during his campaign. But then the polls tightened, and Harris brought in Liz Cheney.
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how unlikely this development is. Among many Democratic voters, the name Cheney is radioactive, going back to the years of her father’s vice presidency; Liz Cheney herself spent years as a fierce right-wing ideological warrior and party loyalist, rising to the leadership ranks of the House GOP. Cheney was not an original Never Trumper. Unlike those of us who have been publicly expressing our concern since he came down the golden escalator in 2015, Cheney says she voted for Trump twice, and in Congress, she backed his administration more than 90 percent of the time. Then came January 6. Although her disillusionment with Trump had obviously been festering for some time, the insurrection led to Cheney’s full-throated denunciation. Her willingness to sacrifice her standing with the party and her seat in Congress made her a symbol of principled GOP resistance. Her role as vice chair of the Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol made her the most famous Never Trumper in the country.
And there she was Monday night with a Democrat she had once denounced as a dangerous radical. The usual alignments of right and left and Democrat and Republican simply don’t apply anymore, because Donald Trump poses a unique danger to the entire American order. “We’ve never faced a threat like this before,” Cheney said, “and I think it’s so important for people to realize this republic only survives if we protect it, and that means putting partisan politics aside and standing up for the Constitution and for what’s right and loving our country.”
This is what Never Trumpers have been shouting into the GOP void for the past nine years. And in the last two weeks of the campaign, Harris and her team have decided to make it their closing argument. Although Harris now frequently refers to Trump as “an unserious man,” she also warns that the “consequences” of his return to power are “brutally serious.” Sounding that alarm also has meant reaching out to the battered remnants of the Never Trump movement. (Bulwark’s publisher, Sarah Longwell—a leading figure of the Never Trump movement—moderated the Harris-Cheney event in Pennsylvania.) Why the Never Trumpers? Because they have been making the case for years that voting against Trump isn’t a betrayal of party principles. They are particularly well positioned to argue that it isn’t necessary to embrace Democratic policies to vote for Harris, because the stakes are so much higher than mere party politics. And that’s an argument that Harris is now trying to make to swing voters. The question is, will that argument actually persuade these voters in the way Harris hopes it will?
The majority of Republican voters across the country will vote for Trump, and Cheney’s involvement is unlikely to move many of them. Harris also faces challenges in persuading conservative voters to overlook her past stances on issues such as transgender health care, the Green New Deal, and immigration. Meanwhile, the largest known group of undecideds is unsure about voting at all.
But this election could come down to a sliver of a percent, and the Harris campaign has decided to make a concerted play for disillusioned and discarded Republican voters in places like Waukesha County, where we met Monday night. In April’s GOP presidential primary, Nikki Haley won about 14 percent of the vote in Waukesha County. Some of those voters were in the audience Monday when Cheney made it clear to them that voting for a Democrat was okay because Trump should never be allowed in any office of public trust again. Perhaps her words will give a few Republican voters the cover they need to make a decision that might feel like a betrayal but is in fact an act of loyalty to country above all.
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Trump: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The improbable coalition that is Harris’s best hope There’s no coming back from Dobbs.Today’s News
The Israeli military said that one of its air strikes in early October killed Hashem Safieddine, a top Hezbollah leader who was a potential successor to Hezbollah’s recently assassinated longtime leader. Hezbollah did not immediately respond to the claim. A federal judge ordered Rudy Giuliani, a former Trump lawyer and former mayor of New York City, to turn over his New York apartment and his valuable personal items to the two Georgia election workers he defamed. A federal appeals court upheld the conviction of Couy Griffin, the Cowboys for Trump leader who was found guilty of a trespassing charge that was used against many other January 6 defendants.Evening Read
Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta at home with her children in Santa Cruz, California Jenna Garrett for The AtlanticThis Influencer Says You Can’t Parent Too Gently
By Olga Khazan
The kids held it together pretty well until right after gymnastics. At the end of a long day that included school, a chaotic playdate, and a mostly ignored lunch of sandwiches, the parenting coach Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta picked up her twins from the tumbling gym around 5:30. The two 8-year-olds joined their 6-year-old sister inside Chelsey’s silver minivan.
Chelsey, an energetic 41-year-old, promotes gentle parenting, a philosophy in which prioritizing a good relationship with your kid trumps getting them to obey you. I was tagging along with her family for a few days to see how her strategy—stay calm, name emotions, don’t punish kids for acting out—works in practice.
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In September, Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying an AK-47-style gun near Donald Trump’s Palm Beach golf course—in an apparent attempt, the FBI concluded, to assassinate the former president. To some, the thwarted violence was a bleak testament to the times: one more reminder that politics, when approached as an endless war, will come with collateral damage. To Elon Musk, however, it was an opportunity. The billionaire, treating his control of X as a means of owning the libs, gave the Palm Beach news a MAGA-friendly twist. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote on the platform, punctuating the line with a thinking-face emoji.
Musk was wrong—authorities have arrested several people for death threats made against the president and vice president—and he eventually deleted the post. But he did not apologize for the mistake. Instead, earlier this month, Musk used an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s X-based show as a chance to workshop the line. “Nobody’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala,” Musk told Carlson, “because it’s pointless. What do you achieve?”
At this, both men guffawed. Musk, having found an appreciative audience, kept going, finding new ways to suggest that the vice president was not worth the trouble of assassinating. Carlson’s reply: “That’s hilarious.”
First as tragedy, then as farce, the adage goes. If only the old order still applied. Not that long ago, public figures such as Carlson and Musk might have been embarrassed to be seen using political violence as a punch line. But embarrassment, these days, is a partisan affliction. It can ail only the soft, the sincere—the people willing to be caught caring in public. The brand of politics that Musk and Carlson practice is swaggering and provocative and, as a result, entirely devoid of shame. And so the two men, wielding their mockery, make a show of each chortle and smirk. They may consider their delight to be defiant—a rebuke to the humorless masses who see the violence and not the lol—but it is not defiant. It is dull. This is the way of things now. The tragedy and the farce, the menace that winks, the joke that threatens, the emoji that cries with joy and the one that simply cries: They bleed together, all of them. Irony storms the Capitol. Cynicism reigns.
[Read: Political violence feeds on itself]
Trump, that louche comedian, is partially to blame. His humor—some of it crude, some of it cruel, most of it treating politics and the people who engage in them as the butt of an endless joke—is more than a performance. It is also permission. Musk and Carlson laughed at the thought of Harris’s death both because they wanted to and because they knew they could. Trump and his crowbar will come for every Overton window. Now no claim is too much. No joke is too soon. Deportations, assassinations, the casual suggestion that America is due for its own version of Kristallnacht: Invoked as ideas and implications, they might be threats. They might be omens. For Trump and the many who humor him, though, they’re simply material—fodder for jokes in a set that never ends.
“Not The Onion,” people might warn one another on social media, as they share the video of Trump’s nearly 40-minute attempt to turn a town hall into a one-man dance party. “Beyond parody,” they might moan, as J. D. Vance spreads racist lies about immigrants snatching and eating their neighbors’ pets. The disclaimers are hardly necessary. Americans, whatever their political convictions, have become accustomed to politics that read as dark comedy—and to politicians who commit fully to the bit. These leaders don’t merely lie or misspeak or make light of life and death. To them, leadership itself is a joke. They’re trolling one another. They’re trolling us. They’ve made mischief a mandate.
Call it the trolligarchy—and have no doubt that its regime is inescapable. Trump says that if reelected he’ll be a dictator on “day one” and then insists that he’s only joking. Under Musk, X’s email for press inquiries auto-responds to reporters’ questions with a poop emoji. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a congressional seat in Georgia by turning trolling into a campaign strategy, has been using the House bill-amendment process as an opportunity for cheap acts of score-settling. In a proposed amendment to a bill meant to allocate funding to aid Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s invasion, she stipulated, among other things, that any colleague who voted for it would be conscripted into Ukraine’s military.
“Messaging bills” may be fairly common among politicians seeking new ways to rack up political points. And Greene’s amendment was roundly defeated. Her stunt, though, wrote tragedy and farce into the congressional record. Roll Call, reporting on it, quoted social-media posts from Matt Glassman, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute. There have “always been chucklehead Members of the House,” Glassman wrote of Greene’s antics. “But the prominence of many of the chuckleheads in the GOP and the ever-increasing general level of chucklehead behavior worries me.”
Life under the trolligarchy requires constant acts of micro-translation: Did she mean it? Was he joking? Were they lying? The lulz, as a result, can be exhausting. The scholar Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, analyzing fMRI studies that illustrate how the brain processes jokes, argues that humor can impose a cognitive tax. Jokes, for all their delights, ask more of their audiences than other forms of discourse do: They require more split-second parsing, more energy, more work. And a troll is a joke unhinged—which makes it extra taxing. Its terms are particularly murky. Its claims are especially suspect. Under its influence, the old categories fail. Nihilism takes over. Fatigue sets in. Sincerity and irony, like stars whose centers cannot hold, collapse into each other.
Humor is an age-old political tradition—Common Sense, the pamphlet that persuaded many Americans to become revolutionaries, was powerful in part because it was often quite funny—but trolling, as a mode of political engagement, is not comedy. It is its antithesis. Nazis of both the past and present have tried to hide in plain sight by characterizing their racism as merely ironic. As The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in a 2017 essay, jokes deployed as rhetoric played a crucial role in helping Trump win the presidency.
[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]
Since then, the trolling has only intensified. But it has also become—in a twist that can read as a cosmic kind of troll—ever more banal. In 2008, The New York Times published “The Trolls Among Us,” a lengthy introduction to a subculture that was then emerging from the dark recesses of the internet. The article is remarkably prescient. It treats trolling as a novelty but frames it as a new moral problem. It parses the cruelty that has become a standard feature of online engagement. But it was also written when trolls’ power was relatively contained. Trolling, today, having slipped the surly bonds of 4chan, is no longer subculture. It is culture.
Many trolls of the early internet hid behind pseudonyms and anonymity; they largely performed for one another rather than for a mass audience. But trolling, as a political style, demands credit for the chaos it sows. Trump, the “troll in chief,” channels that status as brand identity. He will happily lie, his followers know; maybe he’ll lie on their behalf. He will trick his opponents. He will set traps. He will reveal his rivals’ foolishness. He will humiliate them. That old Times article captured one of the abiding ironies of this brave new mode of digital engagement. Trolling may manifest as pranks. But many practitioners insist that their hijinks have ethical ends. Trolls claim to be puncturing pieties, saving the sanctimonious from themselves. They’re righting social wrongs as they subject “elites” to a barrage of corrective humiliations meant to reveal empathy and equality and other such values as nothing more than smug little lies.
Trolling, in that way, can be self-rationalizing, and therefore particularly powerful when its logic comes for our politics. Trump once gave a speech in the rain and then bragged about the sun shining down on his performance. His bravado was propaganda in its most basic and recognizable form—overt, insistent, blunt. It did what propaganda typically will, imposing its preferred reality onto the one that actually exists. But the lie was also so casual, so basic, so fundamentally absurd—even the heavens, Trump says, will do his bidding—that it barely registered as propaganda at all.
Trump came of age as a public figure in the 1980s, long before irony was alleged to have died—a time, on the contrary, when cynicism had become cultural currency. It was a period when earnestness, or at least the appearance of it, was curdling into a liability. Trump has taken the irony-infused assumptions of those years and used them as tools of power. His lies invade and destroy, trampling the truths that stand in their way with casual, cunning brutality. But Trump’s jokes can be similarly, if more subtly, ruinous. A troll reserves the right, always, to be kidding—even about matters of life and death.
That attitude, once it takes hold of the body politic, spreads rapidly. People talk about “irony poisoning” because irony, in the end, has so few antidotes. Greene’s attempt to troll her colleagues as they determined aid to Ukraine led to several more proposed amendments—this time from Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic representative from Florida. One proposed to appoint Greene as “Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” Another suggested renaming Greene’s office for Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who is widely denigrated for his appeasement of Hitler.
Recommending that a congressional office be called the Neville Chamberlain Room may not be a great joke; it’s even worse, though, as a mode of government. Democracy is an earnest enterprise: It requires us—challenges us—to care. It assumes that people will disagree, about the small things and the big ones. It further assumes that they will settle differences through acts of debate. But cynicism makes argument impossible. “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” Nussbaum asked in her 2017 essay, and the question still has no good answer. The old insult comic remains onstage, serving up the same routine to a crowd that cackles and roars. He’ll roast anyone in his path. He’ll soak up the applause. He’ll trust that, in all the levity, people will miss the obvious: When the comedy keeps punching down, anyone can become the butt of the joke.
www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › 2024-election-risks-swing-states › 680348
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In thinking about the days and weeks after November 5, when unfounded attacks on the vote count and the integrity of America’s election are most likely to arise, one must begin with an uncomfortable acknowledgment: The threat to the fair evaluation of the results comes from only one party. There has never been any suggestion that Democratic officials are likely to systematically disrupt the lawful counting of ballots. The risk, such as it is, comes from possible spurious legal challenges raised by Donald Trump supporters, partisan election administration by Republican state officials, and unjustifiably receptive consideration of election lawsuits by Republican-nominated judges.
The good news is that in the states most likely to be decisive, that group of people is not in control. The mechanisms of election administration are, generally speaking, in the hands of responsible public officials rather than partisan warriors—mostly Democrats, but a few clearheaded Republicans as well.
Consider Georgia, where the most senior officials are all elected Republicans who have, in one way or another, expressed their support for former President Trump. Yet both the governor, Brian Kemp, and the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, have a notable and honorable history of commitment to free, fair, and well-managed elections. For example, both recently opposed the transparently partisan efforts of the state election board to change election rules. If the past is prologue, we can reasonably expect that the contest in Georgia will be close, but we can also expect that the process by which the votes are counted will be fair and open.
[Read: Republicans’ new dangerous attempt to break the election]
The same is true of all the other battleground states. Those states—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada—are, of course, led by elected politicians who have partisan views, but none is a leader whose nature suggests a desire to manipulate election administration for partisan advantage. Most of the states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona) are led by Democratic governors who can be counted on to deliver the results fairly.
That leaves Nevada, which, besides Georgia, is the only Republican-led swing state. Nevada’s governor, Joe Lombardo, has expressed moderate views on the election process: In an April 2022 interview with The Nevada Independent, Lombardo said he did not believe that any fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election and saw no reason to believe that President Joe Biden had not been “duly elected.” Of equal note, the secretary of state for Nevada, who has more direct responsibility for election administration, is an elected Democratic official who has committed to a fair election process.
All told, none of the elected officials in any of the battleground states who have direct responsibility for election integrity is an election denier or someone who appears keen on having a partisan dispute over the results. One could not, for example, imagine any of these governors using their state’s National Guard for improper reasons.
Likewise, the court systems in the crucial battleground states are generally well structured to avoid partisanship. Republicans have already filed suits in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona, and doubtless many more will be filed. But as the former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb has said: “The one thing they need in court is evidence … They didn’t have any last time, and they’re unlikely to have any this time.”
Once again, Georgia provides an instructive example of how Trump’s efforts to legally game the system are likely to play out. Last week, a Fulton County Superior Court judge stopped a new election rule that would have required officials to count all Georgia ballots by hand. In a separate ruling, the court also said that certification of the election results was a mandatory duty—eliminating the possibility, which some Trump allies had been considering, of withholding certification and preventing Kamala Harris from receiving the state’s electoral votes should she win. Separately, a different judge barred even more of the election board’s efforts to change the rules at the last minute. At least one Republican appeal has already been unsuccessful.
[Read: The danger is greater than in 2020. Be prepared.]
The likeliest ultimate arbiter of election disputes will, in most instances, be the supreme courts of the battleground states. Partisan tenor is somewhat less salient in the courts, but even taking it into account here, structural protections are mostly quite strong. Democratic jurists hold majorities on the supreme courts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Nonpartisan appointments are made in Nevada.
And though the courts in Georgia and Arizona are controlled by Republican-appointed jurists, neither court has exhibited excessive partisan tendencies. Indeed, the all-Republican supreme court in Arizona recently unanimously upheld a ballot-access rule against an effort by the Republican Maricopa County recorder to limit the number of voters. Only the Republican supreme court in North Carolina has acted in a worryingly partisan manner, approving a Republican gerrymander that a Democratic court had previously rejected. This is thankfully an outlier; the overall correlation of factors suggests, again, that reasonable jurists will be in charge of adjudicating disputes about election outcomes.
Finally, at the national level, fair, good-faith efforts are being made to protect the processes by which the election will be certified. Unlike on January 6, 2021, when Trump put Congress at risk by delaying the deployment of the D.C. National Guard, this time the federal government is well prepared to forestall disruption in the nation’s capital. The Department of Homeland Security has already designated the electoral count as a National Special Security Event, for which ample protection is deployed. And, of course, the D.C. National Guard is now under the orders of Biden, who can be relied on to maintain election integrity.
Is all this cause for unbridled happiness? Of course not. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, remains an uncertain actor. And that we even need these reassurances is a distressing sign of how dysfunctional our current politics are. But a smooth—or, at least, mostly smooth—election is still possible, and the key ingredients are in place to make it happen. This itself matters. As the former federal judge Thomas Griffith recently wrote: “Tearing down faith in an election administration system when the facts show that it is reliable and trustworthy is not conservative.” It is also deeply dangerous. Let’s do our best to keep the faith.
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