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Donald Trump has decided to skip the Republican presidential debates. That’s just as well: Debating Trump is demeaning to everyone involved, and it serves no purpose.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What happened to Wirecutter? What the ruling class fears Megan Rapinoe answers the critics.

Contempt for the Electoral Process

Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday that he’s skipping the Republican-primary debates, the first of which is tomorrow night. His decision makes political sense: A candidate who is crushing the entire field has little incentive to walk into a lion’s den and take on eight challengers. Of course, a candidate who cares about politics, policy, and the voters might want to show courage and respect for the electoral process—but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so those are not real considerations.

Strange as it may seem, I not only support Trump’s decision, but I think both parties should seize the opportunity to make it permanent for this election. I love debates and watch them attentively, and in a normal political year with a normal election and a normal candidate, I would be thumping the desk and saying that every candidate should respect our grand tradition of debate.

But this isn’t a normal year. It’s not a normal election. And Donald Trump is not, in any way, a normal candidate. To allow Trump onstage in either the primaries or the general election is bad politics, an insult to our electoral process, and corrosive to American democracy. All of the 2024 candidates, including President Joe Biden, have good reasons to embrace Trump’s refusal to debate and to shun any further interactions with him.

First, as we should have learned in 2016 and 2020, Trump has nothing but contempt for the electoral process. (I’ll get to his open attack on the process in 2021 in a moment.) Trump benefits from arenas where his opponents are constrained by rules that he himself ignores, and so he treats debates like performance art. He insults, interrupts, babbles, and pouts. In 2016 he stalked Hillary Clinton around the stage and suggested that he’d toss her in jail. In 2020, he tried to suck the oxygen out of the room—oxygen that Trump (according to his own chief of staff) knew was carrying his COVID infection and thus was a very real threat to Joe Biden’s health. Exasperated with Trump’s stream of blather, Biden spoke for many of us when he finally said: “Will you shut up, man?”

Second, to allow Trump on the stage is to admit that he is a legitimate candidate for public office. He is not.

I agree with—and this is quite the list—two lawyers who are members of the Federalist Society and the joint view of the conservative retired Judge J. Michael Luttig and the liberal law scholar Laurence Tribe when they argue that the Fourteenth Amendment bars Trump from office. I also agree, however, with my friend Charlie Sykes that the issue of constitutional disqualification is irrelevant: No one is going to take the measures needed (including, probably, a trip to the Supreme Court) to remove Trump from the ballot.

But as is the case with so much of our Constitution, the real check against someone like Trump is not black-letter law, but the inherent virtue and good sense of the American public. As James Madison long ago warned, if “there is no virtue among us” then “we are in a wretched situation,” and it is a continuing tragedy that millions of voters have failed to summon the basic decency to reject Trump and his assault on our values.

At the very least, the Republican Party (if it had a nanogram of spine left) would seize this moment to say that a candidate who bails out of the primary debates cannot run as a Republican and will get no assistance from the national party. The GOP under Ronna McDaniel (a woman who stopped using her family name of Romney professionally because of needling from Trump) is not going to take any such steps. But the failure of Republican voters and their cowardly leaders to exile Trump from their party—and from our public life—is no reason to treat Trump as if he is just another candidate.

Third, to allow Trump on a debate stage would, at this point, be an affront to the dignity of the Constitution and our republic. Trump’s antics would create yet another evening of both national and international humiliation and add more scar tissue to our already battered democratic norms. The United States—all of us—deserve better than to encourage such a demoralizing circus yet again.

And speaking of the Constitution and our political system: No candidate should have to share a stage and shake hands with a man who is credibly accused of multiple felonies for his efforts to overthrow the American constitutional order.

I am, even now, somewhat amazed even to write those words, but here we are.

Remember, Trump does not deny many of the things he is accused of doing. He (and at least some of his alleged co-conspirators) instead claim that what they did was not technically illegal. But we do not need a conviction to reach the conclusion that Donald Trump is a threat to our freedoms and the rule of law. We can shun him in public spaces, including the debate stage, for all of the acts to which he’s already admitted.

Think for a moment what it would look like if Trump showed up for any of the debates. You might not think much of Mike Pence, but no national purpose is served by asking Pence to walk onstage and smile and shake the hand of the man who supported a mob that was trying to hang him. And although it might be satisfying to watch Chris Christie strip the bark off Trump, a shouting match between two of the most obnoxious politicians in America would not help the voters, nor would it be a moment worthy of our democracy.

Likewise, it is beneath the dignity of President Biden—or any president of the United States—to stand next to Trump and have to pretend that the other podium is occupied by just another political contender instead of the leader of a party that has degenerated into a violent, seditionist cult. America knows both of these men, and knows what they stand for. The real question is whether a pro-democracy coalition will finally defeat Trump and his authoritarian movement, and we don’t need pointless and destructive debates to settle that issue.

Related:

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again. What the polls may be getting wrong about Trump

Today’s News

Donald Trump will turn himself in on Thursday at the Fulton County Jail, in his fourth arrest since April, and will be released after the booking process. Tropical Storm Harold made landfall in South Texas today, with sustained winds of 50 miles per hour. All eight passengers aboard a dangling cable car in Pakistan have been successfully rescued.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers respond to Conor Friedersdorf’s question about the hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” by Oliver Anthony, and how it’s been covered in the press.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Katie Martin / The Atlantic; L. Willinger / Getty

Stop Pretending That Intensive Parenting Doesn't Work

By Nate G. Hilger

Since having our first kid two years ago, my wife and I have become the type of parents we used to pity: intensive parents. To an extent we didn’t anticipate, we have found ourselves pouring time into securing the best child care we can access, the best school district we can afford, the best health care for weird infections and rashes. We conduct relentless investigations into things we have no desire to think about: Should we get life insurance, and how much? And how does this boring-as-death policy actually work if we both, say, quit our jobs and die on a junket to Mexico? Should we let our kid face forward in his car seat a little early so that he’s more entertained on long drives, or is that actually dangerous? Exactly how far do we have to live from a freeway to avoid the worst hazards of air pollution?

Our kid barely knows how to use a fork. I have a hunch that in the hard-decision department, we’re only getting started.

Even as we’ve done all of this tedious work, I’ve often wondered: Is it really necessary?

Read the full article.

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P.S.

This was a tough Daily to write, because I love political debates. I watched my first one of any kind when I was 15, the night Gerald Ford, in one of his debates with Jimmy Carter, claimed that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. (I was only in high school, but even I knew that was a gaffe.) I was in college when Ronald Reagan smiled and said, “There you go again,” to Carter. I was a graduate student in a tiny apartment when Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle that he was no Jack Kennedy. (On that one, I remember thinking it was a cheap shot but that Quayle had stuck his chin out and asked for it.)

But I also admit that I love debates because they’ve provided Saturday Night Live with some of its finest moments. I’ve watched the actual debates, and then watched priceless parodies, such as when Chevy Chase (as a clueless Ford) said, “It was my understanding that there would be no math.” I voted for George H. W. Bush in 1988, but I laughed out loud when Jon Lovitz (as Mike Dukakis) looked over at Dana Carvey’s Bush and deadpanned: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” I laughed—and cringed a tad—when Dan Aykroyd’s Bob Dole went after Al Franken’s Pat Robertson as a fraud and challenged him to heal his arm.

Unfortunately, nothing is funny about this election year (and with the actors and writers on strike, we might not get any new skits anyway), but I miss the days when debates were both important and worth parodying.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The long-awaited federal indictment of Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election may be necessary to contain the threat to American democracy that he has unleashed. But it’s unlikely to be sufficient.

The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.

With polls showing that most Republican voters still believes the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests.

The most telling measure of that dynamic inside the GOP is that Trump remains the party’s central figure. Each time GOP voters and leaders have had the opportunity to move away from him—whether in the shock immediately after January 6, or the widespread disappointment over the poor performance of his handpicked candidates during the 2022 election—the party has sped past the off-ramp.

Polls now show Trump leading in the 2024 GOP presidential race by one of the biggest margins ever recorded for a primary candidate in either party. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has been exploring ways to expunge his two impeachments and/or block the investigations he faces. Even the other candidates ostensibly running against him for the 2024 GOP nomination have almost uniformly condemned the indictments against him, rather than his underlying behavior. Prominent conservatives have argued that Trump cannot receive a fair trial in any Democratic-leaning jurisdiction.

All of these actions measure how much of the GOP is now willing to accept Trump’s repeated assaults on the basic structures of American democracy. The same inclination was evident in 2020, when most House Republicans voted to reject the election results and most Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to decertify the outcome in the key swing states won by President Joe Biden. In the election’s aftermath, the majority of Republican-controlled states, inspired by Trump’s baseless claims of endemic voter fraud, passed laws on a party-line basis making it more difficult to vote, or increasing partisan control over election administration.

Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who specializes in American politics, told me that U.S. history has no exact precedent for a party embracing a leader so openly hostile to the core pillars of democracy. Presidents have often been accused of violating the Constitution through their policy actions, he said, but there is not another example of a president moving as systematically to “manipulate the apparatus of government or elections in order to subvert the will of the people.”

The closest parallel to Trump’s actions, Wilentz said, may be the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War. Those included violent attacks on abolitionists, suppression of antislavery publications, and the promulgation of extreme legal theories such as the denial of basic rights to Black people in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, all of which were designed to protect slavery against the emerging national majority dubious of it. That decades-long “antidemocratic thrust” from the South, Wilentz noted, “finally culminated in the greatest violation of the American Constitution in our history, which was secession.”

By contrast, Wilentz added, the GOP’s continued embrace of Trump amid the evidence of his misconduct contrasts sharply with the party’s refusal to defend Richard Nixon in the final stages of Watergate. “When Richard Nixon was about to be impeached, he didn’t storm the Capitol to get rid of Barry Goldwater,” Wilentz said, referring to the conservative Republican senator who warned Nixon that he would lose a Senate vote to remove him. “He resigned.”

All of this suggests that personal accountability for Trump is unlikely to erase the tolerance for antidemocratic actions that has spread in the GOP since his emergence. Yet many experts who study the health of democracy still believe that prosecuting him remains essential.

Kristy Parker, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group that focuses on threats to democratic institutions, says it is crucial to show the “silent majority” of Americans who support the constitutional system that no one is above the law. “They need to see that the Department of Justice prosecutors are willing to take the risk of indicting Trump,” Parker told me. “They need to see the election workers ensuring that people get their vote counted. They need to see the police officers standing up to the rioters. They need to see people within the system working.”

Michael Waldman, the president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, told me that he has been ambivalent about indicting former presidents, because of the risk of precipitating a retaliatory spiral between the parties. “It is a line that we as a country have never crossed,” Waldman said shortly after the Trump indictment was disclosed last night. “One could imagine how it could be abused and become one more shattered norm.”

Waldman said that failing to indict Trump would have been far more dangerous, because such a decision would have suggested that there is no effective way to hold presidents accountable for misbehavior. Neither of Trump’s two impeachments really damaged his position in the party, Waldman noted, in part because virtually all GOP elected officials defended his behavior. But the multiple criminal indictments facing Trump, he said, show that “the criminal-justice system still is producing tangible legal consequences” that future presidents cannot brush off as easily as an impeachment.

Waldman said the trials of hundreds of January 6 rioters already demonstrate that prosecution can have some deterrent effect. Unruly crowds of supporters, Waldman noted, did not descend on courthouses in Manhattan or Florida after Trump’s earlier indictments, despite his signals that he’d like to see that happen. “The fact that this stuff is not just a bad idea but illegal and you can go to jail for it really makes a big difference,” Waldman said.

John Dean, the White House counsel whose Senate testimony helped doom Nixon during Watergate, also considers prosecution of Trump to be “essential,” he told me. President Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon and preempt a trial, Dean said, was “a historical disaster,” because it emboldened presidents to believe they would never face criminal charges for their actions. Allowing Trump to avoid consequences, Dean believes, would send an even more dangerous signal than Ford did with Nixon. “Trump’s corruption is so much more fundamental to the system than Nixon’s,” Dean said. “Nixon, he abused power, he had his enemies list, he wanted to make government work for the benefit of Republicans and not Democrats. But he wasn’t going after the foundations of government and the system like Trump.”

[Peter Wehner: The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers]

Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election required the cooperation of many other GOP officials and conservative activists and lawyers. Now a growing number of them face consequences of their own, including disbarment proceedings, ongoing state and local investigations, and the potential of further federal charges from Special Counsel Jack Smith against the six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the Trump indictment.

“I’m not sure how much additional prosecutions will deter Trump—unfortunately, he’s all-in on winning as a way to stay out of prison at this point,” says the Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan, a co-founder of Bright Line Watch, a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to U.S. democracy. “But Republican operatives and activists may hesitate as the evidence mounts that participating in an attempted coup puts you in legal jeopardy. That’s important, because Trump can’t carry out his plots by himself.”

Some analysts have worried that the trials could strengthen Trump if die-hard supporters of his on a jury refuse to convict him regardless of the evidence. But Parker told me that cannot be allowed to dissuade prosecutors from bringing cases when there’s evidence that Trump violated the law. The problem, she said, is analogous to the challenges she faced as a Department of Justice civil-rights attorney prosecuting excessive-force cases against police officers who were likely more popular in the community than the victims they abused: “You can’t just give in and allow, effectively, a bully to force his way out of accountability, because then you’ve crushed the ideal that no one is above the law.”

Yet although all these possible sanctions create legal reasons for the GOP to resist another Trump-led attack on democracy, the party’s political incentives point in the opposite direction.

A recent national poll released by the Bright Line Watch project found that the majority of Republican voters accepted all of Trump’s key arguments about 2020 and the multiplying legal challenges accumulating against him. In that survey, only small minorities of Republicans said that he had committed crimes in any of the cases he’s facing. Most Republicans said Trump was singled out for prosecution for behavior that would not have prompted charges against other people. Six in 10 Republicans described the January 6 riot as “legitimate protest.” And although the share of Republicans who said that Biden was elected through fraud had declined somewhat from its peak of about three-fourths, nearly two-thirds of them still denied the legitimacy of his victory.

[Quinta Jurecic: The triumph of the January 6 Committee]

These attitudes provide an ominous backdrop to Trump’s hints that if he wins the nomination but loses the general election, he’s likely to challenge the results again. Trump might not attempt another mass physical attack on the Capitol in 2025, but such sentiments could allow him to enlist Republicans again for a more targeted legal effort to overthrow the results in a few key states or in Congress, Nyhan told me. The widespread Republican rejection of the idea that Trump violated any laws in his actions after 2020 offers reason to doubt that the party would object any more strenuously if he launched another campaign to delegitimize the results in 2024.

Nyhan said he can imagine future circumstances in which Democrats at some point challenge the legitimacy of a presidential race, such as the election coming down to a Republican-controlled state that has restricted voting rights. But he said the more immediate danger is that Republicans won’t accept any presidential race they lose. Traditionally, presidential nominees from each party, including Al Gore and John McCain, have made statements in which “the losing side specifically affirms the legitimacy of the winner,” Nyhan said. But for the GOP next year, he added, “we can no longer take that for granted whether or not Trump is the nominee, and that’s really worrisome.”

Trump may constitute a unique threat to America’s democratic traditions. But he has always connected his claims of pervasive electoral fraud to the widespread anxiety among white, Christian conservatives that they are losing control of the country to a racially diverse, secular, and LGBTQ-friendly Democratic coalition centered in the nation’s largest cities. As Trump put it during one 2020 rally before a predominantly white, rural audience in Georgia: “This is our country. And you know this, and you see it, but they are trying to take it from us through rigging, fraud, deception, and deceit.” Whether Trump is convicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election or not, voters who accept that argument will remain the most powerful force in the GOP coalition. And they will continue to demand leaders who will fight the changes that they believe threaten their position in American society.

Those other Republican leaders may not attempt to overturn an election as brazenly as Trump did with the conduct Smith catalogs in his indictment. But, as Wilentz told me, for the foreseeable future, they are likely to pursue other means “toward the same end: that majoritarian democracy cannot be tolerated under any circumstances if the outcome is not what you wanted it to be.”

Both his supporters and and his opponents assume that former President Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy will go away if he can win the 2024 presidential election. That’s a big mistake. A Trump election in 2024 would settle nothing. It would generate a nation-shaking crisis of presidential legitimacy. Trump in 2024 means chaos—and almost certainly another impeachment.

Trump’s proliferating criminal exposures have arisen in two different federal jurisdictions—Florida and the District of Columbia—and in two different state jurisdictions, New York and Georgia. More may follow.

As president, Trump would have no power of his own to quash directly any of these proceedings. He would have to act through others. For example, the most nearly unilateral thing that Trump could try would be a presidential self-pardon. Is that legal? Trump has asserted that it is. Only the Supreme Court can deliver a final verdict, which presents a significant risk to Trump, because the Court might say no. Self-pardon defies the history and logic of the presidential-pardon power. Would a Supreme Court struggling with legitimacy issues of its own take such a serious risk with its reputation to protect Trump from justice?

[Tom Nichols: Trump seems to be afraid, very afraid]

Trump has one way he might avert the hazard of the Supreme Court ruling against him. He could order his attorney general to order the special counsel not to bring a case against his self-pardon, and then order the Department of Justice to argue in court that nobody but the special counsel has standing to bring a case.

Then things get complicated. Would the attorney general do it? Would the special counsel submit? Would the professionals in the Department of Justice stay in their jobs? And what would happen in Congress and in the country?

The situation becomes even more complicated if you assume that Trump couldn’t win a majority of the popular vote (given that he has twice failed to win one). If he returns to office, he’d most likely do so thanks to a fluke in the Electoral College.

So a criminally indicted president would have to argue that he’s entitled to self-pardon, and also that he’s entitled to forbid the prosecutors to challenge that in court, and also that he can order his Department of Justice to fight in court against anybody else who seeks to sue in the prosecutors’ stead. He’d have to do all of this based on a claim that he represents the will of the people, even though he likely did not win a majority of the popular vote.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

And after all that, he’d still face indictments in state courts, where he has no pardon power. So, for his next move, he would have to order the Department of Justice to argue that state courts have no criminal jurisdiction over a serving president. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City, or on the street in any state, and nobody could do anything about it until his term was up, if then.

As the absurdity of this situation would play out, it’s probable that within a couple of days of an attempt at self-pardoning, Trump wouldn’t have a Department of Justice. There would be mass resignations, and probably no way to confirm replacement senior officials in the U.S. Senate. (The first Trump administration repeatedly relied on acting appointees rather than on Senate-confirmed officials, but for a second administration to intentionally bypass the Senate in order to shut down the courts would invite a constitutional crisis all of its own.)

Trump’s other routes to the same destination run into the same problems. Trump could try a more indirect maneuver to shut down the federal indictments: Order Special Counsel Jack Smith to stand down, and fire him if he refuses. That approach bypasses the courts, but it depends even more heavily on finding a compliant attorney general to cancel the indictment, and on the acquiescence of Congress in what would look like an outright nullification of federal law enforcement. The federal Department of Justice would dissolve. The state cases would continue regardless. Trump scandals would be the only order of business in Congress.

Trump himself may not care: He was neither chastened nor deterred even by impeachment. But Trump leads a minority faction in the country, and the kind of permanent crisis a second presidential term would generate would invite a 2026 Democratic congressional landslide big enough to jolt even a Trump-led GOP.

Trump may imagine that he’s got a one-and-done fight on his hands: Strike hard, strike fast, then settle back to enjoy the corrupt perquisites of lawless power. If so, he and his followers are deluding themselves. The entire term would be consumed by the battle over Trump’s project to use the power of the presidency to protect himself from the consequences of his alleged crimes.

[Benjamin Wittes: Trump’s self-pardon fantasy will meet a harsh reality]

Trump’s past practice when in trouble was to deflect attention from one scandal by lurching into another scandal. Maybe this time he’d try to cut off aid to Ukraine or blow up NATO or start a culture war against drag queens. But none of those stunts would distract Americans; they would only embitter them.

A Trump bid for self-pardon would not be the equivalent of President Gerald Ford pardoning former President Richard Nixon, a decision unpopular at the time but ultimately accepted by many of its fiercest critics as well as a majority of the public. A self-pardon attempt would convulse the country. It would never gain acceptance as a legitimate act undertaken for public-spirited, bipartisan ends. The furor would not subside; the constitutional injury would not heal.

A second Trump presidency would offer only division, chaos, and paralysis that would never be quieted. Nor would it cease—until that presidency itself ceased, and perhaps not even then.