Once she became the nominee, I expected Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election.

More exactly, I expected ex-President Donald Trump to lose.

What did I get wrong?

My expectation was based on three observations and one belief.

Observation one: Inflation was coming under control in 2024. Personal incomes rose faster than prices over the year. As interest rates peaked and began to subside, consumer confidence climbed. When asked about their personal finances, Americans expressed qualms, yes, but the number who rated their personal finances as excellent or good was a solid 46 percent, higher than in the year President Barack Obama won reelection. The same voters who complained about the national economy rated their local economy much more favorably.

None of this was great news for the incumbent party, and yet …

Observation two: All through the 2024 cycle, a majority of Americans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Almost one-third of Republicans were either unenthusiastic about his candidacy or outright hostile. Harris was not hugely popular, either. But if the polls were correct, she was just sufficiently less unpopular than Trump.

Arguably undergirding Harris’s popularity advantage was …  

Observation three: In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue. That year in Michigan, a campaign based on abortion rights helped reelect Governor Gretchen Whitmer and flipped both chambers of the state legislature to the Democrats. That same year, almost a million Kansans voted 59 percent to 41 percent to reaffirm state-constitutional protections for abortion. Democrats posted strong results in many other states as well. They recovered a majority in the U.S. Senate, while Republicans won only the narrowest majority in the House of Representatives. In 2024, abortion-rights measures appeared on the ballot in 10 states, including must-win Arizona and Nevada. These initiatives seemed likely to energize many Americans who would likely also cast an anti-Trump vote for president.

If that was not enough—and maybe it was not—I held onto this belief:

Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con.

The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Foreigners will pay for the tariffs. The Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the right side of the line between election and defeat—and not, as happened instead, on the other side.

My mistake.

[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous cabinet pick]

In one of the closest elections in modern American history, Trump eked out the first Republican popular-vote victory in 20 years. His margin was about a third the size of President Joe Biden’s margin over him in 2020. For that matter, on the votes counted, Trump’s popular-vote margin over Harris was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.

Yet narrow as it is, a win it is—and a much different win from 2016. That time, Trump won by the rules, but against the expressed preference of the American people. This time, he won both by the rules and with a plurality of the votes. Trump’s popular win challenges many beliefs and preconceptions, starting with my own.

Through the first Trump administration, critics like me could reassure ourselves that his presidency was some kind of aberration. The repudiation of Trump’s party in the elections of 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 appeared to confirm this comforting assessment. The 2024 outcome upends it. Trump is no detour or deviation, no glitch or goof.

When future generations of Americans tell the story of the nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that means the story itself must be rethought.

Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own businesses, and was returned to office anyway.

He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault, and was returned to office anyway.

He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.

He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office anyway.

He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to office anyway.

For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them.

American politics has never lacked for scoundrels, cheats, and outright criminals. But their numbers have been thinned, and their misdeeds policed, by strong public institutions. Trump waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him. He did not always prevail, but he did score three all-important successes. First, he frightened the Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way. Second, he persuaded the courts themselves—including, ultimately, the Supreme Court—to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him. Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions. Republican officeholders, donors, and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring—one by one, Trump brought them to heel.

Americans who cherished constitutional democracy were left to rely on the outcome of the 2024 election to protect their institutions against Trump. It was not enough. Elections are always about many different issues—first and foremost usually, economic well-being. In comparison, the health of U.S. democracy will always seem remote and abstract to most voters.

[Read: Trump’s first defeat]

Early in the American Revolution, a young Alexander Hamilton wrote to his friend John Jay to condemn an act of vigilante violence against the publisher of a pro-British newspaper. Hamilton sympathized with the feelings of the vigilantes, but even in revolutionary times, he insisted, feelings must be guided by rules. Otherwise, people are left to their own impulses, a formula for trouble. “It is not safe,” Hamilton warned, “to trust to the virtue of any people.”

The outcome of an election must be respected, but its wisdom can be questioned. If any divine entity orders human affairs, it may be that providence sent Trump to the United States to teach Americans humility. It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a famous 1930s novel about an imagined future in which the United States follows the path to authoritarianism. Because it didn’t happen then, many Americans have taken for granted that it could not happen now.

Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.

“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed in a 1927 essay (here he was writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.

Was Donald Trump serious about his most draconian plans for a second term? That question shadowed his whole campaign, as commentators questioned whether he’d really attempt to deport millions of immigrants or impose tariffs above 60 percent.

If personnel is policy, as the Ronald Reagan–era maxim states, then the president-elect is deadly serious. Last night, he announced that Tom Homan, who was the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration, will serve as a “border czar.” And CNN reports that Stephen Miller, the leading immigration hawk in Trump’s circle, will be appointed White House deputy chief of staff for policy.

These two moves, and the fact that they are among the first to emerge from the transition, are an indication of Trump’s intent to pursue a very aggressive policy and assign it a high priority. Miller, who served as a Trump speechwriter and top adviser previously, has been a hard-liner on immigration for his entire career. He has spent the past four years building America First Legal, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for conservative causes, and was a contributor to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump term.

[Read: The secret history of family separation]

One year ago, in an interview with The New York Times, Miller laid out a set of plans for immigration. Among other things, he said, Trump would use the military to help enforce laws, using the Insurrection Act as license. Trump has also promised to use a 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act, to facilitate deportation without due process under the law. Miller said ICE would focus on rounding up groups of people at job sites and other public places rather than seeking to arrest specific individuals. And he said the federal government would establish detention camps in Texas to hold people swept up in these raids.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told the Times. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

If Miller is the architect of mass deportation, Homan will be the builder. “There is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. “Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.” (The idiosyncratic capitalization is, perhaps needless to say, his.)

[Read: Stephen Miller is Trump’s right-hand troll]

Homan was a career law-enforcement and border official, but his profile changed under Trump as he became a prominent figure, praising Trump for “taking the shackles off” ICE officers. He became the acting director of ICE at the start of Trump’s presidency and remained in that role for about a year and a half, including during the peak of Trump’s policy of family separation at the border. But Homan retired around the time Trump was forced to end that policy, frustrated that the Senate would not confirm him. As border czar, he will likely not require confirmation—though the new Republican Senate majority is expected to be more accommodating to Trump.

During the presidential campaign, Trump vowed to remove not only undocumented immigrants but also some legal ones. Only 40 percent of respondents in NBC News’ 2024 exit poll said they wanted deportation for most undocumented immigrants, but there was no reason to believe he was bluffing. During his first administration, Trump tried—persistently, though often ineffectively—to institute his priorities, especially on immigration. Trump was often stymied by courts. By the end of his first term, however, he had appointed three friendly justices to the Supreme Court—which has already granted him wide latitude with a decision on presidential immunity—and 231 judges to the lower courts, which should smooth his way now.

[Read: The secret of Trump’s economic message]

How Trump will proceed on tariffs is less immediately clear, in part because he never spoke about them with nearly the same specificity, but many corporations have already begun taking action to try to insulate themselves from any effects.

Nearly as telling as whom Trump has appointed is whom he has ruled out. On Saturday, he posted that neither Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, nor Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and secretary of state, would serve in his administration. Haley criticized Trump after the January 6 riot, while Pompeo reportedly discussed removing Trump from office via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Both ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Pompeo’s campaign ended quickly; Haley ended up being Trump’s final rival standing. Both later endorsed him.

Neither of them, especially Pompeo, is a moderate—they are genuine conservatives. But they are also veteran policy makers who were in politics before Trump, and who hold some allegiance to institutions and government processes. Their exclusion is a sign not only of Trump’s long memory for a grudge but likely also of how he will seek to blast through the institutional structures and processes that have guided past presidents.

He wasn’t just offering idle promises.

Democrats in mourning over Donald Trump’s victory can comfort themselves with the fact that, if the United States follows the pattern of other democracies that elect wannabe strongmen, their party should have a very good chance to win back the White House in 2028. The same cannot be said for the United States Senate.

With very few votes left to count in last week’s election, the Republican Party appears to have flipped four Senate seats—in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Montana—giving it a presumptive 53–47 majority. On the surface, that outcome may not seem dramatic, and in fact represents a fine performance for Democrats. The party had no realistic pickup opportunities this election cycle. Meanwhile, it had to defend three seats in red states and five seats in swing states. Democratic incumbents lost all the red-state races, but won four of the five purple-state contests: in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all states that voted for Trump.

The real problem for Democrats is that the 2024 map was only slightly harsher than usual. Going forward, every Senate election is going to be brutal. The institution is so skewed in favor of the current Republican coalition that Democrats need at least a few red-state seats to win consistent majorities. Now they have none.

The partisan divide of the 50 states is not an immutable fact of nature, but here’s how things look for the foreseeable future: 24 states are solidly red; 17 are solidly blue. Over the past three presidential cycles, only six states have swung back and forth: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Throw in New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Minnesota—where Trump or Kamala Harris won by about four points or less—and America has nine purple states in total, representing 18 Senate seats. To hold the chamber, Republicans need to win just two of those seats if they control the presidency, and three if they don’t. Democrats need to sweep almost all of them. They must pitch perfect game after perfect game to have a shot at even the narrowest majorities.

And even a perfect game will not be enough in the 2026 midterms. That year’s map features just two realistic pickup opportunities: Maine and North Carolina. Democrats, meanwhile, will need to defend seats in Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. Unless they pull off a major upset, they can at most cut the GOP majority to 51. In that best-case scenario, they will then need to flip either North Carolina or Wisconsin in 2028 without losing seats in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, or New Hampshire. Barring any unexpected deaths or retirements, Democrats can afford to lose only one swing-seat race over the next four years to have a shot at 50 senators.

[Rogé Karma: The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition]

Anything short of that means that, even if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, that president will be immediately hamstrung. Even a narrow GOP majority will make it impossible for, say, President Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer to pass liberal legislation. They would instead, from the moment they’re sworn in, have to contend with congressional investigations, government shutdowns, and debt-ceiling hostage negotiations.

Their troubles would hardly end there. A GOP Senate majority would slow-walk or even block a Democratic president’s Cabinet nominations and personnel appointments. An administration without administrators would be unable to issue new regulations and rules. Whatever policies the administration did manage to make would then be tied up by an ever more hostile judiciary. Without control of the Senate, Democratic presidents will struggle to get nominees confirmed at even the district and circuit levels. They can forget about the Supreme Court.

Democrats have been aware of their Senate problem for years. That’s why, during the first Trump term, many liberals urged the party to prioritize scrapping the filibuster and making Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states as soon as it had the opportunity. But the opportunity never truly arrived, because the Democrats’ brief trifecta under Joe Biden depended on moderate senators, such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to entertain any such hardball tactics. Addressing the Democrats’ Senate problem legislatively would appear to require a more substantial Democratic Senate majority, which is precisely the issue.

And so, if they are to expand their options in the Senate, Democrats will have to find some way to broaden their appeal in the states where voters seem to have irrevocably abandoned them. That is not a new idea, and it is not an idea that anyone has yet figured out how to implement. But it is the only option. If Democrats don’t figure out how to compete in more states, Trump and his allies won’t need to dismantle the free press, imprison their enemies, or overturn election results to ensure perpetual GOP dominance. The basic math of the Senate will do that for them.

Donald Trump’s presidency was mitigated by his ignorance, idleness, and vanity. Trump did not know how the office worked. He did not invest any effort to learn. He wasted much of his time watching daytime television.

Defeat in 2020—and Trump’s plot to overturn that defeat—gave him a purpose: vengeance on those who bested him.

A second Trump presidency will have a much clearer agenda than the first. No more James Mattis to restrain him, no more John Kelly to chide him, no more Rex Tillerson to call him a “fucking moron.” He will have only sycophants.

Trump has told the world his second-term plans.

He has vowed to round up and deport millions of foreign nationals. Because the removals will be slow—permissions have to be negotiated with the receiving governments, transportation booked, people forced aboard—Trump has spoken of building a national network of camps to hold the rounded-up immigrants. Deportation is a power of the presidency: Trump can indeed do all of this if he is determined to.

Trump has pledged huge increases in U.S. tariffs, not only on China but on friends and treaty partners, such as Mexico. Congress has historically delegated the president’s broad authority over trade. A restored President Trump will have the power to impose tariffs, and will also have the power to exempt industries and firms that bid for his favor.

Trump intends to shut down legal proceedings, state and federal, against himself. A friendly Supreme Court appears to grant him wide leeway to do so. He has promised to pardon people serving sentences for the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. The president has the power to do that also. He has spoken of prosecuting people who donate to Democratic candidates and of retribution against media companies that criticize him. Although it’s uncertain how far the courts would let him succeed, Trump is seeking a stooge attorney general who will at least try to bring such prosecutions.

Trump ordered his allies in Congress to oppose further military aid to Ukraine and got his way for six deadly months. Trump chose as his running mate one of the GOP’s harshest critics of the Ukrainian cause. Trump boasts that he will end the fighting within weeks. That is code for forcing Ukraine to submit to Russia.

One of Trump’s former national security advisers, John Bolton, predicts that Trump would withdraw from NATO in a second term. Trump does not have to withdraw formally, however. NATO ultimately depends on the U.S. president’s commitment to upholding the treaty’s mutual-defense clause and assisting threatened NATO members. As president, all Trump has to do to kill NATO is repeat what he once said as a candidate: that unless they pay up, he won’t protect this or that ally from attack. No further action required; the deed is done.

Some Trump apologists put a gloss on his pro–Vladimir Putin instincts by arguing that abandoning Ukraine will somehow strengthen the U.S. against China. Really? China will be impressed by a United States that walked away from Ukraine’s successful war of self-defense against Russian aggression because the American president is infatuated with the Russian dictator?

Whatever theory Trump allies may confect, Trump himself made it clear in a July interview that Taiwan cannot count on him any more than Ukraine can. Trump conceives of the U.S. alliance system as a protection racket, not as an association of democracies. In his preelection interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump made the Mafia comparison explicit. He said of Taiwan and other allies: “They want us to protect, and they want protection. They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know? The mob makes you pay money, right?” A vote for Trump isn’t a vote for some Pacific-first strategy, however misconceived or addled. It’s a vote for international gangsterism. Trump feels most at home with dictators (including Xi Jinping, China’s president for life) and with client states, such as Saudi Arabia, that pay emoluments to him and to his family via their businesses.

Yet a second-term Trump will not travel a smooth path to autocracy at home and isolation from abroad. If Trump does return to the presidency, it will almost certainly occur after a third consecutive loss of the popular vote: by 3 million in 2016, 7 million in 2020, and who knows how many millions in 2024.

Since the end of the Cold War, a Republican candidate for president has won more votes than his Democratic counterpart exactly once, in 2004. Even so, the GOP has enjoyed three presidencies, and soon perhaps a fourth. Minority rule begins to look like not merely a feature of Republican administration, but actually a precondition for it. Trump Republicans may now insist, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” But most Americans assumed that we were a democracy—and believe that, to the extent we’re not, we should be.

If a president who comes to office without a majority democratic mandate starts doing the radical things Trump wants to do—building detention camps, pardoning January 6 culprits, abandoning Ukraine—he’s going to find himself on the receiving end of some powerful opposition. A president hoisted into office by a glitch of the Electoral College cannot silence criticism by invoking his popular mandate. A president who has been convicted of felonies and who fires prosecutors in order to save himself from being convicted of even more is not well positioned to demand law and order.

Trump may forget, but his opponents will not, that he was the man who wrecked the country’s centuries-long record of a peaceful transition of power. That particular clock reset itself to zero in 2021. The American tradition is now shorter than those of Moldova and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both of which have a record of peaceful transition of power stretching all the way back to 2019.

A second Trump administration will be even more of a snake pit of craziness, incompetence, and intrigue than the first was. Elon Musk will imagine himself to be the real power in the land: After all, he bought the presidency, didn’t he? Vice President J. D. Vance will scheme to shoulder aside an elderly Trump, whom he never respected. It’s amazing what a vice president can get done if he arrives at the office at six in the morning and the president doesn’t show up until nearly noon. The lower levels of the administration will see a nonstop guerrilla war between the opportunists who signed up with Trump for their own advantage and the genuine crackpots.

From the viewpoint of millions of Americans, a second Trump presidency would be the result of a foreign cabal’s exploitation of defects in the constitutional structure to impose un-American authoritarianism on an unwilling majority. It enrages pro-Trump America that anti-Trump America regards Trump and Vance as disloyal tools of Russian subversion—but we do, we have the evidence, and we have the numbers.

If Trump is elected again, world trade will contract under the squeeze of U.S. protectionism. Prices will jump for ordinary Americans. Farmers and other exporters will lose markets. Businesses will lose competitiveness as Trump tariffs raise the price of every input in the supply chain, including such basic commodities as steel and such advanced products as semiconductor chips.

As Americans quarrel over Trump’s extreme actions, the most prominent predators—Russia, China, and Iran—will prowl, seeking advantage for themselves in the U.S. turmoil. Ominously, Trump’s weakness may make great-power conflict more likely.

Putin, Xi, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un may imagine that because they can manipulate and outwit Trump, they can discount the United States entirely. China especially may misinterpret Trump’s dislike of allies as an invitation to grab Taiwan—only to trigger a U.S. reaction that may surprise China and Trump alike. Until such a desperate moment, however, former allies will look elsewhere for protection. As a French cabinet minister said, only days ago: “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of the voters of Wisconsin every four years.”

Under a returned President Trump, the American century will come to a close, in the way darkly foreseen by a great 20th-century novel of Washington power, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, from 1959:

In his lifetime he had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others … rise and rise and rise—and then … the golden legend crumbled, overnight the fall began, the heart went out of it.

[McKay Coppins: This is not the end of America]

Trump’s ascent has driven many to wonder how U.S. politics became so polarized, so extreme. That question, so often repeated, is also profoundly misplaced. We all regularly encounter fellow Americans who hold views different from our own. Almost all of those encounters unfold with calm and civility.

The speech and behavior modeled by Trump are emulated by only his most fervent admirers, and even then only in safe spaces, such as on social media and at his rallies. The most pro-Trump employer in America would instantly fire any employee who talked about women, racial minorities, international partners, or people who lived in big cities the way that Trump does. An employee who told lies, shifted blame, exulted in violence, misappropriated other people’s property, blathered nonsense, or just wandered around vacantly as Trump does would be referred to mental-health professionals or reported to law enforcement.

Trump’s conduct is in fact so disturbing and offensive even to his supporters that they typically cope either by denying attested facts or by inventing fictional good deeds and falsely attributing them to him: secret acts of charity, empathy, or courtesy that never happened.

Trump’s political superpower has not been his ability to activate a small fan base. If that’s all he were able to do, he’d be no more a threat to American institutions than any of the other fanatics and oddballs who lurk on the edges of mainstream politics. Trump’s superpower has been his ability to leverage his sway over a cult following to capture control of one of the two great parties in U.S. politics. If all we had to worry about were the people who idolize Trump, we would not have much to worry about. Unfortunately, we also must worry about the people who see him as he is but choose to work through him anyway, in pursuit of their own goals.

For that reason, Trump’s rise has imposed a special responsibility upon those of us with backgrounds in conservative and Republican politics. He arose because he was enabled not just by people we knew but by people we also knew to despise him.

For that reason too, his rise has generated a fierce and determined internal refusal of a kind not seen before in presidential politics. “Never Trump” is both a label for the reaction of some of the most prominent Republicans, such as Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney, and a movement that has helped tip into the Democratic column congressional seats once held by George H. W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor, and many other former party stalwarts. These did not use to be “swing seats” by any definition: Bush’s seat had been Republican-held for more than half a century until it went Democratic in 2018. Through the 2024 primaries, about one-fifth of Republicans voted against Trump to the very end, even after all of his opponents ended their campaigns.

Pro-Trump Republicans dismiss this internal refusal as unimportant. They also rage against the refusers as party traitors. I have felt that fury because I number among the refusers.

About two weeks ago, I received an email from a reader who demanded, not very politely, that I cease describing myself as a conservative if I did not support Trump’s return to the presidency:

I know a lot of you NeverTrumpers want to pretend otherwise, but the Trump presidency was a very conservative presidency, and a lot of policy objectives of the Conservative Movement were achieved in his presidency … There is never a conservative case for voting for a Democrat over a Republican due to the simple fact that in any given election (whether its federal or state or local), the Republican candidate is to the right of the Democratic candidate.

One lesson of the Trump years, however, is about how old concepts of “right” and “left” have fallen out of date in the Trump era. What was conservatism once? A politics of gratitude for America’s great constitutional traditions, a politics of free markets and free trade, a politics of American global leadership. This was the politics that excited me, as a very young man, to knock on doors for the Reagan-Bush ticket in the election of 1980.

Ronald Reagan liked to describe the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” As Trump closed his 2024 campaign, he derided the country as “the garbage can for the world.” In his first inaugural address, Reagan challenged the country “to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds.” He concluded: “And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.” Trump instead condemns the United States as a “stupid country that’s run by stupid people.”

In 1987, Reagan traveled to Berlin, then still divided by the Iron Curtain, to urge the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Three years later, Trump gave an interview to Playboy in which he condemned Gorbachev for not crushing dissent more harshly and praised the Chinese Communist Party for the murderous violence of Tiananmen Square:

When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength … Russia is out of control, and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.

Reagan saluted a common American identity bigger than party. In 1982, he honored the centenary of the birth of his great opposite number among 20th-century presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Like the Founding Fathers before him, F.D.R. was an American giant, a leader who shaped, inspired, and led our people through perilous times. He meant many different things to many different people. He could reach out to men and women of diverse races and backgrounds and inspire them with new hope and new confidence in war and peace.

Forty-two years later, Donald Trump describes his Democratic adversaries, including the most recent Democratic speaker of the House, as enemies “from within.” Trump also mused about using the National Guard and the U.S. military against “the enemy within.” He has repeatedly spoken of using state power to retaliate against politicians and journalists. As president, he pressed his attorney general to prosecute his critics and perceived adversaries. Privately, he often spoke and speaks of arresting and executing opponents, including General Mark Milley, the most senior member of the military who incurred his displeasure. He has endorsed proposals to haul former Republican Representative Liz Cheney before a military tribunal to be punished for voting for his impeachment.

Even if Trump is only partly successful in crushing dissent, the authoritarian direction in which he wishes to lead the country is unmistakable. Since 2021, Trump has bent the Republican Party to his will even more radically now than he did as president. Republicans have made their peace with Trump’s actions on January 6. They wrote tariffs into their 2024 party platform. They let Trump plunder party funds for his own legal defense, and then, because they were broke, turned over their get-out-the-vote operation to Elon Musk’s personal super PAC. The Republican Party has lost its immunity to Trump’s authoritarianism.

Trump himself has only become more vengeful and bloodthirsty. He told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 about his response to two impeachments: “I became worse.” This personal instinct will guide the entire administration, and that is the meaning of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which functions as Trump’s first-year operating plan (in part because Project 2025 is the only plan Trump’s got).

If you are inclined to vote for Trump out of some attachment to a Reaganite idea of conservative Republicanism, think again. Your party, the party that stood for freedom against the Berlin Wall, has three times nominated a man who praised the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Forty years is a long time in politics. The four decades from 1924 to 1964 saw the Democratic Party evolve from one that nominated a segregationist and refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan to the party that wrote and implemented the Civil Rights Act. Over a similar interval, the Republican Party has rotated from being one of freedom and enterprise to one of authoritarianism and repression. Yet many inside the Republican world and outside—including my email correspondent—insist on pretending that nothing has changed.

A few weeks ago, a researcher released a report that tallied political contributions by almost 100,000 executives and corporate directors at almost 10,000 firms from 2001 to 2022. The tally showed a pronounced trend away from Republican candidates and conservative causes. When reported in the media, the headlines pronounced that “CEOs Are Moving Left.” Are they? Or are they instead recognizing that the party of Trump and Vance has become virtually the opposite of the party of Reagan and Bush?

Consider this example: In his 1991 State of the Union address, Bush discerned an “opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order, where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet collective resistance.” Campaigning this year, Vance appeared at the Turning Point USA convention alongside the far-right broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who announced: “We’re bringing down the new world order!”

Trump is opposed by almost every member of his first-term national-security team, and by his own former vice president; he has the support of the anti-vax crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the propagandist for Russian imperialism Tulsi Gabbard. Something revolutionary has happened inside the Republican Party: If you placed your faith and loyalty in Reagan and Bush’s party of freedom, you need to accept that the party of Trump and Vance has rejected your ideals, discarded your heroes, defiled your most cherished political memories. This GOP is something new and different and ugly, and you owe it nothing.

[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

“I believe in America.” Those words open a great American movie, The Godfather. Although, in the film, those words pulse with heavy irony—they are spoken by an undertaker to a gangster as they together plot an act of revenge against a bigoted failure of American justice—they also pulse with power. We can recognize that there is so much to doubt about America, yet we believe in it all the same.

In 1860, Americans voted on whether to remain one country or to split over slavery. In 1964, Americans voted on whether to defend equal rights before the law. So also will the election of 2024 turn on one ultimate question: whether to protect our constitutional democracy or submit to a presidency that wants to reorder the United States in such a way that it will become one of the world’s reactionary authoritarian regimes.

Some rationalizers for Trump want to deceive you that you face an unhappy choice between two equally difficult extremes. That is untrue. One choice, the Trump choice, deviates from the path of constitutional democracy toward a murky and sinister future. The other choice allows the United States to continue its cautious progress along the lines marked by the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment toward the aspiration of a “more perfect union.”

If elected, Kamala Harris will be the first woman president: a dramatic breakthrough in U.S. history. Yet, in so many ways, her presidency will be constrained. She’ll almost certainly face a Republican-controlled Senate from the start; very possibly, a Republican House, too. Even if the Democrats somehow win a majority in a single chamber of Congress in 2024, they’ll almost certainly lose it in 2026. Besides a hostile Congress, she would also face adverse courts and a media environment in which a handful of ultra-wealthy owners can impose ever-stricter limits on what may be said and who will hear it.

Yet within these inevitable limitations, Harris offers one big idea: the equal right of the female half of the American people to freedom and individuality.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, American women have become the targets of a campaign of surveillance, policing, and control. In many places, they have lost the right to protect themselves from the consequences of sexual violence. A study in an American Medical Association journal estimates that some 65,000 rape-caused pregnancies a year are occurring in the 14 states where abortion is now banned. State governments have inserted themselves into the medical care of women who miscarry their pregnancies, restricting the treatment their doctors can offer—sometimes with permanent loss of fertility or worse as a result of the government’s order.

Some conservative states are weighing restrictions on the right of pregnant women to travel across state lines to seek abortions in more liberal jurisdictions. In a 2022 interview, Vance declared himself sympathetic to such authoritarian measures:

I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation—let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, in 2022 or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity—that’s kind of creepy … And it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?

In his 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, Senator Barry Goldwater answered those who asked what he, as president, would do about this or that particular constituent interest. His words echo to this day: “I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”

America’s main interest remains liberty. The election of 2024 will sway federal policy on a huge range of issues: climate change; economic growth; border security; stability on the European continent, in the Middle East, in the Indo-Pacific. Supreme above all of these issues, however, is preserving the right of the American people to govern themselves according to their constitutional rules.

Trump is not an abstract thinker. When he thinks about the presidency, he thinks about enriching himself, flattering his ego, and punishing his enemies. Yet, as he pursues his impulsive purposes, he is also advancing a bigger cause in which he has many more intelligent partners, and one that will outlast his political career. That cause is to rearrange the U.S. government so that a minority can indefinitely rule over the American majority.

As hemmed in as her presidency may be, Harris will also have a great cause to advance. Her cause will be what Lincoln’s was, and Roosevelt’s, and Reagan’s, too: to protect the right of the American majority to govern itself in defiance of domestic plutocrats and foreign autocrats. Every domestic-policy challenge—climate change, economic growth, budget deficits, border security—will follow from this prior question: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people—or government of some people, by some people, for some people?”

Voting has begun. This great ritual of American democracy reaches its climax on November 5. The right vote to cast in 2024 is both progressive and conservative: conservative because it conserves the great things Americans have already done together and progressive because it keeps alive the possibility of doing still greater things in the future. The near-term policy outlook matters far less than stopping a small cabal of sinister and suspect power-seekers from blocking forever the right of the American majority to do any great things at all.

In the immediate shock of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I posted these words:

We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

Over the succeeding four years of Trump’s term, I lived almost every day in a state of dread. Perhaps you did, too. Yet the American people proved equal to the work required of them. The guardrails shook, and in some places they cracked, yet when the ultimate test came, in January 2021, brave Americans of both great parties joined to beat back Trump’s violent attempted seizure of power.

Now here we are again. You are needed once more. Perhaps you feel wearier than you did seven years ago. Perhaps you feel more afraid today than you did then. Yet you must still find the strength to answer your country’s call. You can do it. We can do it. We believe in America.