Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong

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      It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which Trump asked on Wednesday to overturn the ruling — the former president is off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be “dangerous” or “destabilizing.”There is already a “surge in violent threats” against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.” Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested — and I agree — that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment “is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react” to an adverse ruling.This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences” argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language:“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’t need to know a special “legal” version of the English language. Just apply the words on the page.Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion or to due process. The Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, further expanded constitutional protections against majoritarian encroachment. Majorities can’t reimpose slavery, for example, nor can they take away your right to equal protection under the law.So when a person critiques Section 3 as “undemocratic” or “undermining democracy,” your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was not until the Amnesty Act of 1872 that most former Confederates were permitted to serve in office again.Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told them to march to the Capitol and enlisted them to “fight like hell.” (At the same event, Rudy Giuliani urged “trial by combat.”) When the attack on the Capitol was underway, he inflamed the crowd in real time by tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”Yes, he also asked to the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.”What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It represented an effort to change the government of the United States. I was open to Jonathan Chait’s argument that the term “insurrection” is not the “most precise” way to describe Jan. 6, but he lost me with this distinction: “Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to “seize and hold” far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, something the Confederate Army could never accomplish.There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers.” He calls the text “ambiguous.”But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office except the most powerful? One should not read constitutional provisions in a way that reaches facially absurd results.Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000, the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution — especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The Party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the Party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new. More

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      Trump Asks Supreme Court to Keep Him on Colorado Ballot

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      The petition came in response to a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that the former president had engaged in insurrection and was ineligible to hold office under the 14th Amendment.Former President Donald J. Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to keep him on the primary ballot in Colorado, appealing an explosive ruling from the state Supreme Court declaring him ineligible based on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.That ruling, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote, marked “the first time in the history of the United States that the judiciary has prevented voters from casting ballots for the leading major-party presidential candidate.”Mr. Trump’s appeal adds to the growing pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court to act, given the number of challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility and the need for a nationwide resolution of the question as the primaries approach.Read Trump’s Appeal to the Supreme Court Over Colorado’s Ballot RulingLawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said rulings in Colorado and Maine deeming him ineligible for the ballot required the U.S. Supreme Court to act.Read Document“The issues presented in this petition are of exceptional importance and urgently require this court’s prompt resolution,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote.Mr. Trump’s petition followed a similar one last week from the Colorado Republican Party. The six voters who had prevailed in the Colorado Supreme Court filed a motion urging the justices to put the case on an exceptionally fast track.The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on requests to expedite its consideration of the case. It is likely to act on them in the coming days.The Colorado case is one of several involving or affecting Mr. Trump on the Supreme Court’s docket or on the horizon. After an appeals court rules on whether he has absolute immunity from prosecution, the justices may consider that question. And they will rule on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case in a decision expected by June.In a ruling last week, an election official in Maine agreed with the Colorado court that Mr. Trump was ineligible for another term. Mr. Trump appealed the decision from Maine to a state court there on Tuesday. Both rulings are on hold while appeals move forward, giving the U.S. Supreme Court some breathing room.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said the two rulings so far required the U.S. Supreme Court to act.“The Colorado Supreme Court decision would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” they wrote. “Indeed, the Maine secretary of state, in an administrative proceeding, has already used the Colorado proceedings as justification for unlawfully striking President Trump from that state’s ballot.”Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the petition was “a strong legal document” that “raises some serious, difficult questions.”He added: “This is not to say that Trump has presented slam-dunk arguments that he should win; rather, these are arguments that merit consideration by the Supreme Court.”The case turns on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.By a 4-to-3 vote, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December that the provision applied to Mr. Trump, making him ineligible for another term.“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the majority wrote. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”Mr. Trump’s petition attacked the ruling on many grounds. It said the events culminating in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 were not an insurrection.“‘Insurrection’ as understood at the time of the passage of the 14th Amendment meant the taking up of arms and waging war upon the United States,” the petition said, noting that the amendment had been adopted after “the United States had undergone a horrific civil war in which over 600,000 combatants died, and the very survival of the nation was in doubt.”“By contrast,” it added, “the United States has a long history of political protests that have turned violent.”Even if the events culminating in the Capitol riot could be called an insurrection, the petition said, Mr. Trump himself had not “engaged in insurrection.”The petition also said Section 3 did not apply to him because he had not taken the relevant kind of oath. And it said that the presidency was not one of the offices from which oath-breaking officials were barred.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said that Section 3 disqualified people subject to it from holding office — not from seeking it. If the candidate were elected, the petition said, Congress could remove that disqualification before the candidate’s term began.The petition also argued that judges may not act unless Congress does. “Congress — not a state court — is the proper body to resolve questions concerning a presidential candidate’s eligibility,” it said.More broadly, Mr. Trump’s petition said voters rather than judges should assess whether his conduct disqualified him from a second term.The provision has never been used to disqualify a presidential candidate, but it has been the subject of cases involving other elected officials after the Jan. 6 attacks.A state judge in New Mexico ordered Couy Griffin, a county commissioner in Otero County, removed from office under the clause. Mr. Griffin had been convicted of trespassing for entering a restricted area of the Capitol grounds during the attack.Another state judge, in Georgia, assuming that the Jan. 6 attacks were an insurrection and that participating in them barred candidates from office, ruled that the actions of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, did not meet the standard for removal from the ballot. More

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      Biden Plans 2 Campaign Speeches to Underscore Contrasts With Trump

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      President Biden is intensifying his campaign efforts as he looks toward November, planning a series of speeches that aides said on Wednesday would cast the stakes of the coming election as the endurance of American democracy itself.Even before a single vote is cast in the Republican Party’s nominating race, Mr. Biden and his team are treating former President Donald J. Trump as their de facto opponent in the general election. They’re seeking to frame the contest not as a traditional referendum on the incumbent president and his governance of the nation, but as an existential battle to save the country from a dangerous opponent.With the calendar flipped to 2024, Mr. Biden is making a notable escalation of his re-election campaign with an address planned at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot by a pro-Trump mob.The location, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War, is intended to draw a sharp contrast between Washington, who voluntarily ceded power after serving as the nation’s first president, and Mr. Trump, who refuses to accept the results of the 2020 race. On Monday, Mr. Biden will appear in Charleston, S.C., at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black church where a white supremacist killed nine parishioners in 2015. The venue embodies the country’s current fight against political violence and white supremacy, his campaign said.The two speeches are part of an effort to redirect attention from Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and remind Democratic and independent voters of the alternative to his re-election. In recent weeks, campaign aides have seized on Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric and potentially radical plans for a second term.“The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since,” said Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager. “Our message is clear and it is simple. We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.”Mr. Biden has held only one public event for his 2024 campaign, though in many official White House appearances he has drawn contrasts between his leadership and that of Mr. Trump and other Republicans. He has focused instead on wooing donors in private fund-raising events.Mr. Biden’s appearances will also provide voters with the first side-by-side contrast between himself and his predecessor this election cycle. Mr. Trump is scheduled to hold two campaign rallies on Saturday in Iowa, where he leads the nomination contest by a double-digit margin.For months, Democrats have issued public and private warnings about the need for Mr. Biden’s campaign to engage more aggressively in the 2024 efforts. Polls suggest a neck-and-neck race, with Mr. Biden struggling to energize key constituencies of the Democratic coalition, including young, Black and Latino voters.Biden aides said the campaign planned to hire organizing teams in every battleground state, eventually employing thousands of staff members across the country. A new round of campaign ads is planned later this week.They also plan to dispatch Vice President Kamala Harris on a national tour, focused on abortion rights, that will begin in Wisconsin on Jan. 22, the 51st anniversary of the landmark abortion-rights decision in Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court struck down that ruling in 2022 with the support of three Trump-appointed justices. More

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      Trump da un paso más en su solicitud de ‘inmunidad absoluta’

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      Exfuncionarios del gobierno destacan que la postura de Trump tiene “consecuencias absurdas y de gran alcance”.Casi no hay nada en el texto de la Constitución de Estados Unidos que siquiera respalde de manera remota el más osado argumento de la defensa del expresidente estadounidense Donald Trump contra el cargo de conspiración para anular las elecciones de 2020: que tiene inmunidad absoluta contra cualquier acusación por las acciones realizadas mientras ocupaba el cargo.La próxima semana, un tribunal federal de apelaciones evaluará los fundamentos expuestos en los alegatos, y el panel considerará factores como la historia, los precedentes y la división de poderes. Sin embargo, como ha reconocido la Corte Suprema, la Constitución en sí misma no aborda de manera explícita el tema de la existencia o el alcance de la inmunidad presidencial.En su recurso de apelación, Trump señala que el análisis incluyó una disposición constitucional, aunque su argumento no tiene muchos fundamentos legales. Tal disposición, la cláusula relativa al caso de una sentencia por juicio político, estipula que los funcionarios sometidos a juicio político por la Cámara de Representantes y declarados culpables por el Senado todavía pueden quedar sujetos a un procedimiento penal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Trump Makes Another Pitch to Appeals Court on Immunity in Election Case

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      The filing was the last step before an appeals court in Washington will hold a hearing on the crucial issue next week.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday made their final written request to a federal appeals court to grant Mr. Trump immunity to charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, arguing the indictment should be tossed out because it arose from actions he took while in the White House.The 41-page filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was the final step before the defense and prosecution debate the issue in front of a three-judge panel next Tuesday.The dispute over immunity is the single most important aspect of the election interference case, touching not only on new questions of law but also on consequential issues of timing. The case is scheduled to go to trial in Federal District Court in Washington in early March, but has been put on hold until Mr. Trump’s efforts to have the charges tossed on immunity grounds are resolved.In their filing to the appeals court, Mr. Trump’s lawyers repeated some of the arguments they had made in earlier submissions. They claimed, for instance, that a long history of presidents not being charged with crimes suggested that they all enjoyed immunity. They also said that prosecuting Mr. Trump now could unleash a chain reaction of other presidents being indicted.“The 234-year unbroken tradition of not prosecuting presidents for official acts, despite vociferous calls to do so from across the political spectrum, provides powerful evidence of it,” D. John Sauer, a lawyer who has handled Mr. Trump’s appeals, wrote of the idea of executive immunity.Mr. Sauer added: “The likelihood of mushrooming politically motivated prosecutions, and future cycles of recrimination, are far more menacing and crippling to the presidency than the threat of civil liability.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers raised another, even more audacious argument: that because he had been acquitted by the Senate during his second impeachment of inciting insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he could not be tried in a criminal court in the election interference case.But both legal experts and some of the senators who acquitted Mr. Trump have disagreed with that position — not least because the federal charges he is facing are not analogous to those he faced during his impeachment.The issue of Mr. Trump’s immunity claims is legally significant because the question of whether former presidents can be criminally liable for things they did in office has not been tested in court. Mr. Trump is the first former president to have been charged with crimes.But the appeal of the immunity issue has revolved around more than the question of whether Mr. Trump should eventually stand trial on the election charges. It has also touched on the separate, but equally critical, question of when the trial should occur.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have been trying for weeks to keep the trial on schedule, arguing that the public has an enormous interest in a speedy prosecution of Mr. Trump, the Republican Party’s leading candidate for the presidency.Mr. Trump’s lawyers, pulling in the opposite direction, have used every lever at their disposal to slow the case down, hoping to delay a trial until after the 2024 election is decided. If that happened and Mr. Trump won, he would have the power to simply order the charges against him dropped.The immunity challenge is being considered by Judge Karen L. Henderson, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, and by Judges Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs, who were put on the bench by President Biden.On Tuesday, before Mr. Trump’s court papers were filed, the judges informed both sides in the case that they should be prepared at the hearing next week to discuss issues raised in several friend-of-the-court briefs that have been submitted.One of the briefs argued that the issue of immunity should never have been subject to an immediate appeal, but rather should have been raised only if Mr. Trump were convicted. Another maintained that Mr. Smith had been improperly appointed to the role of special counsel and lacked the “authority to conduct the underlying prosecution.”Last month, fearing that a prolonged appeal could delay the case from going in front of a jury, Mr. Smith made an unusual request to the Supreme Court: He asked the justices to step in front of the appeals court and consider the case first.Although the justices rejected his petition, they are likely to get the case again after the appeals court makes its decision. More

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      Tracking State Efforts to Remove Trump From the 2024 Ballot

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      States with challenges to Trump’s candidacy Trump disqualified, decision appealed Decision pending Challenge dismissed or rejected Alaska Ariz. Calif. Colo. Conn. Del. Fla. Idaho Kan. La. Maine Mass. Mich. Minn. Mont. Nev. N.H. N.J. N.M. N.Y. N.C. Okla. Ore. Pa. R.I. S.C. Texas Utah Vt. Va. W.Va. Wis. Wyo. Formal challenges to Donald J. Trump’s […] More

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      Donald Trump’s Final Battle Has Begun

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      Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era, I resolved a while back not to get overly excited about Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances. They’re often a showman’s cheap histrionics, a con man’s gaudy hyperbole.But I can’t shake a grandiose prophecy that he made repeatedly last year, as he looked toward the 2024 presidential race. He took to calling it the “final battle.”I first heard Trump use that phrase in March, when he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. I laughed at his indefatigable self-aggrandizement. He said it again weeks later at a rally in Waco, Texas, not far from where the deadly confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal law enforcement officials took place. I cringed at his perversity.But as he continued to rave biblically about this “final battle,” my reaction changed, and it surprised me: He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict — which pits him and his supporters against the godlessness, lawlessness, tyranny, reverse racism, communism, globalism and open borders of a lunatic left — but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be, at least if he is the Republican presidential nominee. And if he wins it all? He will probably play dictator for much longer than a day, and the America that he molds to his self-interested liking may bear little resemblance to the country we’ve known and loved until now.With the Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away, a rematch of Trump and Joe Biden is highly likely — and wouldn’t be anything close to the usual competition between “four more years” and a reasonably sane, relatively coherent change of direction and pace. We’re on the cusp of something much scarier. Trump’s fury, vengefulness and ambitions have metastasized since 2020. The ideologues aligned with him have worked out plans for a second Trump administration that are darker and more detailed than anything in the first. He seems better positioned, if elected, to slip free of the restraints and junk the norms that he didn’t manage to do away with before. Yesterday’s Trump was a Komodo dragon next to today’s Godzilla.And Joe Biden, who campaigned in 2020 on a promise to unify the country and prides himself on bipartisanship, has recognized in his own way that “final battle” is apt. He has suggested that he is running again, at the age of 81, because the unendurable specter of Trump back in the White House leaves him no other choice. Trump and Biden don’t depict each other simply as bad alternatives for America. They describe each other as cataclysmic ones. This isn’t your usual negative partisanship, in which you try to win by stoking hatred of your opponent. It’s apocalyptic partisanship, in which your opponent is the agent of something like the End of Days.Trump talks that way all the time, ranting that we’ll “no longer have a country” if Biden and other Democrats are in charge. Biden’s warning about Trump is equally blunt, and it could assume ever greater prominence as he calculates how to win re-election despite widespread economic apprehension, persistently low approval ratings and attacks on his age and acuity.“Let’s be clear about what’s at stake in 2024,” he said at a campaign event in Boston last month. “Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy.”If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one. And it wouldn’t necessarily end with a Trump defeat in November. It might just get uglier.“There are people who don’t realize how dangerous 2024 could be,” Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and arguably Trump’s most prominent evangelical Christian critic, told me recently. “They’re assuming it’s a replay of 2020. I don’t think it is.”He wondered about the rioting of Jan. 6, 2021, as a harbinger of worse political violence. He cited “the authoritarian rhetoric that’s coming from Trump.” He referred to the breadth of the chasm between MAGA America and the rest of it. When I asked him if he could think of any prior presidential elections suffused with this much dread and reciprocal disdain, he had to rewind more than 150 years, to the eve of the Civil War. “That’s the only precedent in American history I can see,” he said.It’s certainly possible that over the 10 long months between now and Election Day, there will be surprises that set up a November election with different candidates, different issues and a different temperature than the ones in place at the moment. It’s also possible that our politicians’ heightened language and intense emotions don’t resonate with most American voters and won’t influence them.“I see our political process pulling away from where people are on the ground,” said Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics and public policy at Harvard who is an advocate of better civics education and more constructive engagement in civic life. “The political process has become a kind of theatrical spectacle, and on the ground, since 2016, we’ve seen this incredible growth of grass-roots organizations working on all kinds of civic health. I think people are getting healthier — or have been — over the past seven years, and our politics doesn’t reflect that.” She noted that in a growing number of states, there are serious movements to do away with party primaries, a political reform intended to counter partisanship and produce more moderate, consensus winners.But moderation and consensus are in no way part of Trump’s pitch, and if he’s on the ballot, striking his current Mephistophelian pose and taking his present Manichaean tack, voters are indeed being drawn into something that feels like a final battle or at least a definitive test — of the country’s belief in its institutions. Of its respect for diversity. Of its commitment to the law. Of its devotion to truth.Do a majority of Americans still believe in the American project and the American dream as we’ve long mythologized them? Do they still see our country as a land of opportunity and immigrant ingenuity whose accomplishments and promise redeem its sins? Do we retain faith in a more bountiful tomorrow, or are we fighting over leftovers? Those questions hover with a special urgency over the 2024 election.And that’s largely because of the perspective and agenda that Trump is asking voters to embrace. Even if the plans are bluster, the plea is a referendum on American values. He has said several times that immigrants “poison the blood” of our country, and a second Trump administration could involve the deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants annually and large detention camps. In his response to his indictments in four cases comprising 91 felony counts, he has insisted that the justice system is corrupt and vowed to overhaul it to his liking and use it to punish political foes. He praises autocrats, equating brutal repression with strength and divorcing morality from foreign policy. He unabashedly peddles conspiracy theories, spinning falsehoods when provable facts are inconvenient or unflattering. He’d have us all live in fiction, just as long as the narrative exalts him.“When it comes to manipulating the information space, getting inside people’s heads, creating alternative realities and mass confusion — he’s as good as anyone since the 1930s, and you know who I’m talking about,” said Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Rauch characterized the stolen election claims by Trump and his enablers as “the most audacious and Russian-style disinformation attack on the United States that we’ve ever seen” and questioned whether, under a second Trump administration, we’d become a country “completely untethered from reality.”We’d likely become a country with a new relationship to the rest of the world and a new attitude toward our history in it.“The Western liberal international order is the work of three-quarters of a century of eminent statesmen and both parties,” said Mark Salter, who was a longtime senior aide to Senator John McCain, has written many books on American politics and collaborated with Cassidy Hutchinson on “Enough,” her best-selling 2023 memoir about her time in Trump’s White House. “It has brought us times of unexpected prosperity and liberty in the world. And somebody like Vivek Ramaswamy or Donald Trump has got a better idea? It’s just ludicrous.”“I just have this feeling,” Salter told me, “that the next four years are going to be the most consequential four years in my lifetime.”Are our most generous impulses doing battle with our most ungenerous ones? That’s one frame for the 2024 election, suggested by the nastiness of so many of Trump’s tirades versus the appeals to comity and common ground that Biden still works into his remarks, the compassion and kindness he still manages to project. He celebrates American diversity and rightly portrays it as a source of our strength. Trump — and, for that matter, Ron DeSantis and many others in the current generation of Republican leadership — casts it as a threat.“Part of what’s in danger is American pluralism,” said Eboo Patel, the founder and president of the nonprofit group Interfaith America and the author of the 2022 book “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.” “There was a consensus, from Kennedy to Obama, that diversity is part of what’s inspiring about America. Virtually every president in recent memory, with the exception of the guy in the Oval Office from 2017 to 2020, spoke about the virtues of American pluralism.”Trump speaks instead about persecuted Christians, persecuted white Americans, persecuted rural Americans. He beseeches them to exact vengeance. Where, Patel asked, does that leave “the American civic institutions that we just expect to work,” the basketball leagues and Cub Scout troops in which political affiliation and partisan recrimination took a back seat to joint mission? They could well break down. “We’re already seeing this in school boards,” he said. “We see this when a high school doesn’t just have to cancel a play but disband its theater department.”Jennifer Williams, a city councilwoman in Trenton, N.J., who made history a year ago when she was sworn as the first transgender person elected to any city council in the state, told me that while she identifies as Republican and has voted for Republican candidates in presidential elections past, the prejudices that Trump promotes terrify her. “My very existence as a human being and as an American is becoming more and more questioned,” she said.There’s a meanness in American life right now, and the way 2024 plays out could advance or arrest it. The outcome could also strain Americans’ confidence in our democracy in irreparable ways — and that’s not just because the Supreme Court may wind up determining Trump’s presence on the ballot, not just because the popular vote and the Electoral College could yield significantly different results, not just because any Trump loss would be attended by fresh cries of a “rigged” election and, perhaps, fresh incitements to violence.It’s also because so many voters across the ideological spectrum are so keenly frustrated and deeply depressed by the political landscape of 2024. They behold a Supreme Court that enshrines and protects ethically challenged justices and, as in the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, seems wildly out of touch with the country. They have watched the House of Representatives devolve into a dysfunctional colosseum of dueling egos and wearying diatribes. They’re presented with candidates who seem like default options rather than bold visionaries. And they feel increasingly estranged from their own government.“That is so detrimental to our democracy,” said Stephanie Murphy, a moderate Florida Democrat who served in the House from 2017 to 2023 and was also one of the nine members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 rioting. “Two-thirds of Americans don’t agree on almost anything, but two-thirds agree that they don’t want to see a Trump-Biden rematch, and that’s what they’re getting.” There will be no real Democratic presidential primary. The Republican presidential primary, to judge by the polling, is an exercise so pointless that Trump hasn’t bothered to show up for any of the four debates so far. “You’re further disenfranchising people,” Murphy said, and you’re fostering “disillusionment among the American electorate that their vote even matters.”The irony is that in 2024, it will probably matter more than ever. How many Americans will see that, and how many will act on it? The final battle may be between resignation and determination, between a surrender of our ideals and the resolve to keep reaching for them, no matter how frequently and how far we fall short.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More