'Constitutional failure': Conservative warns democracy in more danger today than on Jan. 6

Even though former President Donald Trump didn't succeed in overturning the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, a conservative columnist is warning that the state of democracy is dire heading into the next election cycle.

In his Tuesday column in The Bulwark co-authored with professor Jeffrey K. Tulis, conservative writer Bill Kristol urged Americans to take the threat of a second Trump term seriously.

"The leader of the January 6th insurrection is all but certain to be the presidential nominee of one of our two major parties. And polls suggest he has a very real chance to win the general election," Kristol and Tulis wrote. "[T]he United States is closer to constitutional failure today than it was three years ago...We are in important ways in greater peril in January 2024 than we were in January 2021."

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According to the authors, the continued "normalization" of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, and the Republican Party's continued enabling of the former president's rhetoric has created a situation where Trump — who has openly promised to govern as a "dictator" on "day one" of a second term — is effectively unbound, with all Republicans who stood up to him no longer in power.

"The Republicans who broke with Trump have either been marginalized or returned to singing his praises. All but two of the representatives who voted for his impeachment are out of office," Kristol and Tulis wrote. "If he were returned to the White House, he would have only sycophants around him and none of the so-called 'adults in the room' who, however ineffectually, tried in his first term to check his worse impulses."

As of January 2024, Trump maintains a healthy lead over his GOP rivals in both national and early state polls. According to RealClearPolitics' national polling average, the former president has a 51-point national advantage over his closest competitors and is all but assured of clinching the Republican nomination months before the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Kristol and Tulis argued that Trump winning a second term would almost certainly end democracy in the United States.

"Americans need to recognize, at a minimum, that the re-election of Donald Trump would make presidential leadership arbitrary and willful, would tilt the federal government radically toward lawlessness, and would seriously, perhaps critically, wound our constitutional democracy," they wrote.

READ MORE: Former Trump officials say a second term 'could mean the end of American democracy as we know it'

Read Kristol and Tulis' column by clicking here.