The 'larger MAGA project' will rage on even if Trump loses: analysis

30 August 2024

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville has cautioned members of his party against becoming overconfident about Vice President Kamala Harris' prospects for winning the 2024 presidential election. Harris narrowly leads Donald Trump in many of the national and battleground state polls released in late August, but Carville warns that "Trump, traditionally, when he’s on the ballot, chronically under-polls."

However,, The Lincoln Project's Stuart Stevens, a longtime GOP consultant/strategist and Never Trump conservative who is supporting Harris, believes that although recent polls are showing a close race, the Democratic vice president will enjoy a major surge in the weeks leading up to the election — not unlike Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Meanwhile, The Nation's Sasha Abramsky, in an article published on August 30, warns Harris supporters that even if she wins in November and becomes president in 2025, U.S. democracy will still be facing a major threat — as "Trumpism" and the "larger MAGA project" are much bigger than Trump himself.

"After months in which Trump was steadily rising in polls," Abramsky explains, "the polls have shifted in Harris' favor, and Trump has now fallen marginally behind Harris. And as his odds of winning the White House have declined, the intensity of his attacks on the electoral system have grown. Trump allies are already hard at work suing several states, alleging that they are not adequately purging voter rolls of inactive or dead voters. Trump himself has repeatedly refused to say unequivocally that if he loses, he will accept the results of the November elections."

Abramsky adds, "This behavior is, of course, deeply corrosive to the culture of democracy. It encourages voters to think of those who vote differently from them as enemies engaged in vast, shadowy conspiracies to deprive the MAGA leader of his God-given right to ultimate power."

The journalist warns that "everyone from small-town mayors to county supervisors" has become "foot soldiers in the larger MAGA project."

"The long tail of Trumpism is thrashing as wildly today as it was eight years ago — in some ways, even more so," Abramsky observes. "The Republican Party wants to paint all of this as being somehow normal. It's not."

Abramsky continues, "There's nothing remotely normal about heading into the homestretch of a presidential campaign with a candidate facing multiple federal felony indictments, stirring up local election boards to preemptively cast doubt on the legitimacy of elections, and prepping his followers to rise up in insurrection once more should he lose in November. Down that route lies nothing but chaos and the tearing apart of community fabric."

Sasha Abramsky's full article for The Nation is available at this link.

From Your Site Articles