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Three separate times during Thursday night’s debate, CNN’s moderators asked Donald Trump if he would commit to accepting the legitimacy of the 2024 election results regardless of who won. He never did.
Instead, Trump said that he’d accept the results if he thought they were “fair and legal and good” — while at the same time repeating the false claim that the 2020 election was shot through with fraud (a claim that the moderators let stand).
Put together, the former president was all but openly telling us that he’s ready to repeat the campaign of lies and incitement that produced a mob attack on the Capitol less than four years ago. (He did offer a rote rejection of political violence.)
That all of this felt normal, even expected, shows how much Donald Trump has warped our sense of what’s tolerable in America. Here was an authoritarian spouting falsehoods, ranting incoherently about policy, issuing thinly veiled threats against democracy, and somehow we’ve come to accept it.
We’re all so used to this behavior, in fact, that we have trouble reminding ourselves how dangerous it is. I can guarantee Trump’s comments on the election won’t be the top headline at any major newspaper in the country.
That honor will likely go to Joe Biden’s poor performance, and I can understand why. The president of the United States barely stringing a cogent answer together for the first hour of a nationally televised debate is indeed a major story. It seems like the critics warning about Biden’s age had a point.
But there’s something quietly obscene about Trump’s naked authoritarianism falling out of the frame. It wasn’t only these few comments about election results: It was his entire performance, a cavalcade of lies that betrayed a staggering contempt for the American public’s intelligence.
On Thursday night, an authoritarian put his distaste for democracy on open display. Opposite him was a man who claims to care about democracy above all else but has seemed wholly incapable of considering whether there might be some tension between its future and his own ambitions.
Blame Biden for running again. Blame the Democratic Party for failing to stop him. Blame CNN for burying the democracy questions halfway through the debate. Blame the Republicans for nominating Trump. Blame Trump, most of all, for acting the way he chooses to act — and his voters for standing by him while he does it.
Trump reminded us tonight that he is uniquely unfit for office and hostile to our democracy. The fact that those qualities have lost their ability to shock underscores just how much the man has bent our politics to his will.
