Anne Applebaum writes:

In the final week of this election season, the Republican Party is running two different campaigns. One of them is an ugly and angry but conventional political enterprise. Donald Trump and other Republicans make speeches; party operatives seek to get out the vote; money is spent in swing states; television and radio advertisements proliferate. The people running that campaign are focused on winning the election.

Last night, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, we caught a glimpse of the other campaign. This is the campaign that is psychologically preparing Americans for an assault on the electoral system, a second January 6, if Trump doesn’t win—or else an assault on the political system and the rule of law if he does. Listen carefully to the words of Tucker Carlson, the pundit fired from Fox News partly for his role in lying about the 2020 election. Warming up the crowd for Trump, he mocked the very idea that Kamala Harris could win: “It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s so impressive as the first Samoan Malaysian, low-I.Q., former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

“Samoan Malaysian” was Carlson’s way of mocking Harris’s mixed-race background, and “low-IQ” is self-explanatory—but “85 million” is a number of votes she could in fact win. And how, Carlson suggested, could there be such a “groundswell of popular support” for a person he demeaned as a mongrel, an incompetent, an idiot? The answer was clear: There can’t be, and if anyone says it happened, then we will contest it.

All of this is part of the game: the Trump campaign’s loud confidence, despite dead-even polls; its decision, in the final days, to take the candidate outside the swing states to New York, New Mexico, and Virginia, because we’ve got this in the bag (and not, say, because filling arenas in Pennsylvania is getting harder); the hyping of Republican-early-voter numbers, even though no evidence indicates that these are new voters, just people who are no longer being discouraged from voting early. Also the multiple attempts, across the country, to remove large numbers of people from the rolls; the many claims, with no justification, that “illegal immigrants” are voting or even, as Trump implied during the September debate, that illegal immigrants are being deliberately imported into the country in order to vote; Vance’s declaration that he will accept the election results as long as “only legal American citizens” vote.

At Madison Square Garden, Trump doubled down on that rhetoric. He repeated past claims about the “invasion” of immigrants; about “Venezuelan gangs” occupying American cities, even Times Square; and he offered an instant solution: “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get these criminals out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail.” But he left open the question of who exactly all these “criminals” might be, because he seemed to be talking about not just immigrants but also his political opponents, “the enemy within.” The United States, he said, “is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer … November 5, 2024, nine days from now, will be Liberation Day in America.”

The insults we heard from many speakers at Madison Square Garden, including the description of Puerto Rico as “garbage” or of Harris as “the anti-Christ” or of Hillary Clinton as a “sick son of a bitch”—insults that can also be heard in a thousand podcast episodes featuring Carlson, Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, and their ilk—are part of the same effort. Trump’s electorate is being primed to equate his political opposition with infection, pollution, and demonic power, and to accept violence and chaos as a legitimate, necessary response to these primal, lethal threats.

As I wrote earlier this month, this kind of language, imported from the 1930s, has never before been part of mainstream American presidential politics, because no other political candidate in modern history has used an election to undermine the legal basis of the American political system. [Continue reading…]