The race for the White House is in the home stretch, and the two candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are running neck and neck. When it comes to the most salient issue for voters – the economy – Harris has narrowed the gap with her opponent in recent months, but Trump retains a slight lead.

It is a lead Trump does not deserve, argues New York University’s Nouriel Roubini. Harris and Trump differ sharply on “fiscal, trade, climate, immigration, currency, and China policies,” and it is Trump’s agenda that is “much more likely to cause inflation, reduce economic growth (through tariffs, a currency depreciation, and immigration restrictions), and blow up the budget.” So far, however, “markets have not priced in the damage that Trump would do to the economy and markets.”

For Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, the contrast between the two candidates boils down to freedom. “On every big issue in this election” – from women’s bodily autonomy to high drug and housing prices – “Harris would expand Americans’ freedoms, and Trump would curtail them.” Harris’s agenda, centered on a “commitment to help ordinary Americans,” is a far cry from the “discredited trickle-down economics” that Trump is hawking.

That might be the point. Far from seeking to lead a free and prosperous America, the New School’s Nina L. Khrushcheva explains, Trump has shown that he would be a “dangerous dictator eager to rule over a weak, divided, and paranoid society.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in his promise to pursue the “largest deportation effort in American history” – a “policy of state terror” from which undocumented immigrants would be “only the first to suffer.”

This is one reason why Edoardo Campanella, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, concludes that another Trump presidency would “intensify” a decades-old “battle to restore America’s historical racial and political hierarchy.” Even if Trump loses, however, “demographic trends, a Trumpified Republican Party, and counter-majoritarian constitutional rules” imply that American democracy will be “highly dysfunctional in the years ahead.”

A Harris victory might not end America’s crisis of democracy, but the University of Chicago’s Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq point out that it would stave off the kind of direct attacks on institutions that autocratic movements tend to mount when they “gain control of the state’s machinery a second time.” If recent experience in Hungary, India, and Poland is any guide, a second Trump administration would be more “ruthless and effective” at “wielding – and maintaining – power.”

If Trump poses such a profound threat to America’s economy, society, and democracy, how has he gained so much support? Reed Galen, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project and President of JoinTheUnion.us, points the finger at a media machine that has been “flooding America’s living rooms” with “highly addictive right-wing propaganda” for decades. Even if Harris wins, this “media monster” will grow only “louder, uglier, and more unwieldy,” – underscoring the need for Americans to “do the hard work” to “ensure that we don’t find ourselves back here, yet again, in 2028.”

NEW YORK – With polls suggesting that Kamala Harris has at least a 50% chance of winning next month’s US presidential election, questions about her economic-policy agenda have come to the fore. Of course, much will also depend on down-ballot outcomes. If the Democrats were to win the White House and both houses of Congress, they could implement fiscal policies with a simple majority (through the so-called budget-reconciliation process). Otherwise, a Harris administration obviously would be more constrained.

When Harris (briefly) ran for president in 2019, her economic proposals were well to the left of the Democratic Party. Among other things, she supported universal state-funded health care, decriminalization of illegal border crossings, a $10 trillion “Green New Deal” to address climate change, and a ban on fracking.

Now she is running on a more centrist platform that includes support for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), albeit with some new twists such as a price cap on insulin and an expansion of government authority to negotiate drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid. She also favors the recent bipartisan deal to crack down on illegal immigration, which her opponent, Donald Trump, convinced Republicans to scuttle for electoral reasons, accepts fracking, and backs the more limited ($1 trillion) green spending in the Inflation Reduction Act. (Indeed, she has made little mention of climate change in her speeches.)

Although many of Harris’s other proposals remain vague, she would seem to represent a continuation of President Joe Biden’s economic policies. She would support efforts to reshore manufacturing and create an “opportunity economy” with more inclusive growth. She would not shy away from state intervention, especially industrial policies to support the economic sectors and technologies of the future. And she would attempt to rein in the power of large oligopolistic firms through regulation.

In terms of fiscal policy, Harris proposes capping the cost of childcare at 7% of household income (implying a subsidy), reviving the child tax credit, and giving a $25,000 tax credit to first-time homebuyers. Since these measures might increase demand and prices, she also has plans to increase the supply of affordable housing. She would introduce some new tax credits for small businesses, and extend the Trump tax cuts for households earning less than $400,000 per year.

To pay for these policies, she would raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, raise taxes on the very wealthy (those currently with a top marginal rate of 39%), and explore the possibility of a tax on unrealized capital gains. Finally, she has no plans to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. All told, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Harris’s proposals would cost $3.5 trillion over a decade, whereas Trump’s would cost $7.5 trillion unless other taxes (such as tariffs) are introduced.

As for Harris’s trade policies, they would be quite similar to Biden’s, even if she has spoken very little about China on the campaign trail. There would be continued “de-risking” – but not decoupling – in strategic sectors such as critical metals, rare earths, green tech, and high tech, as well as sanctions and export restrictions on semiconductors and other inputs relating to artificial intelligence.

The Biden administration has described its approach as creating a small yard with a high fence, and Harris would probably expand the yard. Thus, tariffs – like the 100% levy on Chinese-made electric vehicles – would be maintained, restrictions on inward and outward foreign direct investment with China would be tightened, and many of the proposals from the House Select Committee on China would be taken up.

Unlike Trump, though, Harris would not slap tariffs on friends and allies or pursue across-the-board tariffs on all Chinese goods. She would pursue a managed strategic competition with China, rather than full containment or decoupling. She would nudge NATO allies to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense (in fact, 23 out of 32 already are doing so), and she would support alliances, multilateral security pacts like the Quad and AUKUS, and bilateral relations with important partners like India and the Philippines. She would keep America in the Paris climate agreement and try to strengthen its efforts to reduce emissions and accelerate the green transition.

However, like Biden, Harris would not try to join the successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, even though many strategists believe that the “pivot to Asia” needs an economic leg to stand on. While maintaining America’s flexible exchange-rate policy, she may lean more on the threat of branding some countries as currency manipulators. By the same token, she would continue to allow the US dollar to be used a weapon of national security (through primary and secondary sanctions). But, presumably, she would also be prudent enough to pursue policies designed to retain the greenback’s status as the major global reserve currency.

Thus, Harris’s fiscal, trade, climate, immigration, currency, and China policies would be quite different from her opponent’s. Trump’s agenda is much more likely to cause inflation, reduce economic growth (through tariffs, a currency depreciation, and immigration restrictions), and blow up the budget. But markets have not priced in the damage that Trump would do to the economy and markets. Perhaps a divided government would constrain him. Perhaps his more moderate policy advisers or market discipline would dilute his most radical policy positions. Nonetheless, the choice at the top of the ballot is very clear.

NEW YORK – Kamala Harris has made freedom a central theme of her campaign. Under the heading “Safeguard our fundamental freedoms,” her website explains that: “Vice President Harris’s fight for our future is also a fight for freedom. In this election, many fundamental freedoms are at stake: the freedom to make your own decisions about your own body without government interference; the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride; and the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”

This messaging is welcome. It is high time that American progressives reclaim the freedom agenda from libertarians and the right, especially now that the right represents the exact opposite. While many on the right drape themselves in the flag, progressives are actually advancing an all-American freedom agenda.

Bringing an economist’s lens to bear clarifies the issue. First, an essential part of freedom is the freedom to do and to act – to live up to one’s potential. People living hand to mouth or on the edge of starvation have no real freedom; they do what they must in order to survive.

Second, in any society of interdependent individuals, freedom for some may entail a loss of freedom for others. As the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it, “freedom for the wolves has often meant death for the sheep.” The financial liberalization of the 1990s and 2000s – freedom for bankers – would have meant death for the economy had government not intervened; but since that intervention required billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, the crisis still reduced the freedom of taxpayers and many workers and homeowners.

Third, a little coercion can meaningfully expand freedom for all. When we work together, we can do things that we cannot do alone; but to avoid the free-rider problem, there may need to be some compulsion.

Fourth, while neoliberal economics expanded the freedom of corporations to exploit others, it did not lead to overall prosperity, let alone shared prosperity. Good economic theory had predicted this even before neoliberalism became fashionable in the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher era. Moreover, neoliberalism is not even sustainable, because it encourages individual traits and market behavior that undermine the functioning of the economy.

Economies run on trust. The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics – Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson – have stressed the importance of institutions; but even seemingly good institutions don’t work when selfish individuals, like Donald Trump, start brazenly violating norms and demonstrating extreme dishonesty.

Fifth, contrary to claims made by conservatives and libertarians like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, unfettered markets are neither necessary for, nor even conducive to, political freedom. The rise of authoritarian populism has been most pronounced in countries where governments have done too little (to address poverty, inequality, insecurity, and so forth), not where they have done too much.

The contrast between Harris and Trump on core liberties – such as a woman’s right to control her own body – is glaring. On every big issue in this election, Harris would expand Americans’ freedoms, and Trump would curtail them. At the center of Harris’s agenda is a commitment to help ordinary Americans, rather than return to the discredited trickle-down economics that Trump adopted during his presidency. His proposed tax cuts for billionaires and large corporations would add an estimated $7.5 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next few years, and that burden will make Americans’ children and grandchildren less free.

While the post-pandemic worldwide spike in inflation appears to have been tamed, Americans remain rightly concerned about drug and housing prices. Harris has proposed measures to prevent price gouging, but these have been widely (and deliberately) misinterpreted. She is not advocating that the federal government sets prices, and many states already have anti-price-gouging laws to prevent firms from exploiting exceptional situations like hurricanes and floods. If anything, the pandemic showed that such policies need to be strengthened and enforced.

Similarly, the Inflation Reduction Act had provisions to bring down the prices of pharmaceuticals such as insulin – an indispensable (century-old) drug for those with diabetes – from what were obviously exorbitant levels. Nonetheless, the United States could do far more to bring drug prices down closer to the levels found in Europe, where there are stronger laws against abuses of market power. Harris would seek to do precisely that, whereas Trump has promised to dismantle the IRA, and thus to increase prices for Americans.

Trump also promises to raise tariffs – to a rate of 100% on goods from China – which would simply increase the prices of apparel, appliances, and many other goods that ordinary Americans buy. In fact, his entire economic agenda amounts to a massive regressive tax on lower- and middle-income Americans. Their freedom as consumers will be reduced, because they will have less to spend as they please.

Moreover, while Harris has released a comprehensive plan to expand the supply of housing and reduce its cost – and to increase affordability for first-time homebuyers – Trump has remained silent on this critical issue.

Finally, to support Americans’ freedom to live up to their potential, Harris’s agenda includes both a vision and some initial concrete steps toward expanding opportunity, especially entrepreneurship. Such measures would be as good for those hoping to start a business as they would be for the overall economy.

Trump is a living testament to the right’s repudiation of freedom. Fortunately, Harris is showing what it looks like when progressives embrace and advance this core American value.

MOSCOW – Vermin. Rapists. Poison in America’s blood. These are just a few of the dehumanizing epithets Donald Trump has used to describe Hispanic immigrants in the United States. Now, he is promising the “largest deportation effort in American history.” His vision of rounding up millions of people is unlike anything seen in a democracy and sounds more like Nazi-occupied France.

Try to imagine what Trump’s plan would entail. Immigration agents raiding farms and factories to haul away workers. School teachers and administrators coerced into informing on students. Covert surveillance of Roman Catholic churches, so that Hispanic worshipers can be nabbed after taking Holy Communion. Families being separated, with parents being sent away and potentially losing contact with their minor children.

Trump says that only undocumented immigrants – who Republicans claim number 20-30 million, far higher than authoritative estimates of around 12 million – would be targeted. But with over 60 million people of Hispanic heritage living in the US (as of 2020), does anyone imagine that his immigrant dragnet would not ensnare US citizens? US Immigration and Customs Enforcement hardly has a spotless record in this area, and it has never carried out anything like mass deportation on the scale that Trump envisions.

Trump would give his operation the patina of legality by invoking an old and obscure law: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which authorizes the president to “apprehend, restrain, secure, and remove” non-citizens within the US who hail from a “hostile” country. The act was supposedly intended for use during wartime, to prevent espionage and sabotage, but that is not why President John Adams enacted it. He wanted to intimidate the followers of his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson, whom he believed were excessively influenced by French revolutionaries.

Since the US was not actually at war with France, Adams included a provision that the Act could be used against nationals of a foreign state that threatens an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.” But, in practice, the Alien Enemies Act has been invoked only three times, always during major conflicts.

During the War of 1812, all British nationals living in the US were required to report their status. During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson invoked the act against nationals of the Wilhelmine, Austrian, and Ottoman empires, as well as citizens of their ally Bulgaria, claiming that these so-called enemy aliens could be treated as prisoners of war.

Most infamously, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the act after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, with Japanese, German, and Italian nationals all being designated enemy aliens. The vast majority of those herded into internment camps were Japanese, but a number of German Jews – who had avoided Nazi death camps by emigrating to the US – were also rounded up and detained.

For Trump, immigrants themselves – not the countries they come from – are invading the US. And, as the Brennan Center for Justice warns, the Alien Enemies Act can be “wielded against immigrants who have done nothing wrong, have evinced no signs of disloyalty, and are lawfully present” in the US. There is no reason to think that Trump will not take full advantage of this, especially given the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that current and former presidents enjoy near-total immunity from critical prosecution for their official acts while in office.

Discussions about Trump’s anti-immigrant policies have often focused on their economic impact which, according to Bloomberg, could cost the US economy some $4.7 trillion over ten years. Who will harvest produce in California’s Central Valley following Trump’s purge? Who will change the sheets and scrub the floors of hospitals and retirement homes? Who will bury the dead and maintain the cemeteries?

With Trump’s immigrant purge costing the US economy so dearly, the prices of food and other basic goods could skyrocket. Moreover, deportation itself is expensive. According to one estimate, deporting one million undocumented immigrants per year – the rate Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, has suggested – could cost $88 billion annually.

But the economic costs of mass deportation would be dwarfed by the costs to America’s soul. When I moved to the US almost 35 years ago, I thought that my experience growing up in the Soviet Union would be far removed from the ways of this supposed bastion of freedom and the rule of law. Today, I hear in Trump’s shocking campaign rhetoric – his menacing talk of “enemies within” and his utter lack of regard for rights, norms, and the rule of law – the echoes of something familiar: a dangerous dictator eager to rule over a weak, divided, and paranoid society.

What happens if the “sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door” – the terror of my homeland during the darkest years of Stalinist terror – becomes part of American life? Will Americans turn a blind eye to the immigrant holding camps that spring up? Will people become informers, turning in their neighbors and co-workers to Trump’s immigration police?

America is already being terrorized by Trump. That much is clear whenever powerful leaders debase themselves for his favor. Cardinal Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan, who grinned and laughed uproariously as Trump uttered countless vulgarities at a ceremonial dinner, is just one recent and shameful example.

Among some groups – not least the Republican establishment – such cowardice would almost certainly persist in the face of mass deportations. But anyone tempted to vote for a man planning to implement a policy of state terror should remember Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous post-WWII confession: “First they came for the Communists,” he began, “and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist.” The same went for Socialists, trade unionists, and Jews. But then “they came for me,” he concludes, and “there was no one left” to speak out.

CAMBRIDGE – The “crisis of democracy” across Western countries is generally attributed to rising inequality, the hollowing out of the middle class, and the politics of mass migration. But another major factor is demography, especially in the United States, where the threat to democracy tracks developments affecting white voters. Moreover, since demographic trends cannot be easily reversed, America’s growing dysfunction is likely to be a persistent factor in global politics for a long time.

By 2044, white Americans will represent 49.7% of the US population, down from 70% today and almost 90% in the 1960s. This change could be immensely consequential from a political and psychological standpoint. For the first time in the country’s history, white Americans will be a minority – even if they remain more numerous than Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other cohorts. Already, white voters’ waning political influence is creating a sense of lost status and marginalization, as partly reflected in surveys showing that nearly 60% of Republicans “feel like a stranger in their own country.”

Against this backdrop, the 2024 presidential election should be seen as part of a longer-term political conflict that will end with either the eradication or the restoration of the country’s historical racial hierarchy. Simply put, today’s Democrats embrace the idea of a multiracial democracy, whereas Republicans want to make the country “great again” by re-establishing elements of the old white supremacy.

This conflict predates Donald Trump. Republican presidential candidates have garnered a majority of the white vote in every election since 1964, the year that Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, won the White House and went on to sign the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts. More recently, Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was a moment of reckoning for the white electorate, many of whom began to grapple with the implications of the country’s changing demographic structure.

After Obama’s re-election in 2012, the Republican National Committee drafted a report acknowledging the need for the party to focus more on attracting minorities. But at the state level, Republicans moved in the opposite direction, doubling down on their appeals to white voters through voter-suppression measures and racially gerrymandered congressional districts. Then, in 2016, Trump tapped into white discontent to win the Republican Party’s nomination.

Another Trump presidency would intensify the battle to restore America’s historical racial and political hierarchy, given Trump’s plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. But even if Trump is defeated, the fight will continue. Trumpism is likely to survive, because the “Make America Great Again” doctrine now permeates a Republican Party that has rid itself of moderate conservatives.

It might seem suicidal for a party to bet its future on a demographic cohort whose political weight is fated to decline – even if support from non-white voters has increased in recent years (reflecting effective messaging about reviving sectors of the economy where ethnic minorities also find employment). But the US Constitution provides one explanation for this strategy. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard University point out, the US system includes several counter-majoritarian institutions that were meant to ensure stability, but that also can empower a political minority.

What counts in the presidential election, for example, is not the popular vote but the Electoral College. That is how Trump won in 2016, despite receiving fewer votes than his opponent. Similarly, each state is assigned two seats in the Senate regardless of the size of its population. By 2040, roughly 70% of Americans will live in just 15 states, while the disproportionately whiter and older remaining 30% will elect 70 senators.

The combination of demographic trends, a Trumpified Republican Party, and counter-majoritarian constitutional rules will make American democracy highly dysfunctional in the years ahead. While its strong institutional foundations can help prevent the US from succumbing to autocracy, it seems destined for periods of heightened political tension and conflict.

In this context, it is not far-fetched to imagine constitutional crises involving the federal government and state legislatures over the management of elections and voting rights; or between Congress and a far-right Supreme Court over civil rights; or between Congress and a polarizing president.

There are no quick fixes. Any constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College or reform the Senate and Supreme Court (which has no term limit for justices) would be dead on arrival, because it would need supermajorities in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Could Americans converge to the center and marginalize the far right and the far left? It doesn’t look likely any time soon.

This year’s election will not yield a binary outcome. A victory for Vice President Kamala Harris will not save American democracy, and a victory for Trump will not suddenly kill it. Instead, it will be yet another installment in the longer-running demographic conflict that started six decades ago, and which shows no signs of ending.

CHICAGO – Would a second Donald Trump presidency really imperil American democracy? Influential commentators suggest that the former president is too “weak,” too desperate to be popular, or simply not “smart” enough to be a dictator. But American history lacks any real precedent, and other countries’ recent experiences suggest that a political movement with autocratic tendencies will become more ruthless and effective a second time around – especially after an electoral defeat.

Here’s how it tends to play out: A first-time leader or a new party gains national power, only to suffer a bitter electoral defeat after a single term. This experience has a radicalizing effect, and the party or leader becomes determined never to lose again. When the party does win a second time, it quickly moves to destroy the institutions and rules that could threaten its hold on power.

Exhibit A is Viktor Orbán, whose Fidesz party has governed Hungary twice. The first time, between 1998 and 2002, Orbán generally operated as a conventional economic conservative. Though he bridled a bit at democratic norms, he never drifted outside the European mainstream. But after losing in 2002, Fidesz spent eight years in opposition. When Orbán returned to power in 2010, he was determined never to be defeated again. By gerrymandering the legislature, changing voter-eligibility rules, and capturing the election commission, courts, and state media, he made it practically impossible for the opposition to win.

A similar story played out in Poland under its Law and Justice (PiS) government. Founded by twin brothers Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński, PiS first held power between 2005 and 2007, when it was part of a coalition and focused on economic inequality and traditional Catholic values. But after the party’s ouster from government in 2007, and Lech’s death in a plane crash in Russia in 2010, Jarosław began railing against real and imagined foes. When PiS won an outright parliamentary majority in 2015, it shifted its focus to dismantling Poland’s democratic institutions.

Among other things, the PiS government packed the Constitutional Tribunal, redrew the electoral map, and seized control of the media commission and judicial appointments. State media became a PiS tool, and opposition parties lost their traditional committee roles in parliament, robbing them of their platform for criticizing the government. But unlike Fidesz, PiS’s efforts to tilt the electoral playing field weren’t enough. It lost power in October 2023 to a coalition of pro-European, pro-democracy parties.

Finally, consider India’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Although it tasted power briefly as a small part of a broader coalition government in 1989, its first solo stint in office came between 1999 and 2004. Its leader at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, focused on economic liberalization and improving relations with Pakistan and China, and any effort to “saffronize” the country remained limited.

Like Fidesz and PiS, the BJP eventually lost power in a fair election. But in 2014, Narendra Modi led the party to a landslide victory. As chief minister of Gujarat, he previously had presided over rapid economic growth and anti-Muslim riots that left up to 2,000 people dead. When he became prime minister, he doubled down on economic liberalization but also undermined press independence, assailed critics of the BJP, and turned a blind eye to violence by Hindu social movements against Muslims and their other perceived foes.

Then, in 2019, Modi revoked the contested Muslim-majority Kashmir region’s special constitutional status and imposed direct military rule, as well as pushing through a new citizenship law that disenfranchised some Muslims – making the BJP harder to defeat. Even though the BJP fell dramatically short of its ambitions in the general election earlier this year, international watchdogs now classify Modi’s India as an electoral autocracy, not a full democracy.

The common element in these three cases is a charismatic leader who comes to reject the idea that his opponents can ever be trusted with power. Defeat is the midwife of anti-democratic ire. When an autocratic movement gains control of the state’s machinery a second time, inexperience no longer impedes it from attacking institutions directly.

The parallels between these cases and Trump’s MAGA movement should be obvious. Like the transformed BJP, PiS, and Fidesz, today’s Republican Party represents a sharp break from its own recent past. As American parties have often done, it underwent a profound metamorphosis. It is now distinct from its Reagan-era incarnation.

To be sure, there are continuities between Trump’s race-baiting rhetoric and the Republican Southern Strategy of the 1970s and 1980s. But Trump was a political outsider in 2016 who broke from – and then simply broke – the party establishment. The 2024 Republican National Convention showcased a personalist party fundamentally different from the GOP of 2008 or 2012.

As with Fidesz, PiS, and the BJP, MAGA was a novice movement in 2016. It plainly didn’t know how to operate the levers of government effectively, and faced pushback on all fronts as a consequence. If given another chance, though, it would have the benefit of experience. Beyond Trump, allied institutions, such as the Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025 blueprint, are far more prepared than they were in January 2017.

Moreover, like Fidesz, PiS, and the BJP, electoral defeat has not mellowed the Republican temperament. The Republican rank-and-file continue to reward down-ballot candidates who share Trump’s anti-democratic beliefs, and who will join him in refusing to recognize defeat in a fair election. The movement’s admiration for Orbán is emblematic of this trend. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, right-wing luminaries like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, and the Conservative Political Action Conference (which convened in Budapest in 2022) all hail Orbán as the vanguard for an insurgent global illiberalism.

The Republican Party has already advanced a long way down the path taken in Hungary, Poland, and India. Whatever Trump’s personal limitations, he now leads a movement with ample talent and experience. Having learned from that experience, and from similar movements elsewhere, another Trump administration would be far more effective at wielding – and maintaining – power.

WASHINGTON, DC – In the prologue of his new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari writes: “We should not assume delusional networks are doomed to failure.” The implications for the United States in the run-up to its presidential election should be clear. After all, the authoritarian “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement – of which the Republican Party is now just the political wing – is nothing if not delusional, and a second term in office for its leader, Donald Trump, would be catastrophic.

And yet the race is neck and neck: polls place support for Trump at about 50% – an alarming result, given Trump’s penchant for extreme, offensive, off-the-wall, and outright dangerous rhetoric. It is a testament to the MAGA delusion’s intoxicating power that half of American voters apparently genuinely believe that Trump is better suited to lead the US than his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump’s supporters might not all give the same reason for backing him, but they do have one thing in common: the constant and sustained inhalation of highly addictive right-wing propaganda. These voters have been bombarded with Trump’s toxic rhetoric for a decade, but that is just the latest phase in a much longer process. Americans heard the late Rush Limbaugh’s vitriol for a half-century, and they have been watching Fox News’s monotone stable of talking heads spew lies and stoke division for nearly 30 years.

For the Republicans who reaped the rewards – including the kinds of establishment figures whom Trump now derides as “Republicans in name only” (RINOs) – the hypocrisy of the propagandists never mattered much. Limbaugh could have Elton John perform at one of his many weddings, even as he railed against what would come to be called “woke” culture. The important thing was keeping the conservative base in line, fired up, and ready to act on a moment’s notice against the monolithic, irredeemably malevolent enemy that was “the left.”

On radios and television screens, conservative pundits railed against “big government” and “tax-and-spend liberals.” If Republicans were the ones expanding the federal government’s powers or blowing up the deficit by slashing government revenues through tax cuts, no matter. Endlessly tarring Democrats as socialists, communists, Marxists, or whatever other scary epithet was in vogue kept the public from noticing the incongruity.

Discrediting authoritative sources of information helped. When the then-political consultant Roger Ailes – a former acolyte of Ronald Reagan – first convinced the media mogul Rupert Murdoch to launch the conservative media network that would become Fox News, he immediately tacked on the slogan “Fair and Balanced.” The implication was clear: “mainstream” media was biased, if not merely a house organ of the Democratic Party. (Fox News dropped the slogan in 2017, after Ailes was fired in the wake of a sexual-harassment scandal.)

Unfortunately for establishment Republicans, the monster has now slipped its bonds. In Trump, the “conservative” movement found a vehicle and a bullhorn for its basest instincts, and in conservative media, Trump found a permanent pulpit. Soon after he descended that “golden” escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and announced his presidential candidacy, the very figures who had spent decades nurturing and benefiting from right-wing media found themselves being criticized, scorned, and insulted by a swaggering Trump before enraptured crowds.

Trump won the 2016 election by taking over America’s information ecosystem. He and the MAGA politicians who rose in his wake to challenge the RINOs got practically unlimited airtime on the right-wing networks. However unhinged his rhetoric or bizarre his antics, he was treated as normal and even celebrated for his “candor.”

But conservative media was not alone in keeping the public’s attention trained on Trump. Applying that most basic principle of news reporting – if it bleeds, it leads – legacy media reported constantly on the political bloodletting of Trump and his MAGA movement. As then-CBS Chair Les Moonves cynically put it in 2016, Trump’s political career “may not be good for America,” but giving him airtime is “damn good” for media companies.

The left, for its part, has proved incapable of replicating right-wing media’s success. While there have been some attempts – such as Air America, which went bankrupt in 2010 – liberal and Democratic outlets appear to be too uptight and elitist to create effective counterprogramming. They lack the right’s craven willingness to use any means necessary to push its agenda. In any case, the US is not exactly a hotbed of progressive thought.

The lack of competition from left-leaning outlets – except, perhaps, MSNBC – means that the right-wing media machine can get away with pushing even ideas and policies that are unpopular with the American public. From an electoral perspective, the propagandists have already succeeded in delegitimizing the Democratic Party for about half of voters; even those who are willing to give Democrats a chance seem to watch for any misstep that might validate decades of Republican fearmongering.

We will soon find out whether this will be enough to put Trump in the White House a second time. If voters reject him, they will have bought the US time – but not much. Over the next four years, the MAGA media monster will grow louder, uglier, and more unwieldy, flooding America’s living rooms with relentless attacks on President Harris.

Harari concludes his reflection on delusional networks by noting that preventing them from winning requires us to “do the hard work ourselves.” If Harris triumphs on November 5, it will be up to all of us to ensure that we don’t find ourselves back here, yet again, in 2028.