Great campaigns are always about something. The races that stand out in history, the ones that inspire meaningful debates and capture voters’ attention, invariably answer big questions. They focus on grand ideas. They present bold choices with consequential answers.
For months, the 2024 presidential election was unfolding in underwhelming ways. The race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, for example, has featured plenty of candidates, though the top contenders haven’t bothered to present solutions to national challenges, leading to months of conversation about conspiracy theories and dubious claims about electability.
But as 2023 comes to a close, and the election year begins in earnest, the electorate is now confronted with an election that is most certainly about a big question and a bold choice.
Can Donald Trump win the presidency while running on an authoritarian vision?
In recent weeks, as the former president has repeatedly referenced his “dictatorial“ ambitions, some conservative voices — on the pages of National Review and The Wall Street Journal — have argued that the public has nothing to fear, because the GOP frontrunner won’t really create an American autocracy.
The fact that such pieces have even been published reflects an extraordinary public conversation about whether a major party’s likely presidential nominee will follow through on his own rhetoric and abandon his own country’s system of government.
But making matters spectacularly worse is the fact that the candidate himself is not only stepping on his would-be defenders, he’s also abandoning all subtlety. The Washington Post reported:
Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden. His speech at a presidential campaign rally here on Saturday also reprised…
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