There Is Only One Issue Left In This Election

Not abortion, or the economy, or climate, or anything else. Just Trump.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

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In the final days of a presidential campaign, the debate can go wildly astray — think of the last-minute controversies over Hillary Clinton’s email or George W. Bush’s drunk driving arrest — or it can be clarified, distilled down to its vital essence. While there’s still time for something stupid to distract everyone, it looks like the 2024 race is being properly focused on a single question. 

For all the important things at stake and the wildly different courses the country could take in the next four years and beyond, there is really only one issue left in this race:

Donald Trump.

That’s it. It’s just him. 

Yes, you can be properly concerned about abortion and climate change and voting rights and workers’ rights and a hundred other things, but at bottom, every voter’s decision comes down to that: Donald Trump, yes or no?

In the last few days, more and more of those who saw Trump up close in his first term are going public to shout, in their own ways, For the love of god, the answer has to be NO. And perhaps most important in terms of focusing the media’s attention, Kamala Harris’s campaign has shifted its emphasis to place Trump’s fascism at the center of her argument. 

Harris has shifted her strategy

Just a few weeks ago, this would have been surprising. While Joe Biden talked a good deal about defending the American system of government from Trump, when Harris became the nominee, the consensus was that high-minded and abstract discussions of democracy should be demoted in favor of what seemed to be more pressing needs, convincing voters that 1) Harris understood their concerns about the cost of living and has plans to bring down housing and grocery prices, and 2) abortion rights have been taken away because of Trump and continue to be threatened.

Harris has not stopped making those arguments, both on the stump and in her advertising (here’s a moving and brutal ad about the consequences of Trump’s successful quest to overturn Roe v. Wade). But now that she has drawn even with Trump (or nearly so) in polling on economic questions, her campaign appears to have concluded that her work there has basically succeeded, and she can place more emphasis on the fact that Trump is unstable, reckless, malevolent, and far more dangerous than he was eight years ago. That’s true not only because he has changed for the worse but because in a second term he will be surrounded by a collection of ghouls who are just as eager to dismantle democracy as he is, with anyone who might display any conscience or commitment to a cause greater than Trump effectively purged. 

While Biden would only say that Trump’s philosophy was “semi-fascism,” Harris is not shying away from the truth; when asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if she considers Trump a fascist, she said, “Yes, I do.” This coming Tuesday, Harris will deliver a speech her campaign is describing as her “closing argument” on the Ellipse in Washington, the very spot from which Trump instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and attempt to overthrow the election he had just lost. She has been campaigning with Liz Cheney and other Republicans not to show that she is an ideological moderate, but to focus attention on Trump and the threat that he poses. 

And now that former general and Trump chief of staff John Kelly has said Trump is a fascist and detailed his former boss’s admiration of Adolf Hitler, while others who worked with Trump — former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, former Secretaries of Defense James Mattis and Mark Esper, former National Security Adviser John Bolton — have made clear what a threat he poses (including his desire to deploy the military against American citizens), Harris is using their words as her primary campaign weapon. As the liberal public opinion organization Blueprint has detailed, “The best-testing closing argument against Trump is one that emphasizes his lack of support from his former cabinet and numerous Republicans.” We can presume that the Harris campaign’s own polling and focus groups have found the same thing, that these third-party validators are the most effective messenger for this message. 

At long last, Trump is all that remains

Trump has always exercised an irresistible gravitational pull, not just demanding our day-to-day attention but forcing all of politics to shape itself in relation to him and what he represents. So perhaps it was inevitable that at the end, this election would just be about him. Whether it might have gone another way, this is where we are. There is only one decision left: Are you voting for Trump and the fascism he would like to impose on the country, or not? 

Your vote may be driven by some other issue, but it is still a vote for or against Trump in his totality. If you say “I’m voting for Trump because I’m mad about inflation,” I’m sorry — you may be mad about inflation, but if inflation makes you vote for fascism, it’s not about inflation anymore. 

The best possible outcome of this election is that only 47 percent or so of those who go to the polls reveal themselves to be either gung-ho for fascism as embodied in the most corrupt, narcissistic, immoral character to have ever prowled the national stage, or at the very least willing to go along with it. I wish I felt more confident in the answer they will give. But that is the only question that remains.