And if it's not Trump, it will be someone just as systemically bad, someone to head a party doing its damnedest to lock in minority rule, white power, and corporate privilege. Trump winning another term as president would be awful, but pretty much any Republican in the Oval Office would be just as awful. McConnell might oppose Trump personally, but he stands for everything despicable the Republican Party stands for.

Extremist gerrymandering and voting restrictions promise to hand national control to the Republican Party for the foreseeable future, even as state and local control remain defacto certainties in many areas, like my own state of Michigan where Republicans are nothing like a majority of the population.

We are experiencing as a nation a crisis of democracy like has not been seen in many decades, perhaps not since the Civil War. Trump, whether he wins or not in 2024, is a symptom of that crisis.

If we had a functional democracy, the Democratic Party would be able to advance popular legislation through Congress, and Trump would never have won in 2016.