Will Democracy Survive Another Trump Win?

“Don’t you want a president who’s going to make America healthy again?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked a roaring crowd, during Sunday’s triumphal rally in support of Trump at Madison Square Garden. When Kennedy, the country’s most famous anti-vaccine activist, suspended his campaign to endorse Donald Trump, it not only represented the death of his presidential aspirations, but the dawn of something new: the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement, a tidy bit of sloganeering designed to highlight where Trump and Kennedy’s agendas overlap.

Cynthia Hawkins and Bill Christopher both depict themselves as moderates whose vote preferences this year are being steered, at least in part, by worries over immigration. But it’s not driving their votes the same way. Instead, their shared concerns about the sheer number of new arrivals to the country in recent years, along with the resulting strains on local budgets and services, are cleaved by the incendiary rhetoric surrounding one of the most divisive issues at play in the November election. Immigration policy and border security have proven to be key issues, both for candidates and the electorate — and especially those on the conservative side of the political spectrum.

Immigration — who’s coming to the country, how they arrive here and what it means for the nation’s identity — has long been a top concern for many voters. The Voter Voices survey conducted this year by more than two dozen Colorado media outlets, including The Denver Post, shows it remains so among large groups of Coloradans, and especially for self-identified conservatives.

Donald Trump may be a known quantity. He’s been a public figure for decades, a television star, and president from 2017-2021. But a second Trump term would present something the United States has never experienced before. Not a would-be authoritarian in the White House—that was Trump’s first term—but a would-be authoritarian who could actually accomplish the task of transforming the federal government into a tool of political repression. Trump is promising to do things in a second term that he didn’t get close to achieving in his first: rounding up, detaining, and deporting millions of immigrants, using the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies, and deploying the military against Americans he’s identified as “the enemy from within.” “Usually, it’s worse.” It’s an agenda much bolder and much more authoritarian than what he accomplished in his first term, when low points included a ban on people from certain Muslim countries from entering the US, family separation at the border with children held for weeks in cells, withholding weapons from Ukraine in an attempt to get dirt on his political opponent (the reason for his first impeachment), and a bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the evening of January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to, ostensibly, “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals.” It was among a slew of presidential actions announced in those first days of the administration aimed at rolling back the agenda of his predecessor, from defunding sanctuary cities to tearing down the Affordable Care Act.

Content warning: The story discusses childhood sexual abuse. In Polk County, Florida, where its sheriff has said his department will “go to the ends of the earth” to arrest child predators, one child victim was left wondering how she ended up on the other side of the law. Taylor Cadle was 12 years old when she disclosed to a trusted adult that her adoptive father had been sexually abusing her since she was 9.