The Stakes for Democracy in the Harris-Trump Matchup

President Joe Biden and his anointed successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, have sought to lay them out in stark, simple terms. The election, Harris said at her rollout event as a presidential candidate on July 23, is “about two different visions for our nation: one where we are focused on the future, the other focused on the past.” Biden, in a speech from the Oval Office a day later, sounded the same theme: “America is going to have to choose between moving forward or backward.”

These are, on the surface, fairly banal words, seemingly anodyne sentiments typical of presidential campaign rhetoric. Yet, in the present context, they are terrifyingly true. They are freighted with historic implications that could make this the most consequential election—for both the United States and the world—in U.S. history, historians and political experts say.

Why? Because the 2024 election is in large part about a candidate and the political party that he now controls—Donald Trump and the Republican Party—who want to move the country decidedly backward in time and who seek a return to an America and a world that no longer exist.

The imagined world of “Make America Great Again”—Trump’s enduring campaign theme—seeks to roll back a century’s worth of recognition and rights to the many Americans who are not white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender. It is a world that intends to curtail a half-century’s worth of reproductive rights granted to women. It is a movement that aims to undo the progressive era dating back to the New Deal—which raised the status of the working class—and return to a kind of gilded age for billionaires, with an economic policy based on corporate tax cuts and tariffs. Finally, in foreign policy, this pseudo-nostalgic vision welcomes a return to the quasi-isolationism embraced by the Founding Fathers and seeks a full retreat from America’s post-World War II role as globo-cop, or enforcer of last resort for global security.

All this is what the “Again” in Make America Great Again, or MAGA, really means, said Joseph Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian. For Trump’s huge MAGA political base, “the promised land lies somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century, when white male supremacy was still the presumed natural order,” Ellis wrote in an email. “That means before Brown v. Board of Education integrated public education; before Martin Luther King had his dream; before Roe v. Wade gave women control of their bodies; before the Voting Rights Act; and, most symbolically, before an African American occupied the White House.” When it comes to America’s role in the world, MAGA means “going back sometime before 1940,” when isolationism dominated U.S. policy, Ellis said.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that for Harris’s campaign, the rallying cry has become, “We’re not going back!”

For Trump and the Republicans, the way to achieve this broad retrograde vision—to undo nearly a century’s worth of progress—is by taking power in the White House and both houses of Congress. And the only way to do that, in turn, is through the massive disenfranchisement of broad swaths of the fastest-growing portions of the U.S. population, such as Black and Hispanic people and especially immigrants. Thus, in the end, the “existential threat to democracy” that Harris, Biden, and the Democrats are warning of is not hyperbole but rather what Trump and his supporters are actually pushing for, Ellis said. They seek to achieve this by all but halting immigration, curtailing voting rights for minorities, gerrymandering their shrinking white majority into a dominant position in as many legislative districts as they can, and asserting unlimited and unchecked power for the presidency.

The brutal fact, Ellis said in an interview, is that U.S. democracy is no longer working for the Republican Party as it’s currently constituted—and probably never will again given demographic trends. “By the year 2045 [white people] will become a statistical minority,” he said, citing U.S. Census Bureau projections. “The Trump believers actually want to see democracy end, because it has come to mean white male supremacy will end.”

Trump has long denied he is a racist, but it’s undeniable that his rise to national political prominence in the last decade—culminating in his 2016 election as president—has been fueled by dog whistling to white supremacists. In late July, after Trump suggested to a stunned audience at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention in Chicago that Harris, who is Black and South Asian, had “turned Black” for political purposes, commentators recalled similar attacks of his in the past. Indeed, Trump’s political career was effectively built on his false, racist “birther” claim that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. After repeating this baseless lie for a year, Trump went from nowhere in the polls to utter dominance of the Republican Party in 2016. Trump has also openly challenged the validity of the U.S. Constitution.

Trump’s supporters have been quite forthright about their back-to-the-future mindset. Trump has rhetorically disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025—a massive new Republican agenda—but it was designed by some key officials from his presidency. These include Russell Vought, the policy director for the Republican National Convention’s platform committee who is said to be in line to be Trump’s next chief of staff. Several of these operatives told me in interviews last year that they want to roll back a century of left-wing encroachment on Washington, decimating what they view as a federal bureaucracy dominated by Black people and other minorities. They aim to reverse what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast permanent bureaucracy—the “deep state” Trump sees as his primary enemy—under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. As Heritage President Kevin Roberts put it to me in an interview: “It’s like doing open-heart surgery on the administrative state. That’s the part that’s never been done before.”

And they want to give the president near-dictatorial powers to accomplish this, including personal control of the Justice Department so he can prosecute his political adversaries.

In an interview in September 2023, Vought told me that the key difference from the first Trump administration is that this time, they’re prepared. With a detailed action plan in place—and with heretics to his MAGA movement slated to be purged from government to an unprecedented degree—Trump may be able to achieve far more than in his first term, when he was stymied by his own cabinet and that obstructive deep state. “We are preparing to be ready on day one,” Vought said. “Whatever is necessary to seize control of the administrative state is really our task.”

In this, the Trumpers could be helped along by a conservative-dominated Supreme Court. In a monumental ruling in July, the court effectively gave the twice-impeached president near-total immunity for most criminal acts he might commit in office were he to return to power. Delivering a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that “the President is now a king above the law” and could be immune even from ordering the assassination of political rivals.

“What’s so strange about that Supreme Court decision is that it actually creates a space where the president doesn’t need to do anything anymore to justify his actions,” said Edward Watts, a historian at the University of California, San Diego. “For example, you don’t need to create a state of emergency to assassinate your rival.” In ancient Rome, Watts said, “even the most tyrannical emperors had to create justification for killing people.”

When it comes to America’s place in the world, these plans also mean withdrawing—at least to some degree—from the rules-based international system. And it’s important to note that for many Americans, some of these views have real appeal, especially the idea that the United States needs to shuffle off its globo-cop role, which has allowed European and Asia nations to free-ride under the U.S. defense umbrella.

Even many mainstream academics welcome his more realist approach to NATO and the Russia-Ukraine war, though they have little use for Trump himself. (Trump has promised to end the war quickly, and he has suggested that he will throw out previous Western promises to bring Ukraine into NATO.) Many experts are wary that Biden and Harris, who embody the postwar internationalist consensus, are now in danger of sucking the United States into wars on three major fronts, pledging all at once to defend Ukraine against Russia “no matter what,” in Biden’s words; Israel against Hamas and Iran; and Taiwan against China.

Trump officials like to note that his more inward-looking approach goes back to George Washington himself, who warned Americans in his farewell address as president “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and to maintain their “detached and distant situation” behind protective oceans.

Trump takes his place for the family photo at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7, 2017. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

What would such a shift mean in practice? Based on the reporting I’ve done in recent months, a second Trump administration would probably not simply pull out of NATO, as the former president has repeatedly suggested he might do. As Robert O’Brien, a former Trump national security advisor, wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs cover article titled “The Return of Peace Through Strength,” a second Trump administration would still value alliances. “‘America first is not America alone’ is a mantra often repeated by Trump administration officials,” O’Brien wrote. But a second Trump administration would also make so many demands of Europe to take over the lion’s share of NATO defenses that a major—and perhaps permanent—rupture in the trans-Atlantic relationship is much more likely.

That would only continue a trend by which U.S. allies have come to realize that they can no longer rely on a superpower so unstable and internally polarized. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder told me, echoing many other policy experts, that contest would be the most important in U.S. history—at least since the Civil War. Trump’s reelection would be tantamount, Daalder said, to a formal divorce from Europe and the West.

That’s doubly true this time around, Daalder says now. “If 2020 was the most important election since 1860, 2024 is the most important since 2020,” Daalder said in an interview. “The fact that [Trump] picked J.D. Vance [as his running mate], whose foreign policy is more nationalist and isolationist even than Trump’s, speaks volumes to the fact that this will be an administration in which there won’t be anybody who adheres to the old framework that has guided American policy since 1941. You combine that with his anti-democratic tendencies—it’s clear this could be more dangerous than last time.”

Other foreign-policy experts agree. In fact, said Jonah Blank, a foreign affairs scholar who once worked on Biden’s Senate staff, “this is a more important election than 2020 because now we know more about what we’re getting. In his first term, the Trump-inspired insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was yet to happen; the Supreme Court hadn’t yet ruled on immunity.” Except for Jan. 6, Blank said, “just looking at what he’s said and done since then is more disturbing than anything he did in office.”

Joseph S. Nye Jr., who is one of the most respected foreign affairs specialists in the United States (Read his letter to the next president in the Fall 2024 print issue here.), had a similar prediction when I interviewed him in 2020. If Trump continued to threaten to retake power, Nye said, then U.S. allies, especially in Europe, would eventually throw their hands up at the unpredictability of U.S. politics. He foresees grimmer tidings now.

“Selling out Ukraine will strengthen [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and weaken the credibility of NATO,” Nye wrote in an email. “Withdrawing troops in [South] Korea or Japan will have a destabilizing effect on East Asia. And withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord again will weaken international institutions, efforts to combat climate change, and hurt America’s soft power. Add to this high tariffs and a trade war with our partners and you have a mess that could be transformative. And we will not have the moderating influence of traditional Republican appointees as we did in the earlier term.”

One saving grace could be that Europeans—weakened economically vis-à-vis the United States and threatened more than at any other time in the postwar period by both Russia and China under President Xi Jinping—will have little choice in the end but to side with Washington, Trump or no Trump.

“It will damage their trust in us, but as long as Putin and Xi remain in power, Trump’s return will not destroy the alliances at their end,” Nye said.

Another possible source of relief is that Trump has repeatedly said he would avoid getting the United States into a war. Indeed, one of his chief complaints against Biden is that, as Trump said during their ill-fated June 27 debate, “he will drive us into World War III” because of his aggressive stance against Russia. Some national security experts agree that at a moment when the Biden administration has painted itself into a corner by fully backing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s quixotic aim of driving out the Russians altogether—thus effectively delegating U.S. strategy to Zelensky—Trump would at least bring a fresh approach. “One thing he’ll do is de-stigmatize the idea that there could be negotiations,” said Stephen Wertheim, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the 2020 book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.

Even critics such as Ellis say that on this issue, Trump may have “a point that has an enormous amount of resonance in the American population right now. We can’t be the savior for the world.”

At the same time, however, a second President Trump would likely dramatically escalate tensions with China. While the Biden administration has pursued a policy of countering China without quite “containing” it—maintaining Trump’s tariff war while building new security structures, such the AUKUS partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—a second Trump administration would more openly embrace the idea that the United States is engaged in a new cold war with China. “As China seeks to undermine American economic and military strength, Washington should return the favor—just as it did during the Cold War, when it worked to weaken the Soviet economy,” O’Brien wrote in his recent essay.

This would involve a dramatic escalation of the trade war and more than Biden’s “de-risking”—a full decoupling of the two economies. “Now is the time to press even further, with a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods, as Trump has advocated, and tougher export controls on any technology that might be of use to China,” added O’Brien, who also called for a crash military program to arm other nations, even Communist-led Vietnam, against China.

“The [Navy] should also move one of its aircraft carriers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the Pentagon should consider deploying the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific, relieving it in particular of missions in the Middle East and North Africa,” he wrote. O’Brien contended that such moves would increase deterrence, preventing war, but a more forward-based U.S. posture could also increase the odds of a direct military conflict between Washington and Beijing.

A big problem in divining what Trump would do in a second term is that his view of America’s role in the world remains mostly incoherent, Wertheim said. “He’s saying, ‘On one hand, I want to dominate the world and when there’s crisis almost anywhere that reflects badly on the U.S., I personally will put a stop to it. But on the other hand, I could take or leave most American alliances.’”

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a rally in Milwaukee on Aug. 20. Dominic Gwinn/AFP via Getty Images

In her speeches as vice president—which have been little noted until now—Harris has repeatedly sounded one theme: Any form of U.S. isolationism “is dangerous, destabilizing, and indeed shortsighted,” as she said at the 2024 Munich Security Conference. “I firmly believe our commitment to build and sustain alliances has helped America become the most powerful and prosperous country in the world—alliances that have prevented wars, defended freedom, and maintained stability from Europe to the Indo-Pacific. To put all of that at risk would be foolish,” Harris said.

“If she beats Trump, she will already have had a successful presidency in a way,” Blank said. “It will be the first step toward averting a truly existential calamity. The stakes really are that large.”

Perhaps. Certainly that could prove to be the case for the Trumpist threat to U.S. democracy. And if U.S. democracy is destroyed or vitiated, that heightens the threat to democracies around the world.

But it’s also worth noting that on some key issues related to America’s place in the world—trade, immigration, neoprotectionism, and the new “make it in America” embrace of industrial policy that has overtaken both political parties—the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz tickets don’t differ as much as the harsh political rhetoric would sometimes indicate. It’s notable that Trump and Biden were equally eager to pull out of Afghanistan. During their June 27 debate, Trump attacked Biden for the disastrous way the United States left the country in 2021, but it was Trump who laid the groundwork by sidelining the Afghan government and negotiating directly with the Taliban. That all but ensured the ultimate disaster involving a rapid takeover by the Taliban after 20 years of U.S. occupation.

Moreover, whoever inherits the White House next January will be forced by the anti-interventionist mood in the country to avoid putting U.S. boots on the ground anywhere in the world. He or she will face the same titanic diplomatic challenges—both in Ukraine and in the Middle East—and will be leery of getting pulled into any further foreign crises. He or she will be equally forced to maintain U.S. deterrence in Europe and Asia—and to face down Putin and Xi, who have more or less joined together to try to eclipse U.S. hegemony.

All of which suggests that the forces of inertia—or the status quo ante—may prove stronger than people think.

“Betting on inertia in U.S. foreign policy is a very good bet,” Wertheim said. “It’s really, really hard to change U.S. foreign policy in a big way.”

So, yes, the stakes of the 2024 election are big indeed. It’s just that we don’t know yet how big they will be.