If there was ever a point of agreement between supporters of President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election cycle, it was on this item: The contest’s stakes were impossibly high.
An Echelon Insights survey conducted on the eve of Election Day found that 78% of soon-to-be Trump voters and 82% of soon-to-be Harris voters believed that they faced “an existential decision for the country,” and that it would be “irreparably harmed if the wrong candidate wins.” Of course, the refrain that this is the most important election of our lifetimes is a familiar one to Americans. It’s been insisted upon every four years since time immemorial.
But what if, this time, both sides were right to be so fearful of the other?
Consider only the events of the last few months. The final days of 2025 saw renewed attention on a massive scandal perfectly calibrated to bolster the Republican and tarnish the Democratic brand. In Minnesota, culprits mostly of Somali descent had defrauded taxpayers out of billions by setting up fake daycare, meal distribution, autism therapy centers, and numerous other fronts.
A blue state whose governor appeared on the Democratic presidential ticket had negligently allowed its welfare system to be ripped off by an immigrant group that has had some difficulty assimilating. It was the stuff of right-wing fantasy and Republican political operatives’ dreams.
Uncontent with the bird in hand, Trump and his top lieutenants sought to stretch a double into a complete trip around the base path. On Dec. 4, his administration introduced “Operation Metro Surge,” a full-court press on immigration enforcement by publishing the names of various criminal aliens that ICE agents apprehended in the Minneapolis area. The group included child sex offenders, domestic abusers, and violent gang members. Perhaps they had succeeded in turning the Gopher State’s blunders into a triple.
In early January, though, the Department of Homeland Security stumbled on the way toward home plate when it announced an expansion of Metro Surge that would see somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 federal agents deployed to Minnesota as part of “the largest DHS operation ever.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, characteristically clad in a tactical vest, showed up to christen the shock-and-awe campaign herself.
Just a few days later, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed after she drove her SUV toward and made contact with an ICE agent while fleeing the scene of where she had been blocking the street with the vehicle. A few weeks after that, Alex Pretti died after being shot repeatedly in an altercation during which he had already been disarmed. Both tragedies could be chalked up to far more than the errors of those on scene.
Central to Trump’s improbable political comeback was his promise to reimpose order at the southern border and deport the “worst of the worst” to enter the country illegally during his wilderness years. Already, he’s accomplished as much with gusto.
On the advice of bad actors, though, he’s gone further still. Instead of going about her job in a focused, workman-like manner, Noem, with the encouragement and help of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, have used Trump’s mandate as an excuse to play army. Instead of sticking to the kind of targeted operations favored by career professionals like border czar Tom Homan, Noem & Co. have opted for shows of force in the form of massive, indiscriminate round-ups, militarized aesthetics (often modeled by the secretary herself), and gleeful mockery of their political opponents.
The decision to turn the difficult, often dangerous, and sometimes controversial work of immigration enforcement into a public spectacle came to a head, of course, in Minneapolis with the deaths of Good and Pretti amid widespread clashes between authorities and protesters. Dispatching thousands of agents into an urban area filled with hostile civilian demonstrators was, as it turned out, a prudential error of epic proportions.
The Minneapolis tinder box was tended to by not just Trump’s deputies, but his enemies as well. Democrats’ reckless rhetoric — which villainized federal agents as cartoonish, black-hearted henchmen, and fetishized a “protest culture” that includes destructive, condemnable, and often illegal behavior — also contributed to the chaos and bloodshed that have rattled the country to its core. Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) deemed ICE a “modern-day Gestapo” last May, and after recent chaos in the Twin Cities, suggested that somewhere in his state, a new Anne Frank story was playing out in front of the entire world.
It should come as no surprise that the cavalier deployment of Nazi comparisons has inspired a startling increase in violence against federal agents, up to and including domestic terrorist attacks of the kind perpetrated in McAllen and Alvarado, Texas, last July. Just as it should come as no surprise that the violence has led to Minneapolis’s powder keg atmosphere — the kind more likely to produce tense, and even deadly, confrontations and mistakes on the part of agents and protesters alike.
All of this was foreseeable, all of it was preventable, but America’s political class is no longer constrained by its conscience. It’s all id, all the way down.
The bloodshed in Minnesota did not announce this development, though it did put it on a more readily apparent, visceral display.
Early symptoms of discernment’s subordination to impulse could be detected during Barack Obama’s administration, which dragged the Little Sisters of the Poor into court in a downright dystopian effort to compel them to cover their employees’ contraception; implemented Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals despite having acknowledged his constitutional obligation not to; circumvented another such responsibility by failing to treat the Iran nuclear deal as the treaty it was; and poured fuel on the fire of the Ferguson race riots, only for his own Department of Justice to later clear Officer Darren Wilson and debunk the often-repeated lie that Wilson had shot Brown while the latter held his hands above head head in surrender. In each case, the former president placed political expediency above patriotic prudence.
Trump was even less sober in word and deed than his predecessor during his first stint in the Oval, as its end proved. On the evening of Jan. 6, 2021, Congress gathered to certify his defeat many hours after it was supposed to because its first attempt at carrying out its constitutional duty was interrupted by an angry mob persuaded by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Even as it breached the Capitol, many parts of its whole chanting, “hang Mike Pence” in a call for the summary execution of his right-hand man, the president egged them on.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” he declared in a particularly galling tweet that afternoon.
Trump’s octogenarian successor, a nearly five-decade veteran of Washington, campaigned on a promise to return the country to some semblance of normalcy. Instead, President Joe Biden spent the twilight (and apex) of his career pouring gasoline on the fire he had vowed to put out.
Rather than reassuring Americans that their electoral system was secure, Biden pushed a conspiracy theory of his own: that red states had revived “Jim Crow” by implementing supremely popular voter ID laws. Then he proposed a sweeping, federal takeover of the system to solve this nonexistent problem, castigating opponents of his plan as modern-day slavers and segregationists along the way.
His Department of Justice made a point of pursuing tenuous cases against pro-life activists and attempted to resume his old boss’s war against the Little Sisters of the Poor, as well as trying to score political points by suggesting that a common sense coalition of parents pushing back against woke excesses in schools were representative of a new wave of domestic terrorism. Sound familiar?
DOJ’s prosecution of Trump himself — which came via a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland after Biden conveyed his frustration with Garland’s inaction on that front in a leak to the New York Times — was yet another massive error in judgment. Whatever Trump was or was not guilty of, Biden and his allies’ decision to mount a massive investigation into him could not have been more ill-advised. Americans perceived the prosecution of Trump not as a symbol of Biden’s commitment to the rule of law, but as an attempt to take his chief political rival off the board.
The rest is history. Biden didn’t head off Trump’s political comeback; he supercharged it. And he confirmed his countrymen’s suspicions about his motivations on the way out the door by offering blanket pardons to his entire family, including his corrupt, criminal son, Hunter.
Trump took the torch back from Biden and kept running. On his first day back at the White House, he pardoned the Jan. 6 rioters who had committed crimes, including violent ones, on his behalf.
It was a harbinger of things to come. In the year that followed, not only was blind loyalty rewarded, but vengeance was sought. Flimsy cases were floated or brought against a small army of Trump’s detractors, including John Bolton, Letitia James, James Comey, Lisa Cook, and Jerome Powell. And Minnesota was only the most politically sensitive example of the administration asking only if it wanted to and could do something, not whether it ought to.
What’s notable about all of this are not the policy missteps and political miscalculations, but the coalescing bipartisan consensus that anything goes.
And contrary to what the media might report and celebrities might claim, America didn’t come off the rails over the course of the last 12 months, when Trump took his first oath of office, or even when he first descended the golden escalator to introduce himself as a candidate for president. No, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the tracks began to loosen, even if it’s easy to say why.
Those in power began to make decisions with a total disregard for the long-term health of the country, instead pursuing the short-term pleasures of rewarding friends, punishing enemies, ignoring inconvenient facts, and telling convenient lies. Over time, the rewards got more appealing, the punishments more appalling, and the well of shared truth smaller until it was infinitesimal. And rather than dissuading both parties from continuing down this path, the cascading series of resulting grievances has only encouraged them further.
So yes, Americans were right to fear the consequences of the 2024 election more than any one before it. But even without Trump on the ballot, they have every reason to fear the consequences of the next one more.
Isaac Schorr is an editor at Mediaite.