Donald Trump is getting crazy close. Does it matter? Historically speaking, with less than two weeks until the third and likely final Presidential election, Trump has recently talked about Arnold Palmer’s penis size and how Joe Biden likes him more than Kamala Harris. He made off-topic remarks about the history of paperclips and why teleprompters are stupid and possibly dangerous. He suggested that Harris drinks or does drugs, that she “chokes like a dog” on “The View” and that she is a “shit Vice President.” He complained that wind power was killing birds and preventing people from watching television. Amid his own much-criticized ramblings, he insisted: “People say it’s pure genius.”

On Tuesday, longest-serving White House chief of staff John Kelly opened to public Stating that Trump met the definition of “fascist” and confirming reports that Trump openly admired Adolf Hitler, Trump complained that Kelly, a retired four-star general, was a tough guy who “turned into a weakness.” “Over time it became JELLO,” Trump fumed in a social media post; This doesn’t seem like the thing that would make one most angry about being called out for praising Hitler. (He added that Kelly was a “LOW LIFE” who “made up a story.”)

If this had all happened over the summer, perhaps Harris would have responded by mocking Trump’s awkward style and apparent insecurity about his masculinity. He could have laughed his famous laugh and continued to remind voters that the former President was hurling recycled insults from the same old playbook he used in 2016 and 2020. But while the candidates are still deadlocked this close to the election, polls show, the Vice President is in an entirely different mode: “the house is on fire and someone better sound the alarm” mode. On Wednesday, Harris warned in impromptu remarks outside her official residence that Trump was “increasingly unstable and unstable” and quoted Kelly as saying Trump was a fascist. At a CNN town hall that night, which would have been their second debate had Trump not run, Harris described Kelly’s remarks as a “911 call” to the country. When host Anderson Cooper directly asked if she considered Trump a fascist, Harris replied, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”

For years, something kept Harris and Biden from embracing the F-word for Trump. Maybe they thought it was too provocative or ineffective in making a case against Trump. Or perhaps they feared the moment we’re in now, where credible, on-the-record reports of Trump’s admiration for Hitler and plans to dismantle important democratic institutions do little to dissuade Republicans from voting for him. Now that the fascist label is out there, a significant portion of the GOP has predictably perpetuated and normalized it, as they have with all of Trump’s previous outrages. Watch the clip of Chris Sununu, the former moderate Republican governor of New Hampshire, grinning at CNN as he rationalizes Trump’s admiration for Hitler and Nazi generals as something voters “itch”. If Trump wins, we’re sure to see many repeats of this scene: As he begins to implement policies that have led Kelly and others to call him a “fascist,” his defenders will shrug and say, “Well, that’s old news.”

Only one candidate on this year’s ballot is known to have directly compared Trump to the leader of Nazi Germany: he once said in a private text message that Trump was either “a cynical jerk like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler.” It was in 2016, when Vance was another Trump-hating Yale Law School graduate, when American politicians worried about blatantly using the word “fascist” and Hillary Clinton already seemed accepted, because who could have imagined that Trump would actually win? .

For years, we’ve all heard Clinton gossip about her closing message from the 2016 campaign: Clinton was too focused on Trump’s threats to democracy and not enough on his threats to steal working-class voters in the Midwest. The other day, with Harris’ closing message of democracy on fire in mind, I went back and watched a video. Clinton rally From the same week in 2016. One of the key differences was that it was in Ohio; What was then still considered a competitive spot for Democrats is now a Trump stronghold. MAGA people. Otherwise, the scenario could have been from one of Harris’s speeches today, which included lines about stopping the epidemic of gun violence, complaints about Trump’s plan to give tax cuts to wealthy Americans, and a promise to be a “President for all” whether it be or not. You vote for me or against me. The coverage of Clinton’s speech that day in Cleveland was a warning about Trump and what makes him different from previous presidential candidates: his refusal to confirm that he would accept any outcome other than winning. “Make no mistake,” he said, “by doing this he is threatening our democracy.” He said that if he loses, Trump will threaten the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in US history. Of course he was right, four years too early.

Watching Clinton, it was hard not to ask the question: What do you wish you knew that you didn’t know that October? The answer, unfortunately, is not about Trump, it is about America. I remember my own phrase, which I used in the tense weeks before the election, when the widespread belief was that Trump would win because his victory was unthinkable, even though the data suggested it was possible. And I would say: If he wins, it will be the biggest upset in modern polling history, at least since Harry Truman. Technically I wasn’t wrong. But looking back, I couldn’t have been further from that.

Not everyone saw what was coming. Read Robert Kagan’s May 18, 2016 article. washington to mail— a piece about Trump that broke the F-word barrier long before Kelly and Harris. This tells you that eight years ago, we already knew everything we needed to know about Trump, long before he was elected President. My friend Douglas Rediker, who advises companies on geopolitical risk, recently uncovered a note he wrote to clients shortly before the election. He argued that “a close election is heading for Trump” and that by all indications the race is close. His theory was that “if Trump’s lack of qualifications for the presidency isn’t disqualifying by election day, there may be enough anger and frustration for many people to vote against him and the status quo.” “Trump’s victory cannot be ignored in any way,” he warned. As with Clinton’s speech, she could repurpose the memo and send it today.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that foreknowledge of this American tragedy would be anything other than demoralizing. Would you really want to believe that, in the beautiful autumn days in the twilight of Barack Obama’s presidency, nearly half the country will spend the next eight years under the ever-deeper influence of a professional huckster professing their love for him? The world’s worst tyrants and dictators botching the response to a once-in-a-century pandemic and cheering on a violent mob of their followers who ransacked the U.S. Capitol in a vain attempt to overturn the results of an election he lost? It was bad enough going through this.

Today’s urgency is entirely different, as Trump’s threat to attack the institutions of American democracy has turned out to be real, not rhetoric. There was one line in Clinton’s speech that particularly caught my attention: “We know the difference between leadership and dictatorship in our country, right?” How striking that even then he felt compelled to ask this as a question. At least in the fall of 2016, the answer still seemed obvious. The audience was like, yes, absolutely, how could it be any other way? He cheered as if to say. But here we are, eight years later, and the tragedy is that no one can be more sure.