I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like it’s been the 2024 election forever—or at least since 2022. The past year and a half has been such an exhausting series of emotional ups and downs for those of us who worry about the fate of democracy, so it’s understandable why anyone would want to ignore the news cycle entirely. The cold reality, however, is that the Great Tune-Out is precisely the opposite of what we need in order for democracy to survive. Because if there is one way of sinking Donald Trump’s political prospects, it’s by getting more Americans to appreciate the fact that this year’s forever election could be its last.
Remember the 2022 midterms, which pundit after pundit warned would result in a catastrophic “red wave” that would just about put Democrats out of order? Well, that wave, as we now know, never materialized. Trump’s chosen Senate candidates, from Mehmet Oz to Blake Masters to Herschel Walker, received a walloping electoral beatdown from their opponents. And that happened thanks to the sea of Democratic voters who felt galvanized by the GOP assaults on abortion and democracy—a phenomenon that Joe Biden needs to replicate if he has any hope of being reelected.
The only problem is that this time around, it’s not Trump’s candidates who are on the ballot; it’s Trump. And the former president has a unique ability to make Americans feel incredibly disenchanted with politics. For one thing, ever since the midterms, Americans have watched Trump systematically weasel nearly every trial and indictment that they ever hoped might hold him accountable. It also doesn’t help that the Supreme Court has thrown him lifeline after lifeline: In March, for instance, it decided that, despite Trump’s incitement of an insurrection, states could not block him from appearing on the primary ballot. More recently, some high court justices also indicated, in all their wisdom, that presidents should receive some level of immunity for alleged crimes, with inane hypotheticals posed by Trump superfans Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Both of these cases show pretty clearly that the conservative-led court is very much in the tank for its guy—hardly a comforting thought for those of us who were hoping that America’s juridical guardrails might stop the country from becoming an authoritarian nightmare.
Which brings us back to how we’re all so stressed out: This isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve all been through one Trump administration, during which consuming news was like drinking out of a fire hose—every day, it seemed, another scandal would come galloping out of the White House. Remember when Scott Pruitt, then the head of the EPA, used nearly $3,000 in taxpayer money to buy tactical pants and tactical polos? When Trump said he was interested in buying Greenland? And when he toyed with the idea of firing missiles into Mexico?
All of this, of course, is to say nothing of Trump’s handling of a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic. Growing up, my grandfather used to tell stories about what it was like being a kid during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which vastly expanded America’s awareness of mass sickness and disease. I thought the COVID crisis might also foster a better public understanding of public health—and maybe even an appreciation of how important it is to arrest climate change. WRONG. Republicans instead used the pandemic to put America’s already tenuous relationship with truth and reason on life support.
Recall just a few of Trump’s suggested home remedies, which included “[hitting] the body with a tremendous” ultraviolet light; taking the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which didn’t work; and using horse dewormer ivermectin, which also didn’t work. Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters—many of whom became rabidly anti-vax—got sick from taking his medical advice. In fact, Yale researchers who studied COVID effects in Florida and Ohio found that “excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before.” This is to say that Trump literally killed his own voters—and they seemed not to blame him for it. And if March 2020 wasn’t already traumatic enough for the nation, Trump followed it up with another once-in-a-lifetime event, inciting an insurrection less than a year later.
The postpandemic, post-insurrection political environment is liable to make anyone feel deeply tired and news-avoidant. People, after all, are scared. They remember the ill-conceived mood around the 2016 election, when they were sure that the normal candidate would win, and then they didn’t. Even today, I sometimes get stopped on the street by people wondering if they should set their expectations accordingly. “Is it going to be alright?” they ask, drawing me in closer.
The thing is, I can’t tell you it’s going to be alright, because I really don’t know. I know what Trump promises to do if he gets back in office—and I know that it’s the stuff of nightmares. Trump will expand the executive branch so much as to essentially become king. And while that might make some voters want to close their eyes, shut their ears, and tune politics out of their daily life, the only way we can avoid it is by paying attention so that what happened in 2016 doesn’t happen in 2024.