Trump or Kamala – we all need to brace for the coming storm no matter who wins

So, the “October surprise” in the 2024 US presidential election was… that there was no surprise. Eight years ago, the Access Hollywood tape and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager’s hacked emails landed on the same day, 7 October 2016. Back then it still seemed genuinely surprising to find Russians meddling in a US election to try to help a candidate who boasted of grabbing women by the p***y. And for that candidate to go on and win. Those were the days.

This time around, October culminated in a stunt: Donald Trump, dressed in a hi-vis vest, leaning casually out of the window of a giant garbage truck taking questions about Puerto Rico. “Nobody has done more for Puerto Rico than me. I took care of them when they had the big hurricanes,” he said, referring to 2017, when he was president and did the exact opposite, delaying aid after two storms hit the island, reportedly because he saw its population as insufficiently loyal.

Such fact-mangling no longer surprises us. Nor, sadly, does the hyperbolic rhetorical arms race that produced the garbage truck stunt in the first place. It all began with a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York where, during a succession of warm-up acts, a comedian referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”. Then, in a Zoom call with a Latino voter group, President Biden hit back. “The only garbage I see out there is his [Trump’s] supporters,” he said.

Remember when Hillary Clinton said she put half of Trump’s supporters into a “basket of deplorables”? In an election where the outcome will be decided by a wafer-thin margin of still-undecided voters, calling half of the electorate “garbage” seems less than sensible.

The White House, somewhat unconvincingly, clarified that Biden had only meant one supporter – the comedian; Kamala Harris pledged to be a president for all Americans. But the damage was done: “garbage” was the new “deplorables”.

JD Vance, the candidate for vice president, tweeted: “This is disgusting. Kamala Harris and her boss Joe Biden are attacking half of the country.” (Hours earlier Vance had defended the comedian’s “garbage” joke, saying: “We’re not going to restore the greatness of American civilisation if we get offended at every little thing.”)

Meanwhile, over at the Harris-supporting MSNBC, they were running black and white footage of Americans doing Hitler salutes at a pro-Nazi rally that took place in New York in 1939, intoning sombrely that Trump was once again “turning Madison Square Garden into a staging ground for extremism.”

After all, didn’t his own former chief of staff call him a fascist? Had not Trump himself talked about using the military to go after the “enemy within” – the people he called Marxists and communists – led by Harris?

This is where we’ve ended up, days away from what might be the most consequential election in America’s history, one in which the very survival of its democracy is said to be at stake: if the candidates themselves are to be believed, the choice is between fascists and Marxists, between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Neither sounds very democratic.

In the few days remaining before polling day, perhaps there’s still time to sit down and breathe into a paper bag. The good news is, Trump is about as much of a Nazi as Harris is a Marxist. The language of 1930s Germany may be useful for riling up a crowd, but it is ill-suited to trying to understand the complex dynamics of America in 2024.

This is not to say that the choice in Tuesday’s election isn’t stark. It is, and the outcome may have far-reaching consequences. On the international stage, Trump has pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord (again); his promise to end Russia’s war in Ukraine looks like it would involve pressuring Kyiv to cede significant chunks of its territory to Moscow – not a great democratic prospect for the people living there.

At home, tens of millions of American women are fearful about further erosion of their rights to seek an abortion, get access to contraception, or even medical treatment for a miscarriage. Gilead, Margaret Attwood’s misogynistic dystopia, seems only just over the horizon.

Then there’s Project 2025, a 922-page blueprint for a second Trump administration drafted by the Heritage Foundation think tank. The Trump campaign has distanced itself from the document, but much of it was drafted by people who served in his first administration and may well serve in a second.

If Trump wins, there is a significant chance he will try to implement some of its proposals. They include dismantling the administrative state, replacing apolitical civil servants with ideological loyalists and placing independent federal agencies such as the Justice Department under direct presidential control. If Trump were able to implement such sweeping changes (there would be considerable judicial, political and institutional hurdles to overcome) then American democracy might indeed start to feel a little wobbly.

If, on the other hand, Trump loses, will he concede? Trump continues to assert that the 2020 election was stolen. Tens of millions of Americans believe him. The fact that there’s no credible evidence for such an assertion does not make their belief less powerful. If he doesn’t concede this time around, his supporters may conclude that democracy is already dead and take matters into their own hands. That is clearly dangerous.

Which of the two possible outcomes in Tuesday’s election is more likely to result in the survival of America’s current system of democracy? The threat in each case seems palpable. But remember: American democracy has already had one Trump presidency and lived to tell the tale.

The United States is a complex and mature republic, with public institutions and private interests whose power far outstrips that of Trump, even the power of the Oval Office.

There is one challenge both sides agree on: that the single biggest threat to American power and prosperity is China.

In fact, both sides broadly agree that the key to defeating the threat from China is good old American dynamism – the combination of innovation, capital and drive that made the United States the pre-eminent force of the 20th century. That dynamism has fallen back in recent decades. Where the two sides differ – starkly – is how to reinvigorate it.

The Democrats, broadly, believe that state power, the power of the US federal government, is the instrument that can best marshal the forces of private capital, public spending and innovation to face off the threat. The faction that is currently ascendant in the Republican Party, however, believes that the federal government is sclerotic, beset by corruption, vested interests and incompetence.

Among Maga supporters, this belief often manifests itself as conspiracy theories. QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy theory about a cabal of satanic paedophiles secretly running America helped drive the mob into the capitol on 6 January 2021. Three years on from that event, a poll found that more than 40 per cent of Americans believe that behind the scenes of government, hidden hands are pulling the strings.

As polling day approaches, prominent figures in the Trump campaign have been actively promoting such conspiracy theories.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has poured more than $100m (£77m) into the Trump campaign. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania (a key swing state), he mused: “It would be interesting to see the crossover between the Epstein client list and Kamala’s puppet masters.”

Who knows whether Musk really believes this nonsense? But we do know that, if he wins, Trump has asked Musk to head a “Department of Government Efficiency”. Musk believes in SpaceX over Nasa: that private enterprise is more suited to reinvigorating American dynamism.

The drive towards greater corporate power (in a country where corporate power is already strong) would seem to point towards less power for voters and their democratically elected representatives. In that sense, the prospect of a second Trump presidency would indeed seem to represent a challenge to democracy.

But American democracy is in many ways already captured by big corporate money. And in the face of the threat by the Republicans to dismantle America’s administrative institutions, the Democrats have become the party of the status quo.

The question is whether the status quo is working; whether it is fit for purpose, whether it is equal to the challenge of keeping the American dream alive.

Gabriel Gatehouse presents ‘The Coming Storm’ on Radio 4. His book ‘The Coming Storm: A Journey into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machin’ is out now, published by Penguin