More People Trust Trump to Protect Democracy Than Biden

What? I mean, WHAT?!?

There’s an astonishing article in today’s Washington Post entitled “Trump trusted more than Biden on democracy among key swing-state voters.” The poll identified 2,255 voters in the six swing states that Biden won in 2020 who they call “deciders,” the voters most likely to swing the election.

Of the “deciders” interviewed in the poll, “…more of them, 38 percent, trust Trump to handle threats to democracy, than the 29 percent who trust Biden on the issue. Twenty-three percent don’t trust either major party candidate.”

What? I mean, WHAT?!?

As I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last week perusing the right-wing information silos, I feel like I might have some idea of why they might feel this way. When the media you consume continues to falsely tell you that the last election was stolen, that Biden “weaponized” the Justice Department, that up is down and down is up, and when those assertions are supported by others in the same self-reinforcing echo chamber, it’s no wonder that some people would choose to believe that Joe Biden is either too ill-equipped to handle dangers to our democracy from outside actors, or is responsible for threatening democracy from within.

Brent Stirton/Getty Images,

Naturally, the left also has our own “self-reinforcing echo chambers” which the right will claim is the entirety of the mainstream media. It’s not, but it’s naive to suggest that we don’t suffer from the same problem of groupthink.

In the article, 46% of respondents who identified themselves as “locked-in Trump voters” said they believe “Biden would try to be a dictator” in his second term. The article doesn’t define “dictator,” but I think we all have a general sense of what that means. And it involves epaulets. Oddly, though, a lot of MAGA folks seem fine with a dictatorial presidency, so long as the dictator is named Donald Trump.

In fact, according to The Hill, “74% of Republicans say it’s fine for Trump to be dictator for a day.” What if Trump were to say, “You know what? That first day went pretty well. How about we extend to a second?” Would that number fall? I suspect it would not. If allegedly democratic Americans would be fine with a dictator for at least a day, what does that say about who we actually are as a country?

All of it makes me wonder what it is we mean by the word “democracy.” Do we mean our current form of government, a representative democracy in which citizens exercise the right to vote for people who will represent them in the Legislative and Executive branches?

Or do we mean something else? Something like what they’ve got in Hungary or, dare I say… Russia?

Increasingly, I feel like a sub-set of Americans, mostly on the right, has decided that democracy isn’t democratic at all. Elections, they say, are rigged. The media is rigged. The courts, the justice department, everything is rigged to offer the illusion of democracy but that, in fact, the whole rotten system is so corrupted that true democracy is no longer possible. What we call “democracy” is, instead, little better than a shadow play.

Pay no attention to the liar behind the curatin.

I have some sympathy for this point of view. After all, it’s true that special interests play an outsized role in our electoral process. Since Citizens United determined that money is speech, unchecked dark money has flown into our elections, undermining confidence in our system and making candidates evermore beholden to the few deep-pocketed American oligarchs who can fund entire House and Senatorial campaigns on their own. All of that dark money is, indeed, a threat to democracy and I’ve seen no evidence that either candidate is willing to address it.

When it comes to foreign interference, social media has weaponized our First Amendment against us, with endless foreign sock puppet accounts distributing endless amounts of disinformation, much of it originating abroad. As the Mueller Report found, these foreign players are conducting “sweeping and systemic” interference in our elections. Of course, Mueller was only talking about Russia, but it would be naïve to think other countries aren’t doing the same thing, including some of our allies.

Naturally, the biggest threat to American democracy is Donald Trump himself, who has done everything in his power to foment distrust in the electoral system. The examples are too numerous and well-known to list.

Taken together, it’s no wonder that the article reports 61% of respondents rate “threats to democracy” as an “extremely important” issue in the coming election.

As I think about what a second Trump presidency would look like, I’m not concerned with elective democracy suddenly getting chucked out against the White House walls like a bottle of ketchup. I don’t think it would happen like that. But I do think we might see a number of laws that have the cumulative effect of achieving a similar result. All they have to do is depress about ten percent of the Democratic vote and the GOP will have a permanent federal majority. With loyalists replacing career bureaucrats in every federal agency once Project 2025 goes into effect, how hard will it be to accomplish this goal? Might not be very hard at all. If there’s one thing governments know how to do, it’s throw up roadblocks.

These days, it feels like America is squeezing me into some sort of psychic girdle, gradually tightening the pressure on me until I suddenly find myself struggling to breathe. Democracy isn’t supposed to work like that. Democracy is supposed to open the lungs up so that all citizens can make their voices heard.

It's amazing to me that voters trust Trump to do anything, let alone save democracy. The man who promised to be a dictator for a day is the least likely person imaginable to protect the electoral institution, the least likely person to root out foreign interference, the least likely person to encourage the citizenry to trust the mechanics of our electoral system and to explain why it should be trusted. He’s the least likely person to preserve American institutions which have served this nation well for almost two hundred and fifty years.

He is, however, the most likely person to suspend the Constitution, suspend elections, install loyalists into positions for which they are not qualified. He’s the most likely person to do what he falsely accuses the Biden administration of doing – weaponizing the Justice Department against his political rivals. He’s the most likely to strip away rights from the citizenry. He’s also the most likely to sexually assault E. Jean Carroll, but that’s neither her nor there at the moment.

I really do feel a little bit lost these days because I don’t recognize so much of what passes for “truth” in the culture. Obviously, I have a left-leaning bias so maybe I’m just responding to the cognitive dissonance of being presented with alternative views of what I consider “factual.” I try to keep an open mind about what I’m being told by members of “the other side,” but it’s not always easy, and I often feel as if I’m in danger of being gaslit.

One thing I will say is that I am not willing to assume that those on the “opposing side,” are operating in bad-faith. Some are, of course, just as some on the left are. But when it comes to which candidate will better protect American democracy, I’m sorry, but all y’all be fucking craaaaazy.