If the 2024 presidential election were held today, Donald J. Trump would win it. He would not have to sic his followers on Congress again, nor would he need to rely on his followers in Congress to approve false electors, or tamper in any way with the certification of the vote. He would win outright.
I arrived at Radiance Church in Commerce City shortly before noon on Tuesday and took up a parking space in the thin band of midday shade cast by the trees at the small parking lot’s far edge. I was nervous in a way I had not expected to be. I have handled plenty of hostile interviews as a reporter, and even enjoyed them from time to time, but this was different.
If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the third act it absolutely must go off,” reads one of the many versions of the narrative principle commonly known as “Chekhov’s gun”. Developed by 19th-century Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, Chekhov’s gun was the playwright’s way of insisting that every element in a story must ultimately be necessary; that there can be no insignificant details, and, therefore, that every detail carries a sense of imminence with it. Through my years of studying, analyzing, and working in politics, I have come to believe that a similar principle applies in real life: the details, often unnoticed at the time of their emergence, have a way of coming back and turning the plot like Chekhov’s gun.
Last Thursday, Donald J. Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony counts levied against him by a jury of his peers in a New York courtroom, marking the first time in our 248-year history that a former President of the United States has been held accountable to the law. The exact consequences of that conviction, legally, culturally, and electorally are still unknown – our frayed social contract and crumbling institutions being what they are – but there is always righteousness in holding the mighty to the same standards as the meager.
Ballot initiatives. Referenda. Plebiscites. Whatever you want to call them, they play a major role in Colorado’s political life. We vote on tax increases, pet projects, citizens’ initiatives, legislatively referred initiatives, and anything else under the sun for which a determined enough cadre of organizers can collect a sufficient amount of signatures to place on our ballots. Colorado is not unique in this regard – 26 states have ballot initiative processes – but we are exceptional: between 1912, when the first initiative appeared on a Colorado ballot, and 2023, Colorado has voted on 266 initiatives, the third most of any state, behind Oregon and California.
Everyone enjoys being proven right from time to time. It’s validating, it puts a little spring in your step, and it allows you to redouble your efforts, knowing that you are heading down the right path. But the experience of being proven right is rarely so crisp, or so quick, as the version I was fortunate enough to have last week, which was bestowed upon me by an unexpected source: conservative Christian political consultant Ralph Reed.
Another session of the Colorado General Assembly has concluded in the standard way: with both a bang and a whimper. Laws were made, tears were shed, and minds were frayed, all as life outside the building continued per usual. The legislative session, which consists of a mad dash through the General Assembly’s constitutional requirements in the constitutionally limited timespan of 120 business days, is over.
Taken from the title of the 1944 film Gaslight, the term “gaslighting” has firmly entered the American lexicon over the past several years. The film, an early entrant in the psychological thriller genre, features a husband who works to slowly convince his wife that she is experiencing delusions, convincing her not to trust what she is seeing with her own eyes. It’s from this origin that we arrived at the modern use of the term to describe a form of psychological manipulation in which someone is made to doubt their own senses and sanity. It is a technique most often employed by conmen and abusers. Now, it is being adopted en masse by the Christian nationalist movement in America to defend their political project from hard-earned criticism.
A parallel reality opened up on November 3, 2020, and tens of millions of Americans fell into it. For the past three and a half years, while the rest of us have been attending to the necessities of our daily lives, those in the parallel dimension have been living through an authoritarian nightmare in which American democracy has been supplanted by the rule of an illegitimate impostor president. In their reality, Donald J. Trump won a second term that day – securing victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College tally – only to have it yanked away from him by a cabal of Democrats, global elites, and voting machine companies. In their reality, this is possibly the greatest crime ever committed; it has suspended their liberty, forced them to live under an unelected regime, and left them in doubt as to whether this nation, conceived in liberty, brought forth by our fathers upon this continent, will last.
There’s an uncomfortable reality about the 2024 Presidential election which has received little attention in the media: the best case scenario for Democrats – and for the republic – is a repeat of the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election. Chaos. Conspiracism. Efforts to delegitimize the election. Possibly even a modified repeat of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And I don’t mean that Democrats would benefit from this scenario; I mean it’s the best they can hope for.
