Democracy’s last Thanksgiving: Experts imagine America in a year if Trump wins the 2024 election

Trump and his allies and acolytes are publicly planning to make him America’s first de facto dictator, which will mean the end of the country’s democracy. Their plans are detailed in such documents and organizations as Agenda 47, Project 2025, and the Red Caesar scenario.

Journalists, pundits, the mainstream political class, other experts, and everyday Americans who follow politics and current events closely assume that the average member of the public does so as well. There are decades of research by political scientists and other experts, however, that shows this to not be true. In reality, most Americans are politically disengaged, lack a sophisticated understanding of political matters, are imagistic and emotional, have a difficult time retaining and understanding complex information, do not pay close attention to elections until they decide to vote, and more generally are civically illiterate. More than half of the American public reads below a sixth-grade level.

In all, the average voter also makes political decisions based on “calculations” and concerns that mainstream professional politics watchers — especially liberals and progressives — would find “irrational.” The 2024 election is less than one year away and, at this early point, Trump is tied with or leading President Biden in the polls. Trump is also ahead of Biden in key “battleground” states as well. Given the Electoral College, voter nullification and voter suppression, gerrymandering and other structural failings in American “democracy” there is a very real and growing probability that Donald Trump will return to power in 2025.

The sum effect is that these discussions and warnings about America’s “democracy crisis” and “fascism” are often ignored or filtered out by large portions of the public as being just more “partisan bickering” and “politics as usual.” Intervening against that dangerous tendency requires making the stakes and implications of Trump’s return to power and the end of American democracy very clear, very direct, and very real for the average person. The mainstream news media and political class have largely failed in that task.

To that point, this may be the last Thanksgiving where the American people will live in a democracy, however flawed and ailing it may be, where their basic Constitutional and other civil rights are relatively secure.

In an attempt to reflect on the meaning of this Thanksgiving in a time of such great troubles, and what this holiday will mean (and what they will be doing) when and if Dictator Trump takes power next year in 2024 and beyond, I reached out to a range of experts who I have spoken with previously for my conversation series here at Salon:

Brynn Tannehill is a journalist and author of “American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy.”

I’m thankful for my loving little family. Our world may be on the verge of burning down, but at least we have each other — that and my wife’s Canadian citizenship.

How will I spend Thanksgiving in the years following a Trump is re-election? In Canada, on the second Monday of October. I suppose we’ll be thankful we got out, because Republicans at both the state and federal level are making it clear that their goal is a future with every trans person either in the closet or detransitioned.

If Trump goes down, the status quo holds for another 4 years. We’ll see if the GOP continues to be just as dedicated to “eradicating transgenderism” in 2028. Based on the core characteristics of fascism, my guess is yes. For the foreseeable future, every general election will be a referendum on whether we should have meaningful elections ever again.

Rick Wilson is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a former leading Republican strategist, and author of two books, “Everything Trump Touches Dies” and “Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump – and Democrats from Themselves”.

This Thanksgiving, I’m deeply thankful to see both of my children happy, successful, and married to loving, smart, supportive spouses. (We Wilson’s can be a handful.) I’m grateful for my beautiful, brilliant fiancée Renee and the energy and joy she brings to my life every day.

If Trump wins in 2024, it’ll be a dark Thanksgiving indeed. Like millions of Americans, I’ll be contemplating how to protect my family from the coming authoritarianism Trump and his people have promised. As someone Trump ordered Bill Barr to investigate back in 2020, I’m likely on their list. It almost seems absurd to type those words, but it’s important to plan for the worst.

If Trump loses in 2024, I’ll raise a glass (or several) that Thanksgiving Day to every damn American who stayed in the fight until the end.  Once he’s gone, I’ll keep giving groups and parties advice on keeping the lights of democracy and liberty on in a world where even if Trump is off the stage, authoritarianism and extremism still has a foothold. Aside from that, I hope I’ll be watching my kids have their kids, traveling, writing more books, and flying and restoring antique airplanes.

Steven Beschloss is a journalist and author of several books, including “The Gunman and His Mother.” His website is America, America.

I feel fortunate that Joe Biden is our president and a fierce advocate for democracy. In another time, that would be the most obvious expectation. But Donald Trump and his fascistic enablers have made it necessary to be clear who’s committed to American values like equality, diversity and justice—and who’s ready to toss it all away. Over the next year leading up to the 2024 elections, I expect Biden will further ramp up the pro-democracy agenda and messaging. That includes continuing to push back against the GOP role in stripping away women’s reproductive freedom and ignoring the will of the people, what we’ve learned is a powerful motivator to get people to the polls. Biden won in 2020 by over 7 million votes with the largest turnout (66.3 percent) in half a century.

I anticipate—and surely hope—2024 will generate the same passionate engagement, if not surpass it. That bodes well for Democrats, even though the various third-party candidates are a reason to worry they could tip the outcome in Trump’s favor.

The idea that a majority or sufficient plurality would choose to usher in an autocratic government with no mission beyond enabling Trump to seek vengeance against his enemies remains improbable. If I’m right, next Thanksgiving will be cause for great celebration. But if I’m wrong? Thanksgiving 2024 will look more like a funeral—the demise of the American democratic project—than a time to give thanks.

Nate Powell is a graphic novelist and the first cartoonist to win the National Book Award. Powell has also won four Eisner Awards. His forthcoming graphic novel, Fall Through, will be released in February 2024, followed by a comic adaptation of James Loewen’s influential “Lies My Teacher Told Me” in June.

The stakes of everything at ongoing risk always illuminate my relative safety, health, comfort, choice, voice, and the people with whom I share this life. I’m deeply thankful for the ability to safely be with friends and members of my creative communities again after three and a half years working our way out of the deepest depths of social isolation. I have so much gratitude for the continuing privilege of making ends meet by doing what I have wanted to do since I was 11 years old—and for people’s faith and support in my strange and emotional work in an often-undervalued medium. I’m thankful for the strangers throughout much of my local community who show basic humanity and decency, calling out my own tendency for judgment and dismissal and helping to reinstill much-needed faith in people. I’m thankful for having a chance to see one of my all-time favorite bands, The Hated, at a one-off reunion show deep in Maryland back in January—and how that experience helped galvanize much of the above gratitude throughout this foreboding year.

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If Trump wins in 2024?  I spend a lot of time focused on just how eagerly people have memory-holed much of the last nine years (in fact, I made an entire book built on counteracting that urge in real time). Fragmented senses of continuity and context have been powerful conditions to allow the multiple, ongoing crises and inhumanities we witness and experience every day. I will be doing what I was doing for Thanksgiving every year since 2016: acknowledging the ongoing horror and radically deepened stakes, weeping, swearing, remembering, and then turning my phone off to focus on gratitude and love for the day, surrounded by a handful of people whose very right to exist in peace has (hypothetically) been destroyed. But Thanksgiving is my very favorite holiday, and I find it very moving to observe the day with all the mess cut out, on my own terms. I will not let fascists take away that observance of humanity, that interconnectedness.

If Trump loses? In this best-case scenario (which I still, in fact, feel is more likely), I will do exactly the same thing as if the fascists won—there will be mass violence, fear, paranoia, and resentment to different degrees in either outcome. We are a decade into a massive, collective human struggle for the survival of multiracial democracy itself—and this era is only a chapter of the last century’s fight against white supremacy and fascism. This will be the rest of our lifetimes, and everyone needs to understand that fact. At the same time, allow yourself time and space for quiet, for sacredness, for love and human connection—do not relinquish these under any conditions.

Norm Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributing editor for The Atlantic.

It is hard to come up with a bundle of things to be thankful for given the state of the country and its politics. I am grateful that Glenn Youngkin and Virginia Republicans were rejected by voters in that state, that Pennsylvania chose a good justice for its Supreme Court, that Ohio rejected the disgraceful and dishonest Republican effort to impose draconian restrictions on abortion, that Kentucky chose to reelect its superb governor. I am grateful we do not have a government shutdown over the holidays. But our situation otherwise is pretty dire.

If Trump wins, I will likely spend my Thanksgiving talking to family about whether we should leave the country, and where we should go. That, sadly, is not an exaggeration. He has made clear what he will do, turning American into a fascist hellscape. If we decided to stay, I would have to think through how to fight back to keep some fragments of our decency and democracy.

If Trump loses, I will be very thankful. But if Republicans gain back the Senate, I will not be very hopeful that the next four years will provide the opportunities we need to tackle the big problems we face.

Rich Logis is a former right-wing pundit and high-ranking Trump supporter. He describes himself as “a remorseful ex-Trump, DeSantis and GOP voter.” 

Palpable dread, despair and hopelessness are pervasive throughout our communities on this Thanksgiving; I understand why so many feel politically paralyzed. However, our history shows that we are a resilient people, and I believe it’s because the vast majority of us are, despite our flaws, good and decent people—even, yes, most MAGA voters, who have been exploited by Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party. As a former devout MAGA activist, I left MAGA in 2022, after a year of struggling with the reality that I erred in supporting Trump and MAGA, and playing some role in getting him elected. I give thanks, on a daily basis (sometimes multiple times!), for my personal and political epiphany; because the scales fell from my eyes in my Road to Damascus transformation, I know it can happen for others. My own story is one of hope and redemption, and I see this as possible for our nation. To paraphrase the late, venerable American poetess, Maya Angelou: our nation is a multi-colored ocean, leaping and wide, welling and swelling, we bear the tide. We rise. We rise. We rise.

If Trump wins in 2024? I believe a second Trump presidency will irreparably damage our democracy. What would such an America look, and feel, like? I don’t know; no one does. In the most accurate definition of the word, the U.S. is exceptional, in that we are the only exception in world history: there is no other multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious (including freedom from religion), diverse, tolerant republic/democracy hybrid, in which the people directly participate in government representation and commerce; and is also both the most powerful military, and largest economy by GDP, in world history. We are, for the most part, on our own, in figuring out how to make this American experiment work with the least amount of combustibility, as possible.

Our progress over the last 247 years, since our founding, has never moved linearly; while we are a more equitable society today, much more work is needed, and it will be accompanied by struggle. We have it in our power to ensure that we never have to answer the question of, “what if Trump is re-elected”? Remember: there is a will of the people, and it is one of the tenets that renders us exceptional, albeit imperfect.

Yes, I believe our alliance will be victorious; electorally repudiating MAGA, however, will not cure all our civic ills. Apologies for tempering good news, but a defeat is the start—not the end—of helping others leave MAGA (which my work focuses on) and equipping our nation to go on the non-violent offensive against whatever follows MAGA. MAGA is the latest—but not the last—embodiment of politically traumatic mythologies designed to make millions panicked and desperate over an increasingly diversifying America, and an increasingly engaged youth. Let’s work together to ensure the highest voter turnout in our history; all of us doing a little will make good trouble and history.

Mark Jacob, former Chicago Tribune metro editor and current author of the Stop the Presses newsletter at stopthepresses.news.

I am thankful this Thanksgiving for pro-democracy advocates in MAGA-dominated states. People who work against the odds, standing up for their principles even though their chances of success are not great. The prospects seemed dim in Georgia a few years ago, but they’re not dim anymore. The state has two Democratic senators and voted for Biden in 2020. Perseverance is so important. So, I’m thankful for blue dots in red states.

If Trump wins in 2024? I would be preparing next Thanksgiving for the biggest crisis in American history since the Civil War. I would be protesting and speaking out. Resisting the rise of authoritarianism. I desperately hope I never have to find out the answer to this question.

If Trump loses, he won’t accept the loss. He and his extremist followers may well make a second coup attempt. This is a long-term struggle for the survival of our democracy. Whether he wins or loses, I’ll keep speaking out and fighting fascism. I invite all people of good will to join us.

Cheri Jacobus is a former media spokesperson at the Republican National Committee and founder and president of the political consulting and PR firm Capitol Strategies PR.

I don’t know if “thankful” is the accurate descriptive word for how I feel about the election next year, or the state of the world. I will, however, admit to, despite the past 8 years of Trump thuggery, bigotry, treason, (and taking several direct hits from him and his flying monkeys, myself), still maintaining a glimmer of hope that Justice will prevail. I maintain a degree of faith that the American people’s love of Democracy will save us, despite the daily reminders that our institutions have largely failed us so far, when it comes to Trump.

Why this hope and faith with media still relying so heavily on Trump ratings, after Merrick Garland sat on his hands and let us down for so long, and after social media oligarchs increasingly control the flow and access to accurate information? I have hope and some faith because of Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky. Because of Fani Willis, Tish James, Jack Smith. Voters in an off-year election this month turned out to defeat Trumpism and MAGA fascism, giving me hope they will do so again next year. Some in our justice system appear to have the competency, backbone, and commitment to holding criminals accountable, despite a long history of Trump and some of his team skating on obvious crimes. 

The collective of non-MAGA cult Americans understand in our bones that failure next November means the effective end of our democracy. That is not hyperbole. We also know an election win will not be the end of the war on democracy, but it is a battle that must be won in order to prevail long term. If successful, we will celebrate at Thanksgiving 2024, but will re-arm for battle, knowing the wind is at our backs. Failure is not something I am willing to contemplate, consider, or plan for at this time.