On a freezing morning in Iowa last January, back when some in the GOP could still delude themselves into believing their party could be wrested from Donald Trump, I asked a woman who’d voted for him twice why she was now supporting Nikki Haley in the Republican primary. “Chaos follows him,” she explained at one of the former South Carolina governor’s events, held at a brunch spot in the Des Moines suburbs.
It wasn’t a novel observation, and—in its passive construction—it made Trump seem like something of a victim of the chaos rather than the source of it. But it would turn out to be as good a framework as any for his quest to return to power: Chaos has reigned in the months since, in this election year like no other. “It’s just more crazy shit after more crazy shit after more crazy shit,” as Democratic strategist Rebecca Pearcey put it to me recently.
Crazier than normal? Well, America is a deeply weird place, so weirdness tends to be a feature of its elections. But the last three, with Trump on the ballot, have been especially tumultuous: In 2016, there was the shock of his initial rise, with its daily deluge of scandal; in 2020, the election played out against the backdrop of a pandemic and civil unrest, culminating in a MAGA insurrection; and now, in 2024, the race has featured Trump’s felony conviction, two apparent assassination attempts on him, the exit of his incumbent rival, and the ascent of a new contender who has seemed—in a three-month sprint to the finish line—to make him even more unhinged than he typically is.
“The new normal,” Wisconsin representative Mark Pocan told me over the phone last week, “is ‘not normal.’”
And a central question hanging over this race, as it enters its final day, is: Will the election be a continuation—and maybe even an acceleration—of the last 10 years of Trump tumult? Or could the country finally, as Kamala Harris put it in her campaign’s closing message last week, begin to “turn the page on the drama and conflict” of the last decade?
It’s hard to say. After all, while Trump himself has been the most obvious cause of the disorder, his arrival as a serious political force came about as a result of institutional dysfunction and social erosion that preceded his ride down the golden escalator in 2015. That’s part of the reason the sense of angst has persisted through Joe Biden’s presidency: He may have been able to quiet down our politics after the never-ending noise of the Trump years, but that only seems to have made it easier to hear the tinnitic buzz of disillusionment that was already there.
“It’s just, like, depressing,” as a college student told me at a small demonstration in Wisconsin back in April, as Biden touted his student loan relief plan at a Madison technical college. The student was referring to the cold reality of American foreign policy—as seen in the Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza, which would become the subject of larger and more heated campus protests as the spring went on—but the sentiment seemed to also reflect a broader frustration with the ways our government sometimes fails to live up to the high-minded values it espouses.
Trump has made a political career out of exploiting that disconnect, convincing a great number of disaffected Americans that the answer to our systems’ faults and imperfections is to burn them down. He started plenty of fires throughout his presidency, inflicting burns on the public and political norms in the process. But the nation was not consumed because enough members of his party were willing to throw buckets of water on the flames. The difference between now and 2016, or even 2020, is that the GOP has become a party of political arsonists, ones who’ve spent Biden’s term dousing our institutions with gasoline and working to hand Trump a pack of matches.
That unity was on display at the Republican National Convention back in July. Trump was already planning on going into Milwaukee as a kind of conquering hero, having prevailed over what supporters considered his political persecution—a conviction on 34 felony counts in a hush money case—to become the front-runner following a disastrous Biden debate performance. But he was elevated to something like martyr status in their eyes after he was injured in a shooting at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania, just two days before the kickoff to his nominating party. As the week opened, supporters wore shirts reading: “I’M VOTING FOR THE CONVICTED FELON.” By the end of it, many had added an accessory: a white bandage over their right ear, like the one Trump wore when he made his grand entrance at the Fiserv Forum.
It was a perfect encapsulation of Trumpism: By day, the convention had a carnival quality to it, and there was a nihilistic, it’s-all-just-a-game-anyway jocularity among many of his supporters. But as they convened for the evening programming, the arena pulsed with a dark energy. Trumpworld had promised a softer, more unifying former president in the wake of the attempt on his life; instead, he seemed even more openly fueled by grievance, and his supporters appeared even more galvanized by it. At Trump’s first RNC as a presidential candidate, Ted Cruz—once a bitter rival—told delegates to “vote your conscience,” even if it meant defying the man GOP voters had chosen as their nominee; eight years later, Cruz practically cast Trump’s candidacy as a divine decree. “Thanks to God Almighty for protecting President Trump,” Cruz said, “and for turning his head on Saturday as the shot was fired.”
Trump would leave Milwaukee with the wind at his back. His party was energized, while the Democrats were in disarray over not only internal policy disagreements but also their nominee, who looked all of his 81 years in a debate with Trump and in subsequent damage control efforts. “The morale of the caucus,” as one Democrat put it during those dog days, “is at historic lows.”
How quickly things would change. Days after the RNC wrapped, Biden caved to pressure from party leaders, dropped his reelection bid, and threw his support behind his vice president.
This was in late July, long past the point that many Biden backers and some pundits predicted would be too late in the process to switch nominees. There was no real precedent for such a dramatic move, they warned. And besides, they argued, Harris wasn’t popular enough or politically skilled enough to lead the party, especially with so little time to get an operation off the ground. In the most compelling argument against Biden leaving the race, The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang had written that, to combat Trump’s “chaos,” “it might just be better to present the most stable and well-known option.”
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