When Trump won in 2016, I thought the best we could immediately hope for was basically a Republican administration; or that a disastrous Trump administration would make it harder for another more dangerous version of him to succeed. Ironically enough I made the analogy of a vaccine.
When he ran again in 2020 I was surprised by how much damage he had been able to do in four years with incompetent and corrupt appointments, but thought that there was a limit to how much more damage he could inflict in four more years because "He doesn't have a goal in mind apart from making money and he won't last long." If he'd won in 2020 that might have been true; just as in 2020 he didn't start getting ready to steal the election until too late, he might have neglected the problem of term limits in 2024 until too late.
But that's not what happened. He lost, and spent two months discovering that to flip an election takes more than just a couple of phone calls and some threats to the right person. And now he's had four years to think about how to be ready next time - or more accurately he's had four years to accumulate people around him who know how to be ready. So it won't matter that he's old and suffering cognitive decline; the next person will not need to study his methods and work out how to appeal to his fan base. Trump will die in office (however long that takes) and hand over to somebody a system where they no longer need to appeal to voters if they can appeal to the people in charge.
Trump has a goal now, and that goal is "be president for life". He doesn't care what damage he needs to inflict to do that and he doesn't care who helps him or what will happen after he is gone. Even if he does nothing as president but sit and watch TV for the rest of his life, his legacy will be damage that can only be repaired at enormous cost.
In 2020 I said "Vote like your life depends on it" and enough people rejected Trump to give us a chance to do it again. What the GOP needs and deserves - has done for the last eight years - is the kind of thrashing that makes a generation of party strategists flinch at the thought of it. It's an indictment of the political system in the US, particularly on the right, that Trump is allowed to run after an attempted insurrection and that this is even likely to be a close election. But a Trump defeat is extremely important no matter how close and the more people vote that way the more effective it will be. Every vote counts.
Getting rid of Trump won't fix anything, but a second Trump presidency would make all of our problems worse.
Vote Democrat, all the way down the ticket. Vote for America.
