Now We Know Which Way Trump Will Run | Opinion

If you were wondering whether former President Donald Trump would embrace the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in his bid to reclaim the White House, you got your answer over the weekend. At a Waco, Texas, rally that served as the first official event of his campaign, Trump held his hand over his heart as he listened to a recording of imprisoned insurrectionists singing their creepy "Justice For All" mashup while a montage of scenes from Jan. 6 played on a big screen behind him. It wasn't subtle, and it was clear evidence that Trump plans not to explain the insurrection away as an Antifa false flag operation or a few knuckleheads run amok but to openly embrace it.

The choice of Waco as a venue was also not incidental. The rally was held on the 30th anniversary of the deadly federal siege of the heavily armed Branch Davidian compound which left 76 members of the cult dead. The botched Waco raid wasn't just a political disaster for the nascent Clinton administration—it also became a key part of the ongoing far-right white power grievance narrative. With Trump planning (absurdly) to make executive branch overreach the centerpiece of his campaign, the Waco anniversary offered an unparalleled opportunity to groan pitifully about his legal plight while simultaneously blowing sloppily on Earth's loudest and most obvious dog whistle.

"The abuses of power that we're currently witnessing at all levels of government," the former president thundered to the gathered Texas throngs with his signature lack of self-awareness and historical literacy, "will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt, and depraved chapters in all of American history." More shameful than slavery, folks! More barbaric than the Trail of Tears! More corrupt than the FBI's infiltration of the civil rights movement! As always with Trump, he's willing to debase himself and his party and risk national catastrophe if it helps explain away his complicity in the Capitol riot and focus the attention of his own cult members on the latest designated Trumpworld villain.

Have we really thought through what it will mean for the leader of an insurrectionist conspiracy who celebrates de facto far-right holidaysto seek his party's nomination and potentially become president? During the interminable denouement to the already sordid 2020 election, Trump's antics at least had an expiration date. No matter how many times he trotted out his legal goon squad to issue hallucinatory ramblings about ballot harvesting and mules and the nefarious big city Democratic fraud operation that forgot to rig down-ballot races, he still had to clear out of the White House by the time the Bidens' moving van arrived.

We will have no such luxury this time. Even if he is indicted, by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, or one of the many other cases he faces, he will likely be released after an arraignment. Any potential convictions are probably years away. Unless swiftly convicted of something that specifically bars him from seeking public office, Trump would be able to run from jail anyway, just as socialist leader Eugene Debs did in 1920.

That means that there is nothing in front of us but an endless horizon of Trump hogging your television screen, spouting lies and conspiracy theories and bringing previously fringe people and ideas into the Republican mainstream. It means at least a year and a half of the former president extolling the virtues of the people who tried to destroy American democracy at his behest, calling for more violence if he gets indicted or defeated at the ballot box, chipping away at the legitimacy of our electoral institutions, spawning more clones and imitators while promising more horrors should he win.

And while it might seem preposterous that Trump could actually win either his party's nomination or the presidency after his 7-million vote drubbing in 2020 and then his failed gambit to prevent the duly elected government of the United States from taking power, there is little available polling evidence to suggest that he's a certain loser. Trump has topped nearly every available public poll of the Republican nomination this year, and President Biden leads Trump by just 1.3 points in the latest Real Clear Politics average of a potential 2024 rematch.

Even if he loses, the danger of an aspiring autocrat leading one of America's two major parties and leaving his imprint on it should already be obvious. Fanatical Republican primary voters foisted openly authoritarian general election candidates on the country last year, many of whom endorsed Trump's Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is out there trying to make it effectively illegal for journalists to criticize government officials. Republican state legislators are plotting to ban books, drag shows, gender affirmation care, vaccines, and even the Democratic Party.

If today's Republican Party were a country, it would rank somewhere near authoritarian Russia on any credible index of democracy. This is a party that has embraced cutthroat tactics to stay in power, elevated a series of comically unfit and unserious people into positions of authority, and paid only modest penalty with voters for any of it. Imagine granting Donald Trump four more years of influence over this Republican Party, and what the GOP might look like once he's finally done with it.

David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.