The 2024 American Presidential Election

We’ve Known the Water is Warming, and We’ve Been Trying To Get Out of the Pot Before It Boils Over

*

It turns out that frogs try to scramble out of the pot when the cool water starts to warm.

Of course, they do.

I never believed the literalness of the Boiling Frog story nor its application as a metaphor for how too many Americans have gotten used to Donald Trump’s offenses, so worry less about the consequences of a second Trump term.

The pot is slowly boiling, but most of us climbed out of it long ago.

*

I imagine a conversation with my Republican father, who died of sinus cancer at 71 in 1993.

I begin by telling him that his Party just nominated for the third time an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon who had been impeached twice during his first term.

Mr. Trump introduced himself as a candidate in 2015 by saying this aboutSenator John McCain, someone my father admired:

He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured; I like people who weren’t captured.

And, a couple of days ago, in a stump speech to a Christian group of supporters, Trump said

You won’t have to do it anymore…It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore.

Finally, I pulled out my phone and showed him a photo of the Trump-encouraged insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.

*

After exclaiming, “You can talk on that thing? And load photos!” my father said

What has happened to my Party and my country?

My reawakened father is gobstruck by the iPhone’s capabilities and what has happened to American politics. He is the frog placed in boiling water.

But that’s not true for most Americans. We’ve seen the political Mr. Trump up close for almost a decade, and we know the pot has been slowly coming to a boil.

*

In the summer of 2016, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in an interview said:

He is a faker…He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes to his head at the moment. He really has an ego…I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our President.

During the fall of 2016, I taught a Political Science seminar to 20 undergraduate students on the Trump/Clinton presidential campaign. After the Access Hollywood tape, I recall a 90-minute class discussion. Three of the students were men on the Luther College football team. All were self-identified Republicans. One young woman asked the men if they had ever heard locker room talk of the sort Donald Trump engaged in on the tape. Each said no, never, not like that.

At the end of the discussion, another young man in the back of the class raised his hand and said, almost chokingly, precisely my dead father’s imagined response.

I don’t know what is happening in my country.

*

In the 2016 American presidential election, 66 million Americans supported Hillary Clinton and 63 million Donald Trump. Trump won the Electoral College because he carried Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by 79,000 votes. Four years later, Biden flipped those states (by only 44,000 votes) in the national ballot count, 81 million to 74 million.

A majority of Americans have always viewed Donald Trump unfavorably.

The frogs have been climbing out of the warming water for years.

When Democratic Party leaders pressured Biden to withdraw from the race, the number one reason was their fear that he could not beat Donald Trump.

The reason Vice President Kamala Harris was able to consolidate her control over the Democratic Party so quickly was the need for the Party to unify to keep the pot from boiling over.

America is an evenly divided country. Many of my Trump-supporting friends do not believe the pot is even warming. Or that it will boil over with a woke-infused flame.

And our unique Electoral College mechanism, which at this historical moment favors the rural-dominated Republican Party, could produce another Trump victory.

History is full of contingencies. Imagine, for example, if there had been no Trump-Biden debate a month ago or if this year’s Democratic Party convention had been first in July.

President Biden would now be the nominee.

But that didn’t happen. People acted. President Biden bent to the will of not only Nancy Pelosi but the majority of Democrats who have been saying for two years that he is too old.

Like the frogs, we know what we see and feel.

The water is boiling.

It’s time to turn off the burner.