NIALL FERGUSON: Why Kamala Harris poses a greater threat to democracy – both at home and abroad – than Donald Trump

He’s back. Donald Trump, that is. Just a few weeks ago, he was trailing in the polls and left in the fundraising dust. Now the race is too close to call – and he has the momentum. No wonder the Democrats are scaremongers.

“Trump speaks like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini,” commentator Anne Applebaum wrote last week in The Atlantic magazine. “He and his campaign team believe they can win by using the tactics of the 1930s,” she argued.

Kamala Harris herself is now concerned enough to endorse this argument. When a radio interviewer recently described Trump’s political views as fascism, she responded, “Yes, we can say that.”

She did it again last Wednesday on CNN, when asked if she believed her opponent met the definition of a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she quickly shot back. “Yes, I do.”

And the American liberal press was right behind her with one argument that ‘Trump is obsessed with having a dictatorial-level army’, while another alleged Trump was heard saying: ‘I need the kind of generals Hitler had ‘.

What’s strange is that, according to research from the Center for Working-Class Politics — hardly a conservative organization — this argument is almost entirely ineffective at changing the minds of registered voters.

And that shouldn’t surprise us, because it failed when Hillary Clinton’s campaign tried the same thing against Trump eight years ago. ‘America has never been so ripe for tyranny’ was the headline in New York Magazine at the time. Clinton was at it again, calling Trump “blatantly fascist” on CNN on Thursday.

Does Trump look or sound like Hitler? To answer that question, I refer readers to his hilarious performance at an annual fundraising dinner for Catholic Charities in New York on October 18.

Tradition dictates that the presidential candidates present tell jokes at their own expense. Harris broke with convention and appeared in an unfunny video instead of in person. Trump jokingly refused to send himself up, saying, “I guess I just don’t see any point in shooting at myself when other people have been shooting at me for a long time.” He continued to skewer the Democrats.

Or how about the good humor with which Trump handed out fries during a memorable election stunt at a drive-in McDonald’s. The Führer didn’t do stand-up. Mussolini also did not serve fast food.

According to the averages of all polls, Trump has had a lead over Harris over the past three weeks in all seven swing states in this election: Georgia and North Carolina in the south, Arizona and Nevada in the west, and Michigan, Pennsylvania. and Wisconsin in the Midwest – and not because Americans long for fascism. (Just to remind you, fascism was all about state control of the economy and militarization in preparation for war, pretty much the opposite of Trump’s philosophy.)

It’s because they trust Trump over Harris on the issues that interest them most: the economy, which suffered a nasty bout of inflation while Harris was Joe Biden’s vice president, and illegal immigration, which has been under the watchful eye of Biden and Harris has gotten out of hand. .

I admit: I was wrong about Donald Trump. I thought on January 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol, his political career was over. The reality is that no matter how recklessly he behaved that day, Democrats failed to convince about half of likely voters that his behavior showed he was a Hitler-like threat to democracy.

If he is re-elected, his critics warn of a threat to the constitutional order. But they also foresee a threat to what they call the liberal international order. It is often claimed that Trump would pull the plug on support for Ukraine in a second term.

His desire to be a dictator at home, they say, is complemented by his desire to align America with dictators abroad — especially Russian President Vladimir Putin. If Trump’s critics are right, democracy is doomed – not just in America but also in the rest of the world, starting in Eastern Europe.

Earlier this year, I half-seriously said that the American elections were a choice between Republic and Empire. By that I meant that if you believe Trump is a threat to the republic, you should vote for the Democratic candidate. But if you believe the Democratic candidate is a threat to American primacy in the world, then you should vote for Trump.

I accept that, as Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, said this week, President Trump has no great respect for the Constitution or the law. But the question is not to what extent Trump has authoritarian tendencies: the question is to what extent he might give in to them if he is re-elected for a second term.

Assuming he wins on November 5, how would Trump — as some of his critics fear — change the Constitution to give himself a third term. That is something that is unequivocally excluded by the 22nd Amendment. It’s not even something a president should propose.

And what if Trump, as he did during his first term, tried to change U.S. immigration policy through an executive order, but the courts rejected it. What might he do if the Supreme Court were to uphold the trial court’s initial ruling?

And, finally, if Trump were to order the US military to take action against domestic political opponents, where is the evidence that the upper echelons of the military would be willing to carry out such an order?

The rule of law is deeply entrenched in the US, not only because it is, by design, a republic of laws, but also because it remains a country conspicuously governed by people with law degrees. Moreover, the country has a class of officers that is strongly committed to the separation of the military and politics.

Trump himself may have little respect for lawyers and generals. Who can really blame him after nearly four years of “litigation” – politically motivated lawsuits designed to discredit if not imprison him – and multiple political attacks by generals he fired? But there is no aspect of the Republican platform that envisions any change to the Constitution.

The irony is that it is not Trump, but the more radical Democrats who are openly discussing constitutional changes that would fundamentally alter the American political system to their own advantage. To cite one of many examples, in an article published two years ago in the New York Times, two liberal professors at Harvard and Yale respectively, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, urged Democrats not to to try to ‘reclaim’ the ‘broken’. Constitution, but to ‘radically change the basic rules of the game’.

“It is difficult,” they wrote, “to find a constitutional basis for abortion or unions in a document written by largely wealthy men more than two centuries ago.” It would be much better if liberal lawmakers could simply argue for abortion and labor rights on their own merits, without having to concern themselves with the Constitution.”

“In a democracy, majority rule should always be paramount,” they declared. It shouldn’t ‘survive'[e] vetoes by powerful minorities who invoke the constitutional past to block a new future.’

“One way to achieve this more democratic world,” they wrote, “is to provide the Union with new states,” to “break the false impasse that the Constitution imposes on the country through the Electoral College and the Senate, in which substantial majorities are being thwarted issue after issue.”

For anyone who reveres the US Constitution – the most successful political document in history – this is all blood-curdling. It is nothing less than a call for revolution: to replace the American republic with a tyranny of the majority.

And who’s to say that Harris, if elected president with a majority in the Senate and House of Representatives, wouldn’t be open to such revolutionary plans?

The real threats to American democracy take other forms too – not least the ever-rising federal debt burden. It is worth remembering that there are few examples in history of great powers remaining great long after the cost of debt servicing exceeded the cost of defense, as is the case for the first time this year.

That, even more than Trump’s Russophilia, is the real problem for America’s allies. On its current trajectory – which I assume would continue under Harris’ presidency – US defense spending is simply not sufficient to simultaneously defend Ukraine, Israel, and also Taiwan if all three are attacked.

And that is very likely. The Biden-Harris Administration’s Foreign Policy Likely Dooms Ukraine to Defeat; Israel risks war against Iran, with only limited American support; and Taiwan fear a blockade by China sometime in the next four years. The characteristic term of this government is ‘de-escalation’. On closer inspection, this term is the functional opposite of ‘deterrence’.

We cannot know for certain whether Trump is right when he says that the attacks on Ukraine and Israel would not have happened if he had been re-elected in 2020. All we know is that no such acts of aggression by authoritarian powers occurred during his first presidency. term.

So Republic or Empire? I would say the latter seems more vulnerable to another four years of Democratic government than the former to another four years of Trump.

These elections remain agonizingly close. It could depend on the decisions of ten or twenty thousand voters in a few dozen provinces. But of this you can be sure: none of those swing voters are voting for Kamala Harris because they are convinced that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

The fact that Harris has resorted to playing the Hitler card is a sign of desperation, so I’ll just say it. She’s losing this election.

Sir Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.