Kamala Harris has spent the final stretch of the 2024 race on a swing-state blitz, pitching voters on her vision to address issues they care about. Donald Trump? He’s taken a different tack, with his campaign using its last days to tell Americans the ways they’d make their lives much, much worse.
In the past week, Elon Musk—a top supporter and key adviser to the former president—has fantasized about a full-scale economic collapse, suggesting that the “temporary hardship” many Americans would suffer with a Trump win would be a good thing. House Speaker Mike Johnson has pledged to end the Affordable Care Act, which millions of Americans rely on for their healthcare. And, over the weekend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist Trump said would be able to do “anything he wants” on health matters if elected, made clear he would not only crack down on vaccines from his administration post but would also seek to “remove fluoride from public water.”
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Promises to crater the economy, take away your healthcare, and put General Jack D. Ripper in charge of public health wouldn’t seem to be the ideal closing campaign argument. But it’s not just Trump’s surrogates unwittingly making the case against his election; the man himself has echoed RFK Jr., raising the possibility of banning vaccines and endorsing his plan to ban fluoride from water. “It sounds okay to me,” Trump told NBC News on Sunday.
Trump has, of course, seemed more unhinged than ever lately. He’s issued brazen threats that underscore the danger he poses to democracy and engaged in bizarre behavior that makes plain his unfitness for office. But the frankness with which Trump and his allies have discussed their destructive plans could be even more damaging to his electoral prospects than all that: Even voters who aren’t tuned into the implications for democracy in 2024, after all, may not like the idea of suffering economic “hardship” just so Elon Musk can dismantle the administrative state, or having former NFL star Herschel Walker be in charge of missile defense because he campaigns for Trump.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t a receptive audience for his absurd agenda. Millions and millions of Americans are in fact charmed by Trump’s extremism and stupidity. Meanwhile, some have overlooked it in the interest of scoring tax breaks, locking in the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, and other more traditional GOP goals. But Trump has made even less effort lately to disguise his agenda in kitchen-table euphemisms, instead openly indulging in the most objectionable ideas put forth by the weirdest people in his orbit. It should make for an easy choice Tuesday: the normalcy and common sense represented by Harris, or Trump and his murderer’s row of morons, grifters and creeps.
