Who Wins If Trump Loses

With some distance from the day-to-day mania of life under Trump, it’s going to be impossible to deny that these agencies intruded to an extraordinary degree in US domestic political affairs over the course of the past several years. But because it was largely done to the detriment of Trump — typically to create the impression that he’s an agent of Russia, or at least benefitting from their sinister so-called “interference” — the long-term consequences of this development have yet to be fully wrestled with. Let’s just say it doesn’t bode well for the future of civil liberties when intelligence agencies seize autonomy to do whatever they please in the political realm.

Those of us repulsed by this slew of anti-Trump tactics — despite having no affinity for Trump himself, or the Republican Party, and no reason to support his re-election — will have to reckon with a grim recognition if he goes down to defeat this week. Which is that these tactics will have been successful. All the security state machinations, the blathering media tirades, the incessant waves of phony moral panic, the needless infliction of mass psychological turmoil — the constant fantasies and delusions that obscured far more than they ever revealed about the country’s actual problems — all of it will have been vindicated. Because it will have been done in service of accomplishing the desperately-craved goal that has been forefront in the minds of these hysteria-purveyors every single day for the past four years: removing Trump.

Trump is routinely decried as a singularly menacing destroyer of democracy. And at least around the margins, there’s probably a kernel of truth to some of that. But the damage his opponents have done — arguably far more significant — will reverberate long after he’s gone.