Kamala Harris is right, Trump 2.0 would be "unhinged," aimed at "unchecked power"

Donald Trump is dangerous. Congress and the Supreme Court failed us. Now, it's up to us. As Harris said Wednesday, “What do the American people want?”

On Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris gave brief, almost solemn remarks about the danger posed by Donald Trump in his effort to regain the White House.

It was less than a minute, but it might have been the most important statement of her campaign.

Here’s what she said:

Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there — and no longer be there to rein him in. So the bottom line is this, we know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be, “What do the American people want?” Thank you.

It’s true.

It’s obvious.

He’s dangerous.

What’s more, though, is that this was made possible — if not passively encouraged — by the leaders of institutions that were supposed to serve as the guardrails to prevent this.

As I’ve written before, the U.S. Senate’s failure to convict Trump in his second impeachment coming out of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election was a significant moment in which 43 senators — all Republicans — failed our nation.

When I discussed that in December 2023, I wrote that courts would have to play their role in accountability.

Simply put, the Supreme Court failed us on that front. Again and again and again. Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees arguably went even further than the Senate Republicans had done in abdicating their duty back in January 2021.

In July, the court’s conservatives, led by Roberts, blocked the other branches (the legislative and executive) in their efforts to hold Trump accountable through the criminal legal system.

The entire court also failed in March to let Colorado take its own actions, under the Fourteenth Amendment’s "insurrection" disqualification clause, to hold Trump accountable for his role in January 6, 2021.

In both cases, the male Republican appointees on the court went further still to break down other guardrails.

In the Fourteenth Amendment case, the men — in an unsigned opinion — put limits on how the Fourteenth Amendment’s insurrection disqualification clause could be invoked at the federal level beyond the state issues in the case. In the immunity case, the men — in Roberts’s opinion for the court — blocked prosecutors from even being able to introduce evidence relating to immune acts for prosecutions coming out of unofficial conduct. (On both of these issues, the vote was 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett breaking off from the other Republican appointees.)

And so, we are left with ourselves and those around us. We must protect democracy, in spite of these institutional failings. We must do that before we can act to fix the guardrails.

We are left with John Kelly and his comments about Trump to The New York Times. We are left with the disturbing reporting in The Atlantic about what Trump wanted from his staff. On Harris’s side, we are left with uncomfortable alliances, like the Cheneys. We are left with unanswered questions about whether Harris will take action to make life better — here and overseas.

I do understand the anger on the left and the discomfort among rational people on the right in this moment. I never thought I would be casting my vote for Kamala Harris, but I think it is essential and important that I do so this year.

For me, the election is a bigger question: Do we want a person in office who seeks to take and use all power — unchecked power — to punish enemies and reward allies, or do we want a person who we might think does wrong, perhaps even often, but supports guardrails on the use of power?

If the election is about that bigger question — which is, ultimately, democracy or authoritarianism — then this election isn’t about alliances in the way that we normally think about them in politics.

This isn’t about who you want in your boat. It’s about if you want the boat to stay afloat.

At the end of the day, it was a simple distinction that showed me what we’re dealing with here. I want a president who tells Bret Baier how wrong he is and why he is being unfair in an interview and then moves on with her life. I do not want a president who threatens the broadcast license of a station when he cancels and then and gets mad about how they handle it.

One is democracy. The other is authoritarianism.

What do the American people want?