Being Mentally Prepared for Trump's Second Term

Many polls have the 2024 general election race between Republican former president Donald Trump and Democratic current vice president Kamala Harris as close. While polls this far out from a general election are not particularly instructive and historian Allan Lichtman, the academic who successfully predicts general elections with striking accuracy, is predicting a Kamala Harris win, it is important to be mentally prepared for the very real possibility of a second Trump term—and all the drama that comes with it.

There are multiple reasons why people need to consider the possibility of—and be mentally prepared for—the return of Donald Trump to the White House. The first is that the Bradley effect is a political phenomenon that would most likely be intensified with respect to the first black woman candidate on a major political party’s presidential ticket.  The Bradley effect is a theory that black candidates in political contests with white candidates tend to register higher support in preceding polling than they do during the actual elections. While the Bradley effect did not result in Barack Obama losing his presidential elections, it is useful to consider an intersectional analysis as it relates to Kamala Harris’ electoral prospects. (One need not be an intersectional feminist to understand how the theoretical approach makes political sense here.) Kamala Harris’ gender could result in her facing unique challenges with respect to general elections that Barack Obama’s masculinity shielded him from. Likewise, Kamala Harris could face intensified challenges because of her gender that Hillary Clinton’s whiteness was a buffer against. Kamala Harris very rarely plays into her identity because she understands that her diverse ethnic background may not be an electoral strength—not in this political climate.

There are some voters who may not feel comfortable with a woman as the president of the most powerful nation on earth. Including the additional variable of blackness could present a significant hurdle for voters who already would not want to vote for a woman to be president of the United States. Kamala Harris’ policies are also sometimes brazenly socialistic, such as her plan to federally ban price gouging for food, which could turn off potential moderates who prefer more evidence-based economic proposals. It is simply difficult to believe that some voters are not simply lying to pollsters about their support for Harris. This is precisely the reason that I argued in a previous essay that President Biden should step down before the election so the question of “whether a black woman can be president of the United States” would be off the table, as Kamala Harris would already be the incumbent going into the presidential election. It would be an excellent early October surprise by the Democratic Party, and—for a quite a delicious slice of petty—it would also make the Trump “45-47” merch obsolete very close to the election, since if he were to win a second term, he would be the 48th President of the United States.

The second reason why people should be preparing themselves for a Trump second term is because xenophobia is electorally effective. Gallup polling from June 2024 has the highest percentage of respondents in over twenty years claiming that immigration to the United States should be decreased. Donald Trump and JD Vance pushing the horrendously bigoted idea of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating their neighbors’ pets may seem as if the Republican candidate and his running mate have lost their minds, but the truth of the matter is that their attempt to advance this obviously nonsensical story, for which there has been zero evidence produced, is electorally clever as it taps into real public sentiment about a highly charged political issue. Trump knows better than anybody how effective stoking the fear of “the other” is in being electorally successful. It is the precise strategy that took him to power the first time around. As morally vulgar as it is to single out a group of immigrants for an overwhelming hate campaign based on utter falsehoods, scaring people into the voting booth is an efficacious political strategy. I am willing to bet that the month prior to the election will see the unleashing of some of the nastiest xenophobia in modern political history.

So many Republicans with self-respect who are not particularly fond of Kamala Harris’ policies understand that supporting Donald Trump is a betrayal of every conservative principle, and they understand that the clear “lesser of two evils” is a vote for Kamala Harris. For what it’s worth, there is an almost zero likelihood of Harris debasing both herself and American political institutions by having a frenzied mob of her supporters attack the United States Capitol Building to prevent a peaceful transfer of power. The fact that Donald Trump has people even considering voting for him after January 6, 2021 is evidence that the political processes in America that were once taken for granted are not as safe as one would think. A normal country would have Democrats and Republicans uniting to vote for Kamala Harris in droves, with the understanding that policy can always be argued about as long as there is a functioning political process. Trump is the new normal, and it would be silly to think that he has no chance of winning.