Every January, we get the opportunity to start fresh, wipe the slate clean: a tabula rasa of new beginnings opens before us, full of hope and promise. That was before Donald Trump. Any hope that Trump would exit like other presidents who failed to win a second term — Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush most recently — and move into the private sector and do different work were sundered forever on Jan. 6, 2021 with the violent insurrection at the Capitol.
On Jan. 6, 2024 — three years after the insurrection — President Joe Biden will be in the Philadelphia area giving a speech at Valley Forge. It will be Biden’s first major campaign speech of 2024 and as the Inquirer reported, “Biden is trying to motivate voters through fear of a second term under former President Donald Trump. And he’s focused on winning Pennsylvania.”
Pennsylvania — Philadelphia specifically — clinched the vote for Biden in 2020. The state has been a lynch pin for decades in presidential elections. The past six elections have come down to three states. Pennsylvania has always been one of them, except in 2000 when it was just Florida. But the fact that these races have narrowed to just a few swing states has made paying attention to the distinctions and records of the candidates all the more critical.
Current polling has former president Donald Trump leading not just his closest GOP challengers, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but also Biden. And while it seems incredible that Biden, who revived a decimated economy after the worst years of the pandemic, saved countless lives by putting the nation back on the side of science and provided free vaccines and testing to the country, and re-established the U.S. as an ally and participant in critical global issues like climate crisis, Trump has entrenched himself among the GOP with lies about the 2020 election and false narratives about his multiple legal challenges being about GOP voters instead of his own corruption and criminality.
In addition, Trump’s followers have committed to an anti-vaxxer/COVID conspiracy stance that has continued to kill people in red states, and equally committed to Trump’s anti-immigrant and racist rants that are increasingly Hitlerian in both their language and tone. Trump has outright stated on Fox News that he intends to be a dictator. He has also aligned plans for dealing with his enemies list.
Trump has also doubled down on his long-established anti-LGBTQ+ stance. He was already the most actively anti-LGBTQ+ president in U.S. history, and Biden is unquestionably the most pro-LGBTQ+ president. But while Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ record has receded in memory, anger with Biden over the war in Gaza, student loans and other issues central to Gen Y and Gen Z have dominated social media and been reflected in the polls.
Yet Trump and his challengers remain far more problematic for people in historically marginalized communities — women, people of color, immigrants, the poor and working poor, and LGBTQ+ people. Trump’s legally established history of racism dates back to the 1970s. In 2023, Trump — who previously admitted to grabbing women by their private parts — was found liable for the sexual assault of Emmy-winning writer E. Jean Carroll — an assault the judge said was rape.
Only two of the remaining four GOP challengers to Trump — DeSantis and Haley — qualified for the Jan. 10 CNN Iowa debate. Trump qualified, but will do a Fox News town hall on the same day, Fox announced Tuesday.
But while DeSantis and Haley have come out against overturning the government, they both are highly problematic figures. Haley failed last week to cite slavery as the cause of the Civil War and DeSantis’s history of anti-LGBTQ+ activism is longstanding.
Late on Dec. 29, Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill banning gender-affirming health care for transgender minors. On Truth Social, Trump said, “DeWine has fallen to the Radical Left. No wonder he gets loudly booed in Ohio every time I introduce him at Rallies, but I won’t be introducing him any more. I’m finished with this ‘stiff.’ What was he thinking. The bill would have stopped child mutilation, and prevented men from playing in women’s sports. Legislature will hopefully overturn. Do it FAST!!!”
DeWine said in a press conference late Friday, “These are truly complex issues, and reasonable people draw vastly different conclusions.”
He said, “This bill would impact a very small number of Ohio’s children, but for those children who face gender dysphoria, and for their families, the consequences of this could not be more profound. Ultimately, I believe this is about protecting human life.”
DeWine added. “Many parents have told me that their child would not have survived — would be dead today — if they had not received the treatment they received from one of Ohio’s children’s hospitals. I cannot sign this bill as is currently written, and just a few minutes ago, I vetoed the bill.”
This thoughtful response from a Republican governor in one of the reddest states and Trump’s response highlights how Trump would act as president — even in the face of science-based actions by fellow Republicans.
Trump has already weaponized the House GOP and newly ensconced Speaker Mike Johnson is a Trump supporter who still can’t acknowledge Biden won the 2020 election. Johnson is also a radical anti-LGBTQ+ activist with a long history of acting as legal counsel for anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups. In addition, Johnson’s wife, a licensed therapist, conducts conversion therapy, which has been banned in 20 states, including New Jersey. Pennsylvania has not banned conversion therapy.
All of this means every voter in every historically marginalized community in Pennsylvania and the nation will have to think about what the stakes are in November. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost by a mere 77,000 votes in the battleground swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Third party votes in those states were 800,000. Democrats voting third party literally ceded the election to Trump.
In 2016, the electorate remained unsure of what Trump would do as president and many saw Hillary’s candidacy as a proxy third term for Obama or were swayed by their own misogyny. In 2024, everyone knows not only what a Trump presidency has meant in the past, but what an unfettered Trump presidency would mean next year and beyond.
On Dec. 31, former White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin, former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, and former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week,” “We don’t need to speculate what a second Trump term would like because we already saw it play out.”
Griffin — now a co-host of ABC’s “The View” — said, “Fundamentally, a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly.” She accused Trump of “having gone to historic and unconstitutional lengths” in attempting to “steal a democratic election” to stay in power.
“I’m very concerned about what the term would actually look like,” Griffin continued. We know what it would actually look like — Trump says what he would do at every rally and his supporters cheer him on. As Washington Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan wrote a month ago, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”