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November 4, 2024 
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On Tuesday, in her last major speech before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris closed the argument of her campaign against Donald Trump by casting him as a singular threat to American democracy, a "petty tyrant" "consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power."
At Times Opinion, we've published a wide range of editorials, columns and guest essays that accord with that judgment. But they also complicate it, by placing Trump in the context of broader political forces that he has both harnessed and been harnessed by. After all, the man wouldn't be much of a threat if he were acting alone.
When Trump was indicted by a Manhattan jury last March, for example, the columnist David French wrote about how Trump's defenders used apocalyptic language to sow corrosive distrust of the justice system, "priming his supporters to reject the rule of law, root and branch."
In a guest essay last year, the lawyers George Conway, J. Michael Luttig and Barbara Comstock argued that the conservative legal movement has also been complicit in Trump's assault on the rule of law. While there were a few lawyers in the Trump administration who refused to participate in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, "more alarming is the growing crowd of grifters, frauds and con men willing to subvert the Constitution and long-established constitutional principles for the whims of political expediency," they wrote. "The actions of these conservative Republican lawyers are increasingly becoming the new normal."
Another, especially alarming aspect of the new normal, as David Austin Walsh detailed in May, is the growing presence of neo-Nazi and other far-right elements within the Republican Party's rank-and-file. That month, Trump's Truth Social account posted a video of mock headlines about his re-election, one of which predicted that "what's next for America" was the "creation of a unified reich." The campaign claimed that the video was posted by a staff member, which underscores a problem "that goes far beyond Mr. Trump," Walsh wrote. "A generation of young Republican staff members appears to be developing terminal white nationalist brain. And they will staff the next Republican administration."
These pieces and other coverage we've gathered clarify the stakes of tomorrow's election. Check them out below.
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