Last year, as he was gearing up for his 2024 run at the presidency, Donald Trump referred to his campaign has "the final battle." Writing for The New York Times, Frank Bruni says that while Trump's rhetoric is mostly "a showman’s cheap histrionics" and "a con man’s gaudy hyperbole, his "final battle" comments hit differently.
"He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict — which pits him and his supporters against the godlessness, lawlessness, tyranny, reverse racism, communism, globalism and open borders of a lunatic left — but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be, at least if he is the Republican presidential nominee," Bruni wrote.
With a Biden-Trump showdown looking increasingly likely, Bruni wrote that America is,"on the cusp of something much scarier" than the usual "four more years" that comes with campaign messaging, thanks to the fact that Trump's fury and rageful ambition has metastasized since 2020.
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"He seems better positioned, if elected, to slip free of the restraints and junk the norms that he didn’t manage to do away with before. Yesterday’s Trump was a Komodo dragon next to today’s Godzilla," he wrote, adding that Biden plays a role in the "apocalyptic" rhetoric as well.
"Trump and Biden don’t depict each other simply as bad alternatives for America. They describe each other as cataclysmic ones. This isn’t your usual negative partisanship, in which you try to win by stoking hatred of your opponent. It’s apocalyptic partisanship, in which your opponent is the agent of something like the End of Days," he wrote.
He added that the problem with this kind of rhetoric is that it causes the people on the losing side of an election to believe that "those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard," making it harder for either side to accept the election's results.
"The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one. And it wouldn’t necessarily end with a Trump defeat in November. It might just get uglier."
Read the full op-ed over at The New York Times.
