Newsletter: If he’s reelected, how far will Trump push his supporters this time?

Good morning. It is Saturday, Nov. 2, and I still don’t believe how the Dodgers came back in Game 5 of the World Series to win their eighth championship. Here’s what’s happening in Opinion.

With the election three days away, I’d like to look way back to roughly this point in 2016. Some of us saw the threat posed by a potential Donald Trump presidency — including, ahem, The Times’ editorial board and yours truly — but an untimely mix of voter apathy, electoral college idiosyncrasies, mercurial FBI leadership and Russian disinformation propelled Donald Trump into the White House. Maybe we were caught off guard. Maybe we thought it couldn’t happen here. Maybe the thought of President Hillary Clinton was enough to take a chance on President Donald Trump.

Whatever it was, the sense that the country had made a terrible mistake set in very quickly in some quarters, especially among those who studied authoritarianism elsewhere in the world. Now, I know that academic musings hold little sway in the Trump era, but it’s worth looking back with the benefit of hindsight to see if the warnings had any merit.

They did, and one I keep coming back to, one that rattled me deeply when I read it just after Trump’s election in 2016, was this piece by Sarah J. Kendzior, an author and journalist who studied dissident movements in former Soviet states. She distilled the threat posed to venerable American ideals and institutions down to the most basic institution of them all: the everyday relationships we have with each other, as individuals, that bind us into communities, and how those may change as our values change. So, Kendzior asked her readers, right then, to write down what they valued, what behaviors they considered unacceptable, what relationships and experiences shaped them, “because if you do not do it now, you may forget.”

She continued: “Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.”

Those words, written in 2016, chill me to the core. After the 2020 election, I never would have guessed that supporters of then-President Trump, who had been defeated by Joe Biden, would violently storm the U.S. Capitol to thwart the peaceful transfer of power. And after Jan. 6 happened — and Trump’s supporters (among them a frequent contributor to our own op-ed page) said that they were done with the 45th president — I couldn’t foresee how brief the former commander in chief’s political exile would be. But tens of millions of American voters are crossing a bright red line they surely would have drawn for themselves in November 2016 — or even on Jan. 5, 2021.

Updating Kendzior’s exercise for 2024, what would Trump’s supporters write down as unacceptable behavior? Violent insurrection can’t be on the list. What tops that? I hope the 75 million or 80 million people who will vote for Trump on Tuesday think of some new limits to set, because their leader will push them to cross lines they should not have to draw.

Many could vote against Kamala Harris over the war in Gaza. That’s a mistake. “Sitting out this election — or, worse, casting a ballot for a third-party candidate such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein — will do nothing but help former President Trump retake the White House,” says columnist Robin Abcarian. “As my dear mother used to say, that’s like cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

What Venezuela’s turn away from democracy means for U.S. migration. Tirana Hassan, executive director of Human Rights Watch, says the authoritarian crackdown by Nicolás Maduro’s regime after Venezuela’s fraudulent election will send more migrants to the United States. Problem is, recent U.S. policy changes have made the trip much more dangerous for Venezuelans fleeing danger in their home country.

Happy Halloween? Living with unease, uncertainty and the uncanny in a scary season. “Oblivious to its original purpose,” author Cornelia Powers writes about Halloween, “our modern version is an expression of the American idea that you can be whoever you want to be as well as a vehicle for our tensions and anxieties, turning death into a joke with temporary disguises and decorative one-upmanship.” She suggests putting the “hallow” back into Halloween.

Former Republican adviser Scott Jennings says why he’s voting for Trump: “While there’s no politician I agree with 100%, Trump and the Republicans are highly likely to do what I want most of the time, while Harris and the Democrats are almost guaranteed to do none of what I want at any time. The argument that to save conservatism I must vote for the most liberal presidential candidate in American history seems, charitably, naïve to this Republican.”

More from opinion

From our columnists

• Harry Litman: Does freedom itself depend on the outcome of this election? Donald Trump’s probably does
• Jackie Calmes: If Harris falls short, blame Democrats and the media on this issue

From guest contributors

• Richard Price returns with a story of urban disaster, grit, hustle and even hope
• Israel is weaponizing hunger against Palestinians. Here’s how the U.S. can stop it

From the Editorial Board

• ER patients are still being hurt by racial and gender biases
• Carla Hall: I was lucky to see a baby elephant up close, but it’s time to rethink keeping these majestic animals in zoos

Letters to the Editor

• Kamala Harris isn’t fear-mongering. She’s telling the truth about Trump
• I’m a Republican who worked for Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 2024, I’m voting for the Democrat
• Manzanar is a “sobering reminder of what our country is capable of doing to its own citizens”