Trump and Harris agree on a bleak view of the US – if the other wins | US elections 2024

In a speech full of promises, falsehoods, insults and jokes that Donald Trump delivered to a packed arena in Wisconsin six days before the presidential election, one line stood out: “November 5 will be the most important day in our country's history.”

Hyperbole? Undoubtedly and exactly the type that the former president has used repeatedly in recent months as he plots a return to the White House from which Joe Biden ousted him four years ago. Did his followers realize it? For many the answer was yes.

“We screwed up. In plain language, we're screwed,” said 72-year-old retiree John Martin when asked what would happen if Trump lost at the ballot box on Tuesday. “We're going to become a third world country added Mary Watermolen, 55, as the couple left Trump's speech in Green Bay on Wednesday evening.

Two days earlier and hundreds of miles away, Kamala Harris, the vice president and Trump's Democratic opponent, had similarly described the election's chances to hundreds of people visiting her in a Michigan college town.

“While I believe Donald Trump is an untrustworthy man, the consequences if he ever becomes president again are brutally serious, brutally serious,” she said in a city park in Ann Arbor. “There is so much at stake in this election, and this is not 2016 or 2020. We can all see that Donald Trump is even more unstable and moody, and now he wants unchecked power, and this time… there will be no one.” there to stop him.”

As people or politicians they have little in common, but as they campaigned in swing states and elsewhere in the final week before the presidential election, both the vice president and the former president came away with a unified message to their supporters: America is at a tipping point , and if I lose, the country will never be the same.

This came in Harris' speech on Tuesday evening in the same park in Washington DC from which Trump addressed his supporters who would storm the Capitol on January 6th. “This election is more than a choice between two parties and two different candidates.” “It is a decision about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or one ruled by chaos and division.” , she said.

And it was part of the conversation Thursday night in suburban Phoenix, where Trump sat down with the fawning Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator. “She’s dumb as a rock, and you can’t have that,” he said of Harris. “We love our country too much. You can't have that, we just went through four years of it. You can't have more. A country can only take so much.”

That sentiment now seems certain to be in the minds of tens of millions of Americans who will vote on Tuesday. In past elections, the world's third-most populous country chose its next leader while its troops fought abroad, its economy collapsed and, most recently, it was ravaged by a global pandemic. There are no external factors of comparable severity this year, and yet this week in interviews at campaign events in Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona, many Democratic and Republican voters told the Guardian their belief that the country is on the brink.

“It's constant lies telling them what they want to hear,” retired steelworker Kevin Hinckley, 68, said of Trump as he left Harris' rally in Ann Arbor. “He's so mean, he's a terrible person, pretty terrible. I just hope he doesn't make it. God forbid if he does.”

Much of this sentiment is fueled by Trump himself, who has maintained his position at the top of the Republican Party for nearly a decade. Big promises and dire threats have been a hallmark of his campaign style since he entered politics in 2015, but this year voters are going to the polls knowing what it's like to have him in the White House.

His four years in office ended with Biden defeating him and Trump spending weeks looking for ways to keep the Democrat from entering the White House, culminating in his supporters' violent and unsuccessful attempt on January 6 to stop Congress from voting. To confirm Biden's victory.

Far from backing down from his involvement in the riots, Trump instead spoke of pardoning those convicted of the attack, mused about acting as a “dictator” on his first day back and called his political opponents the latter Time as “the…”. “Enemy from within” against whom he could send the military.

Intellectuals with ties to Trump have written a right-wing blueprint for redesigning the U.S. government called “Project 2025.” The former president denies having anything to do with it, but Harris argues that the plan could potentially cause irreversible damage to American institutions if followed.

Since the three Supreme Court justices he appointed have already backed a ruling that shields presidents from prosecution for official acts while rejecting the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed in Roe v. Wade, Harris' supporters believe Trump will lead the country in the next few years four years into the sidelines would be political territory from which it may not emerge straight away.

“I see that this is really crucial if we want to hold on to democracy. In that sense, I really see it as kind of an existential choice,” said Jamie Taylor, 62, a retiree waiting to hear from Harris in Ann Arbor.

She feared that a second Trump administration “would be more fascist.” So I think he will keep his promises to really gut the civil service and hire loyalists. I don't know if he's actually going to carry out the mass deportations like he claims, but I think he's going to carry out some sort of mass deportation in a way that's going to be pretty damaging to the families and probably the country's economy. I think he will continue to do things that are… against the law.”

For his supporters, it's the opposite: Trump is the only man who can fix the country's problems, from immigrants arriving from Mexico to consumer prices, which have risen under Biden's term. “One problem after another has broken Kamala and I’m going to fix it,” he said in Green Bay.

The day before, in Saginaw, Michigan, his candidate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, warned that if Harris won, manufacturing jobs would be taken away from the state and relocated to China. Drug cartels can enter freely from Mexico and bring with them fentanyl, which they would disguise as candy, he said.

“I think it will be the crash of 1929 and we might think about leaving the country. We don't want to see them descend into chaos again,” said Xavier Bartlett, a high school student who attended the speech at 17, even though he wasn't yet old enough to vote.

“There will be a civil war,” added 33-year-old fast food worker Thomas Powell. If something like that were to happen, and he doubted it would, it would be because Trump's supporters thought Tuesday's election was rigged, Bartlett said.

Standing on a busy street outside the recreation center where Vance spoke was Carol Kubczak, a volunteer for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers' campaign.

Amid the honking of passing cars whose drivers noticed the Trump signs she and others carried, Kubczak, 67, described how she broke with the Democratic Party and voted for Trump in 2016, but kept her vote secret from her family. For this reason, she hardly ever has a conversation with her sister anymore.

“If (God forbid) (Harris) gets in, I really don’t think there will be any more free elections,” Kubczak said.

In the audience for Trump's Green Bay speech was Steve Wallace, a former professor turned community college administrator who assumed no one he worked with knew anything about his political leanings. Wearing a red MAGA shirt, the 62-year-old said he had voted Republican for decades and that Trump's policies fit his libertarian-leaning view of the way government should be run.

He had already voted to help Trump win Wisconsin, but did not share predictions of dire consequences if Harris were elected.

“I wouldn’t see a big change. “I think that would increase division,” he said, predicting a Harris administration would resemble that of Barack Obama, who many Republicans in Wisconsin believe continues to hold power in the Biden White House.

“There will be brighter days, there will be dark days. It’s not the end of the world – it’s not,” he said. “This is a huge country with great opportunities.”