constraining Trump four years ago. We were wrong. And we
never anticipated anything remotely like the attempted pres-
idential coup of 2021.
Sarah Longwell: I agree. When I co-founded Republicans for
the Rule of Law^1 in 2018, I looked at Trump’s victory in 2016
and thought, OK, this is an accident of history. I would have
told you that Trump is a cancer on the party, but if you cut
him out, you know, there’s enough institutional memory that
the party will bounce back. But Trump metastasized, right? He
reconstituted much of the party in his image. In 2022, there
are hundreds of mini-Trumps running for offi ce.
That Jan. 6 happened isn’t the most surprising part. What
is most alarming is that Trump wasn’t held accountable for
it, and that the party has decided today that, even after he
incited an insurrection, he should still be the leader of the
party. People like Tim Scott — people that you might have
said, ‘‘These are the good, reasonable, post-Trump Republi-
cans,’’ the people I counted on to constrain him — are now
happy to be considered for his vice-presidential candidate
and to endorse him for 2024.^2
Homans: I want to back up a second and question the implicit
premise of my own fi rst question here, which is that this con-
versation necessarily begins with Trump. Sherrilyn, you’ve
argued that we should have seen the warning signs for Amer-
ican democracy years earlier.
Sherrilyn Ifill: I think that it’s really important for us not to
begin with Trump. I have repeatedly described Trump as
an accelerant. But he was able to accelerate something that
already existed. One of the issues that I’ve been most frus-
trated by is the failure of so many of those who really study
democracy, and who see themselves as people who are com-
mitted to democracy and democratic ideals, to see the signs
that were quite apparent long before Trump came into offi ce.
Things like voter suppression against Black voters, or police
offi cers killing unarmed Black people with impunity, were
Illustration by Pablo Delcan The New York Times Magazine 31
5 In addition to the
Texas voter-ID case,
civil rights organizations
sued North Carolina
over the Republican-
led Legislature’s 2013
omnibus elections bill,
which imposed strict
voter-ID requirements,
restricted early voting
and eliminated same-day
voter registration —
measures that a panel
of federal judges,
in overturning the law,
ruled targeted
Black voters ‘‘with almost
surgical precision.’’6 After Joe Manchin,
the Democratic senator
from West Virginia,
announced that he would
not support changes to
the filibuster that would
allow Senate Democrats
to pass the For the
People Act with a simple
majority, he and a group
of other Democratic
senators spent much of
last summer drafting
the Freedom to Vote
Act, a bill that offered
a narrower range
of voting rights reforms
and more safeguards
against state-level efforts
to establish partisan
control over election
systems. At the same
time, Senate Democrats
tried to advance the
John Lewis Voting Rights
Advancement Act, a
much narrower bill that
would have reworked
and restored some
provisions of the Voting
Rights Act, including
preclearance, that were
struck down by
Shelby v. Holder. Both
bills were blocked by
Republican filibusters.treated as a race issue and not a democracy issue, when if
we saw them in any other country, we would recognize them
as indicators of something being wrong with a democracy.
Carol Anderson: With Obama, there was this narrative: ‘‘Woo,
we have crossed the racial Rubicon! We have overcome! We
put a Black man in the White House!’’ Without looking at the
data that shows that a majority of white people did not vote
for Barack Obama and that they have not voted for a Dem-
ocratic candidate for president since 1964, the year Lyndon
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.
Ifill: Our democracy was in terrible trouble when we had
a Black president and a Black attorney general, and there
was this thin veneer that we were moving in one direction.
I remember at the time being in a meeting with President
Obama and saying: ‘‘Let me explain to you what is happening
in Texas. Let me explain to you what’s happening in Ala-
bama.’’^3 After the Supreme Court decided the Shelby County
v. Holder case, which removed the preclearance provision, a
critical provision from the Voting Rights Act,^4 there was this
wave of voter-suppression laws that were happening around
the country with very explicit statements from Republican
leaders of those states, saying, ‘‘We’re free and clear now.’’
The Legal Defense Fund and other civil rights organiza-
tions were litigating cases in 2014 in Texas and North Caroli-
na. And in both of those cases, you had courts saying that the
legislatures had passed these laws for the purpose of discrim-
inating against Black voters.^5 That’s kind of a big deal. That
sounds to me like a democracy problem. That is a problem
that existed before Trump.
Homans: In the past year, there have been many more
state-level Republican legislative eff orts to pass laws on vot-
ing in the vein of the 2013 and 2014 laws you mentioned,
and also more novel legislation directly targeting the elec-
tion system — though very few of those bills actually passed.
Congressional Democrats spent a lot of last year trying to
respond to all this legislatively. Their fi rst move was the For
the People Act: a sweeping bill that Democrats passed in the
House (though not in the Senate) in 2019. It mostly addressed
longstanding Democratic priorities regarding voting rights,
gerrymandering and campaign-fi nance reform, not the new
election-related concerns, and it ran into total Republican
opposition and the unwillingness of some Senate Democrats
to scrap the fi libuster to pass it. After that, Democrats intro-
duced narrower bills like the Freedom to Vote Act and the
John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but so far they
have run aground on the same obstacles.^6 Now we fi nally
have a small, bipartisan group of senators exploring whether
it would be possible to at least fi x holes in the Electoral Count
Act, an archaic and confusing 19th-century law that Trump
tried to use to overturn the election in 2020.
Did the Democrats blow what might have been their one
chance to avert a future constitutional crisis by making it,