This year’s presidential election has been marked less by a continued erosion of political norms than by a desperate and fatalist Republican Party abruptly jettisoning them.



GOP nominee Donald Trump has promised to jail his opponent Hillary Clinton if he becomes president. With macabre consistency, he and his allies let slip fantasies in which she is murdered or executed. They have recruited the FBI to influence the election, and the FBI has accepted the invitation. Trump has asked mobs of his supporters, many of them white nationalists and armed reactionaries, to flood urban precincts and intimidate minority voters, whom he’s accused of participating in a global scheme to steal the election.

In these waning days of the campaign, Trump and his surrogates, including down-ballot Republicans running for reelection to the Senate, have settled on a somewhat contradictory message: Trump is warning his supporters that the republic cannot withstand four or eight years of a Clinton administration, let alone decades of liberal control of the Supreme Court. But his minions in the GOP are suggesting that they won’t allow Clinton to flip Court’s ideological balance; some of them are going so far as to suggest there’s nothing about a Clinton presidency for Republican voters to worry about, since they will vanquish her agenda, and probably impeach her for good measure.

“I think if Clinton should get elected, I guarantee you in one year she’ll be impeached and indicted,” Trump’s top surrogate, Rudy Giuliani, told conservatives in Iowa on Wednesday. “It’s just going to happen. We’re going to sort of vote for a Watergate.”

Trump, who steps on his own messages with comical frequency, indulges this scenario as well, perhaps unaware that it contradicts his apocalyptic visions of a liberal Clinton onslaught.