BENZONIA, MI — Eight people were filling in their ballots today when I arrived at Benzonia Township Hall on Michigan’s fourth day of early voting. Before the era of Trump voting was a sacrosanct celebration of American citizenship. But this year voting in this tiny town of 500 residents close to Lake Michigan is fraught with all manner of peril. The simple act of voting has been violated by menace and lies.
In its fundamental form voting is a process. Until this year elections in my lifetime, even the fiercely contested ones, were conducted with the clear expectation that appearing at the polls was safe, votes were counted with precision, and the outcome could be trusted as accurate.
Four years ago Donald Trump wrecked the trust in that process. We all know the details. Before election day Trump repeatedly inoculated himself from losing by declaring the election results would be rigged. The evening of the election he declared victory before all the votes were counted. In the following weeks he assembled a conspiracy and a mob to attack the Capitol to impede Congress from certifying the results.
Trump has made it clear in 2024 that he’s prepared to disrupt that process again. Take a moment to consider what is happening, and what is at stake. It’s an attack on a vital aspect of American life, a process we didn’t worry much about. Trump is promising to wreck that core process that defines the American experience and our national security.
Though most Americans take it for granted one of our core strengths is the national devotion to process. We expect stuff to work. Airline flights on time. Cracked roads fixed. Clean water from our taps. Ample food on the shelves. Restaurants inspected. Gas at the station. Electricity available 24/7. Fair and honest elections.
And when process falters we complain – loudly.
What most Americans don’t fully recognize, even those that support him, is that Trump is determined to tear at more American process than he’s already injured. If he succeeds there will be much, much greater consequence.
Let’s start with voting , which was far from the only process Trump disrupted during his first presidency. He encouraged MAGA violence against election workers and officials. He made lies and conspiracy central principles of the process of campaigning for president. He weakened the U.S. postal system. He attacked the process of recruiting and cultivating allies in NATO, the American alliance that had kept the western democracies relatively stable since World War Two. He even attacked basic business principles and process of of core supporters. You might remember that Trump wrecked one of the country’s largest farm export markets when he issued tariffs on China and grievously injured an international trade that provided two thirds of China’s soybeans.
As a candidate this year he interfered in the federal response to deadly flooding in the Appalachians, disrupting the process of assisting people injured and property damaged by the country’s worst – so far – climate change disaster. The number of people affected by that villainous move has yet to be counted.
These and other ugly Trump attacks on process reached their intended results. They grievously impaired America’s sense of purpose, tilted its stability, damaged its confidence. They animated tens of millions of Americans who shared in his treachery. And they provided Trump justification for asserting that he, and he alone, was capable of addressing the “American carnage” of his first term, and his most recent assessment that the United States had devolved into the world’s “garbage can.”
With every foul phrase and mumbled threat Trump is like a plague of termites chewing into the foundation of American process. If he wins a second term – and I don’t think he will – more attacks on process are coming with much more devastating results.
I started to understand the ubiquity of process more than four years ago, while reporting about how nations were responding to the start of the pandemic. I reached out to Raj Pandit, an esteemed environmental professor at the University of Delhi, to ask him about conditions in India. He told me India would muddle through, as it always does, during periods of national stress. He noted that once the infection subsided the United States would also be in decent shape.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because one of America’s most important strengths is its allegiance to process,” he replied. “America has a process for everything. Look at Amazon. Log on. Order. Receive It two days later. You guys take it for granted. America is the only country capable of inventing a company like Amazon. It’s the greatest expression of process in human history.”
Yet in a second term Trump would be capable of harming Amazon, a signal champion of process. His proposed tariffs would tighten import markets, significantly raise consumer prices, ignite high inflation, and damage Amazon’s sales.
Here’s another keystone process at risk. Trump has called for deporting undocumented residents, and maybe their families. It’s a devastating strike at immigrants and the process of immigration, which has provided muscle for American production, ingenuity for business, and a path to prosperity for almost every family in a nation of immigrants. More immediately, Trump’s deportation scheme would hurt his own supporters — and the rest of us — by causing shortages of food. I’ve spent a lot of time in fields and food factories.Guess who’s milking the cows, slaughtering the beef, and picking the fruits and vegetables?
Mass deportation will also lead to labor shortages in the service industry and trades everywhere in the country. If Trump’s deportation plan goes into effect try putting on a new roof in Kentucky, constructing homes in Texas and Arizona, picking apples in Washington state, repairing vehicles in Ohio, managing hotels in Missouri.
I’m convinced Trump will lose the election. I’m sticking to my story from earlier this year. I don’t think America is so far gone that we’ll re-elect Trump. We have a process for rejecting a tyrant.
— Keith Schneider
