Always divided, America is now combustible. Trump and Harris show it as never before

Never before in US history have voters chosen between two presidential candidates who so starkly personify America’s chronic divides. Not even in the 1860 election, on the eve of the US Civil War, when the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln emerged the victor from a four-way contest which featured two rival Democrats.

In this epochal election, a black woman who is the daughter of immigrants is up against a racist misogynist who rose to political prominence as the untitled leader of the birther movement, which denied the very legitimacy of America’s first president of colour, and launched his first presidential campaign with an attack on Mexican immigrants.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris: a picture of America’s great divide, as never yet seen in a presidential contest.Credit: AP/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

Kamala Harris is not just a Democrat but a democrat: a believer in free and fair elections and the sanctity of their outcomes. Donald Trump has repeatedly defamed democracy, both in 2020 when he lost and even in 2016 when he won. Refusing to countenance that Hillary Clinton had amassed 3 million more votes nationwide – which was irrelevant to the result, of course, because of the vagaries of the Electoral College – Trump speciously claimed that up to 5 million of those ballots had been cast illegally.

The former president is a demagogue, while his 60-year-old opponent is decorous and demure. Harris is a former attorney who believes in the majesty of constitutional law, whereas Trump, a wannabe dictator, once threatened to terminate the country’s rulebook.

In the billing of this election, the pithy tagline “the prosecutor against the felon” has taken hold. But that only scratches the surface. Trump and Harris represent two different versions of America, and two contrasting historical traditions. Trump reminds us that racism, nativism and conspiratorialism have since 1776 been a through-line of the American story. Harris fits within the more hopeful narrative of national progress.

These countervailing storylines were reflected in the choice of venues for the candidates’ 11th-hour set-piece rallies. Trump hired Madison Square Garden, even though his campaign doubtless knew it would invite comparisons with the Nazi rally held in 1939 by American fascists. Harris picked the Ellipse on the National Mall, the very spot from which Trump incited the January 6 insurrection. There, with the White House at her back and the Washington monument in her gaze, she spoke of “Normandy, Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall”, all symbolic landmarks in America’s myriad freedom struggles.

Never before have Americans been presented with the prospect of such divergent presidencies. Trump, by firing thousands of public servants deemed to obstruct his path, could effect the most dramatic change to the make-up of the federal government since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal first expanded Washington’s executive power. He would deploy the Justice Department to pursue “the enemy within”, whereas Harris respects the traditional firewall between the presidency and the administration’s prosecutorial arm. Harris would uphold the remaining reproductive rights for women. Republicans would try to curtail them even further.

Trump’s “America First” foreign policy would be devastating for the freedom battle in Ukraine, and further embolden fellow authoritarians, such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Deepening the trade war with China risks a global downturn that could affect all our pocketbooks. Trump has pledged to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, a decision from the world’s second-biggest polluter that could ultimately signal defeat in the battle against global warming.

“America, we are not going back,” Harris says. By contrast, Trump’s most cherished slogan, Make America Great Again, is a statement of nostalgic nationalism. This framing is crucial to understanding this election. Trump is more of a bulwark against what is coming over the horizon. Much of Harris’s support comes from voters who see themselves either as victims of America’s past – many of them people of colour – or who believe the country should make amends for its historical sins. Much of Trump’s support comes from voters who see themselves as casualties of America’s future – a more multi-ethnic, secular and “woke” nation.

Though the norm-busting and rule-breaking of Trump’s four years in office explain much of his appeal for the MAGA base, his authoritarian tendencies remain off-putting for many wavering Republicans. Trump 1.0 could yet bar him from a Trump 2.0.

Harris, meanwhile, has been hamstrung by the mis-steps of Joe Biden’s administration, especially on immigration, and also, in these final days, by his mis-speaking. The elderly president’s latest jumble of words, which created the sense he was describing Trump supporters as “garbage”, was a gross act of political malpractice at a time when the Harris campaign wanted him hidden from view.

Yet there is also a legacy from Barack Obama’s presidency that puts obstacles in her way. Many black and left-wing thinkers were angry that the country’s first African-American president did not sufficiently champion their cause. A “monument to moderation” is how the influential writer Ta-Nehisi Coates described his presidency. That sense of frustration contributed to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which had the collateral effect of drawing the Democratic Party further to the left on questions of race, gender identity and policing. Biden, partly as a result of this trend and partly to demonstrate his reformist credentials, has pursued a more progressive presidency than his former boss. That has made the Democrats more vulnerable to the charge of wokeism and radicalism, a criticism that resonates so strongly, especially among men.

What makes this contest additionally troubling is that one of the most climactic elections in US history is also one of the closest. In a country where political violence has been so recurring, that is a combustible combination.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.