Lisa Miller clearly comes to condemn Trump, not to praise him. Yet her polemic captures a common justification of his administration’s violent, cruel, and authoritarian ethnonationalism. This striking tension should raise questions about both her diagnosis of our democratic malaise and her prescription for solving it.

The stark contrast Miller draws—between a democracy-stultifying system of “checks and balances” and a majoritarian expression of popular will—is also central to the MAGA movement’s rhetoric and actions. Echoing Trump’s own language, Miller stresses that political institutions are “dominated by elites,” leading to the “atrophy” of mass politics. Her invocation of “older traditions” of constitutional law, along with her call to mobilize “mass majorities” that respond to “ordinary people’s needs,” likewise echo the White House’s proclamations of constitutional fidelity and its appeals to “ordinary Americans.” And just as Miller decries the idea of states acting as “a veto of the national public interest,” so the Trump administration has sued blue states over trans athlete and immigration policies it perceives as un-American.

Of course, it is possible that MAGA is right about the cause of our political dysfunction but wrong about what’s to be done. Miller might distinguish her position from Trump’s by arguing that her proposals, unlike his, are actually grounded in the interests and wishes of ordinary Americans. She does cite polls showing majority support for certain progressive policies. But Trump can point to more than hypothetical majorities. He secured an actual electoral victory by campaigning on very different issues than the ones Miller foregrounds. He won the popular vote in November by more than 2 million ballots thanks to substantial rightward shifts among “seemingly every possible grouping of Americans,” as the New York Times put it. He won, moreover, without hiding his morally odious views or anti-democratic tendencies. And polling suggests that majorities still support some of his anti-immigrant and anti-trans policies, even after months of cruel crackdowns.

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