Well, he tweeted let’s delay the elections

Well, he tweeted it. Maybe some people were surprised, but some people have predicted this turn, and you could go through the social media archives and probably find some of those predictions dated in the fall of 2016. He is a rather predictable man, and the only surprise is how well he plays the part. But he is not surprising, which is something to both hate and admire, I suppose, although I mostly hate it.

Maybe he just wanted to float the idea. Maybe he didn’t mean it. His people, those steadfast supporters hoping one day to be carved into the permanent record of his statue garden, will say it is but a joke. They will nod and wink. They will explain the joke to you, and you will have to look over your shoulder because they are surely not nodding and winking at you — you have made it very clear you are not down with the mission, and, as far as you can tell, the mission is self-serving.

In their book How Democracies Die (2018), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt conclude one of their chapters:

Norms are the soft guardrails of democracy; as they break down, the zone of acceptable political behavior expands, giving rise to discourse and action that could imperil democracy. Behavior that was once considered unthinkable in American politics is becoming thinkable. Even if Donald Trump does not break the hard guardrails of…