With the mid-term elections just days away, Trump has been caroming around the country making increasingly frenzied, incoherent pleas for voters to support the GOP. When he’s not off on bizarre riffs about admiring the asses of sycophants and foul bromides about jihadists running for the Senate and immigrants burning down Paris, he continually tells his shrinking cohort of adoring fans, Pretend I’m on the ballot.

Trump’s—and the GOP’s—problem is that his narcissism, the classic blinkered narcissism of the authoritarian strongman, is standing in the way of their political radar. Encircled by his cultlike followers cheering his every inane, incoherent, antidemocratic sentence, Trump simply cannot fathom that the broader public is busily ditching him and scrubbing his sadistic, strongman spectacle, his gauche merch, and his potty mouth from the collective psyche. He cannot comprehend or internalize the dozens of polls that have shown that the public, by nearly two-to-one margins, rejects his persona and his cruel, destructive, political vision.

“Pretend I’m on the ballot” is as good an incentive as any attack ad that Democratic spin-doctors could have come up with for tens of millions of voters to head to the polls and cast votes up and down the ballot for Democrats. It makes Biden’s awkward embrace of the phrase “Bidenomics,” during a time of high inflation and economic angst, seem positively benign.

Trump has spent the past two years on a wrecking-ball mission against the American government, the American people, and America’s international relationships, while being cheered on by the GOP-led Congress, aided and abetted by GOP governors and state legislators, and supported by America’s opportunistic new tech-overlords. If there is any karma in the universe, Tuesday will be the GOP and the oligarchy’s day of reckoning.

Increasingly fascist in its outlooks and its methods, this regime—for it is that far more than a regular administration—has systematically undermined the rule of law and attacked pretty much every part of the Constitution apart from the Second Amendment; and, it has done so not just with GOP congressional and state-level blind-eyes but with their active connivance.

Trump’s regime has repeatedly gone after the press, and attempted to ban critical outlets from covering the White House and the Pentagon, pressured television broadcasters to take liberal late night comedians off-air, encouraged oligarchs to buy up media outlets and remake them as pliant supporters of Trumpism, strong-armed universities to fire staff and expel students it dislikes and to end “diversity” hiring and admissions policies (a code word for firing or demoting the Black and brown people in academia and their departments), arrested and deported students simply for writing essays and articles about Israel-Palestine that stand contrary to administration policy, and bullied white-shoe law firms into committing to hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono services.

The Trump regime has destroyed USAID and, in the process, knowingly condemned untold millions of people around the world to disease and to death. It has yanked the welcome mat, that has been such a defining part of the American story, out from under the feet of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. In doing so, it has separated families, imprisoned hard-working immigrants in gulag-like conditions, and “rendered” tens of thousands of immigrants to third countries where they are often held indefinitely in violent prisons. It has sent masked agents of the state into American cities from Los Angeles to Chicago, Charlotte to Minneapolis, where they have gunned down immigrants and citizens alike, and has then dared to accuse those who were killed of being “terrorists” and “paid agitators.” It has dragged toddlers—literally children still in diapers—into immigration court without any legal counsel to argue their case for being allowed to stay in the US. And it has attempted to deport hundreds of unaccompanied child-immigrants back to clear-and-present danger on middle-of-the-night flights to countries such as Honduras and Guatemala —flights stopped only by the last-minute interventions of judges.

The regime has preached family values even while its leadership is entirely compromised by their apparent involvement in the Epstein scandal. Trump and Vance have denounced their political opponents as undermining the sanctity of the family even while they double down on Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramiswamy’s odious advertisement that essentially accuses the Democratic candidate, Amy Acton, of lying about being raped by her stepfather when she was 12 years old.

Trump has perverted the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and immigration agencies so as to target his critics, from ex-FBI director James Comey to Congress member Ilhan Omar, getting a prostrate DOJ and FBI to launch clearly politically motivated investigations, and using the full force of a mobilized state to serve his personal whims. He has publicly called for the execution of opponents whom he has labeled as treasonous and has mocked protesters at his rallies while they are being savagely beaten by his supporters. In his recent campaign appearances, where one protester after the next has been thumped, Trump has morphed into something closer to the lyncher in chief than the commander in chief.

This regime has launched an illegal war in Iran—one that has resulted in both entirely pointless loss of life and economic devastation, and that has elevated inflation in large parts of the world to a level deeply destructive of communal well-being; and Trump himself, in a fit of pique, has threatened to end a civilization, which is as close to an explicit nuclear threat as one can make without actually saying, “I’m going to drop a thermonuclear weapon on your sorry heads.” He has, in so doing, deliberately and explicitly injected the language of hyper-terrorism into American diplomacy. The regime has arrogated to itself the right to assassinate purported drug smugglers on the high seas, without providing any evidence as to the “smugglers’” guilt—and, notwithstanding that, even if they were smuggling drugs, no international law gives the US government the right to simply kill suspected criminals. It has kidnapped an overseas leader, (the perhaps unlamented) Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, and is making war plans to attack Cuba. It has threatened to annex Danish territory and has, repeatedly, mocked Canadian sovereignty and pushed the idea of Canada’s becoming the 51st state. It has unilaterally renamed international waters after America and floated the notion of renaming entire oceans after Donald J. Trump.

This regime has sanctioned international organizations such as the International Criminal Court that have a mandate to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity. And it has denigrated democratic allies, from Canada to the UK to Norway, often in the crudest possible terms, leaving America increasingly bereft of friends on the global stage. Just the other day Trump, angry that he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, lambasted Norway as a “shithouse country.” At the same time, Team Trump has cozied up to some of the most brutal countries and leaders on earth, overtly positioning the United States as a force not for global good and the spreading of democracy but as an autocracy intent only on strong-arming other peoples and countries into quiescence.

This summer, Trump’s regime, which fetishizes violence-for-the-sake-of-violence, converted the White House grounds into a cage-fighting arena as a birthday celebration for Trump and for the American Republic, and then floated the idea of livestreaming executions. It regularly broadcasts snuff movies showing the moment US weapons blow up fishing vessels in the Pacific and Caribbean.

Millions of Americans are suffering from the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed by Congress at Trump’s urging last year, as well as the insane tariffs unleashed on the world, and, by extension, on US consumers. Because of the legislation, they are losing access to health insurance—at the same moment that Robert Kennedy is dismantling the public health infrastructure—food stamps, and housing assistance; and, because of the tariffs and the Iran war, they are finding that basic consumer goods cost far more than they used to.

Trump’s response? He is positively giddy with delight that high oil prices mean high profits for US oil producers; and on tariffs he has simply doubled down, even in the face of opposition from the Supreme Court. While the public suffers economically, Trump is busy constructing a gaudy White House ballroom and replacing bathroom faucets, picture frames, and even curtain railings with tasteless gold ornamentation. There’s a “let them eat cake” quality to his actions, a blithe dismissal of the optics of all of this shiny gaucherie in a time of economic angst.

While most Americans are getting swept backward economically by a combination of soaring energy prices, rising interest rates, and the threat of AI taking their jobs, Trump and his inner circle are on a self-dealing binge that is, surely, the most egregious display of public corruption in US history. It makes Tammany Hall smell like roses. In the past two years, Trump’s net worth has increased by about $3 billion, much of it through his hawking of cryptocurrency to gullible fans as well as to wealthy businessmen who realize that it’s an easy way to grease the wheels and get access to Trump regarding their pet projects and political priorities.

Nothing is off-limits for this crew of Class A grifters: Trump’s negotiators with Russia are busy selling out Ukraine in exchange for oil deals that pad their pockets. Ex–DHS secretary Kristi Noem was, it is widely alleged, channeling lucrative advertising contracts to people close to her and her family. Trump himself saw nothing wrong with accepting a nearly half-billion-dollar airplane as a gift from the Qatari government. Melania saw nothing wrong with accepting tens of millions of dollars of promotional money from Amazon to promote her ludicrous biopic.

In April, Hungary’s electorate said sayonara to longtime autocratic leader Viktor Orbán. Last week, voters in Brazil kicked Flávio Bolsonaro and his Trumpy-fascist vision to the curb—after which Bolsonaro fled, his tail between his legs, to Florida. And voters in Serbia elected a student-led coalition, in the process sending packing strongman leader Aleksandar Vučić.

Meanwhile, in just a few days, voters here in the US will have our chance not just for a regular midterm reset but for a fundamental moral recalibration of this oh-so-damaged country and a thorough repudiation of Trump’s autocracy. Even with the hundreds of millions of dollars that Elon Musk has poured into the election to try to shore up GOP fortunes, there are now scores of House seats and about a dozen Senate seats that seem to be in play, with the Republicans playing defense even in ruby-red lands such as Mississippi and Texas.

The United States has a rare window open to begin to undo the extraordinary harm that Trump and his GOP acolytes have inflicted on it over the past two years. We have a chance to say “not in our names,” and to punish the political party that let this authoritarian, xenophobic, racist, grifting rot take root.

It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. There is no moral margin for error.