Is 2024 Doomed to Repeat 1968 or 2020—or Both?

robosmith · May 10, 2024

Is 2024 Doomed to Repeat 1968 or 2020—or Both?

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Trump’s announcement that he has no intention of peacefully accepting another defeat this fall, by the way, was only one of many extreme statements he made on his campaign swing. A day after being found in contempt of court for defying a gag order that prohibited the former President from posting social-media attacks on witnesses and the judge in his New York case, Trump disparaged the charges against him as “bullshit” and mocked the “kangaroo court” where he is being tried on allegations that he sought to tilt the 2016 election by paying the former adult-film star Stormy Daniels a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to buy her silence before the voting. Amid familiar complaints about electric cars and his favorite false claim that, when he was President, the U.S. had the greatest economy in the history of the world, there was a palpable threat of violence in his rhetoric. At one point, Trump announced, theatrically, “If we don’t win this election, I don’t think our country is going to survive. I’ve never said that publicly, I don’t think, but I’ve felt it for a long time. I actually think our country’s not going to survive.”

This is history as a cautionary tale. The Biden-Humphrey, Gaza-Vietnam, Trump-Nixon parallels may be inexact, but remind me, again, just why the Democrats decided to pick Chicago for this year’s convention? Already, activist groups are promising major protests over Biden’s support for Israel during the August gathering, all but guaranteeing bad split-screen visuals emphasizing young progressives’ disillusion with a President who urgently needs a strong youth turnout to beat Trump. “It looks like a repeat in the making,” the Democratic consultant Don Rose, who, in 1968, served as a spokesman for one of the main antiwar groups, told Chicago’s CBS News affiliate this week. “At this moment, there’s a perfect parallel.” With confrontations between campus protesters and police spreading nationwide in the wake of Columbia’s crackdown, Meghan McCain, somewhat more crudely, summed up the emerging conventional wisdom about 2024 in a tweet on Thursday: “The DNC convention this summer is going to be a fcking shit show.”

The truth is that it’s far too early to know whether the historical dread that many Democrats feel about a 1968 redux is warranted. Maybe, by the fall, the war in Gaza will no longer be front and center. Perhaps, by then, the students will be more focussed on Trump’s threats to their reproductive freedom, their democracy, or consumed by some other Trumpian outrage that has yet to occur. What’s already both knowable and known, however, is that if Trump is once more defeated, he’s planning on pulling a 2020 all over again. On this, at least, take him at his word.