Tonight, Vice President Kamala Harris stood on the Ellipse, a lawn by the White House that dates back to the 19th century, and urged Americans to consider the country’s more recent past.
The Ellipse was a setting intended to draw the public’s gaze back to Jan. 6, 2021, when former President Donald Trump used that site to urge his supporters to march to the Capitol, before they started a deadly riot he now calls a “day of love.”
It was also a place that underscored how plainly, thoroughly and grimly abnormal this election has become.
A candidate who tried to overturn the last election is not usually in striking distance of winning the next one, with the future of a criminal prosecution hanging in the balance. An opposing candidate’s closing argument speech is not usually held at the birthplace of an insurrection. And American voters do not usually find themselves needing to form an opinion on whether the next president should use executive power to imprison enemies or even to deploy the military against them.
We have had a lot of elections. We have had a lot of close elections. But we really haven’t done this before.
Never before have voters been warned so clearly and persistently that a certain candidate would govern like a “fascist” or a “dictator,” as some of Trump’s former aides have in recent days. Never before has that same candidate spent the last weeks of his presidential campaign escalating threats toward his enemies anyway. And it is not usually the case that, in the closing days of a campaign, a candidate finds himself denying accounts that he praised Hitler.
