We must start urgently talking about the dangers of a second Trump presidency

With Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, the battle lines are drawn for November. Unless something very weird happens, we’re looking at a Joe Biden and Donald Trump rematch.

It’s time – past time, really – to sweep away any remaining delusions about the viability of a more moderate Republican challenger or what a second Trump term would bring.

Now the question isn’t who’s running but whether American democracy will endure.

To put it bluntly, not if Trump is elected.

He’s already told us, many times over – and in abundantly clear terms – what he will do with a second term:

He’ll prosecute his perceived enemies with the full power of the government. He’ll call out the military to put down citizen protest. He’ll never allow a fair election again.

“Twelve more years” is no longer just a joke to pander to the raucous and red-capped faithful.

“The serious scholars of fascism are now saying that the ‘F-word’ is merited,” Jeff Sharlet, a Dartmouth professor and author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, told me in an interview on Wednesday.

Do Americans really want to live in a fascist or authoritarian nation? Some may believe it will work out just fine – that the loss of freedom may hurt others, but not them – but most of us don’t want that. Or we wouldn’t if we were fully aware of the consequences.

I talked with Sharlet about the actions that the mainstream press and regular citizens can take now that we know what we know.

Newsrooms big and small, he believes, need to educate their staffs about the dangers of fascism.

“There needs to be a pause,” he said, in coverage as as usual, and an internal reckoning. Sharlet suggests that media leaders bring in scholars – for example, Yale’s Timothy Snyder, who wrote On Tyranny – to lead