Trump and Harris are neck and neck. This is a five-alarm fire | Robert Reich

Two weeks before Election Day, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are essentially neck and neck.

Neither candidate is ahead by a single point in the New York Times polling average in five battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

How is that possible? Even if the polls were systematically wrong and Harris was ahead of Trump by, say, 5%, I would still be appalled that so many Americans in swing states would support Trump.

I’ve spent most of my life fighting bullies, from the elementary school bullies who teased, threatened, and occasionally beat me, to the 1960s white supremacists who murdered my friend Mickey Schwerner he tried to register black voters in Mississippi.

I protested against Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War and advocated for Richard Nixon – whose henchmen broke into the Watergate complex and then tried to cover up his illegal actions – to be impeached.

I watched Ronald Reagan urge Americans to accept the cruel fraud of trickle-down economics and legitimize corporate denigration of unions.

I watched George W. Bush insist on invading Iraq based on the lie that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” invade Afghanistan because terrorists lived there, and unify the world Gulag with torture chambers built.

When I was U.S. Secretary of Labor, I fought against Republican tyrants who wanted to make it easier for CEOs and their big investors to get richer by squeezing their workers. Later, I fought the Wall Street bullies who gambled away other people’s money and then, when their bets turned out bad, were bailed out by taxpayers.

But in all my years, I have never met a dirtier tyrant than Donald Trump.

He is the tyrant of all tyrants. He spews dangerous lies like most people breathe.

He has degraded and weakened our system of home rule, attempted a coup against the United States, divided Americans with toxic bigotry, and rewarded his wealthy supporters with tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

Trump created a Supreme Court that took away women’s right to their own bodies and exempted presidents from criminal liability.

In the last few weeks he has become even more detached from reality, more awkward and even more incoherent.

He says that if he returns to power, he will take revenge on his political opponents – including many loyal Americans who defied him – by calling them an “enemy within” and openly threatening to use the U.S. military to use against them.

He says he wants to rid America of “scum” and “vermin,” including refugees, immigrants and Democratic officials like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi.

He is threatening to withdraw the ability of television stations to broadcast news because he doesn’t like the reporting.

On Sunday, he said he had subpoenaed the recordings from CBS, claiming that the network’s editing of Harris’ recent appearance on 60 Minutes was misleading.

He refuses to be bound by the results of the upcoming election. That means America will likely endure weeks or months of legal battles after Election Day, possibly even involving violence.

I was hopeful in late July when Joe Biden selflessly dropped out of the election and passed the baton to his Vice President, Kamala Harris.

And even more hopeful because Harris has proven herself to be a tough, cocky, powerful activist and force for positive change. Her debate performance against Trump was the best I’ve ever seen.

But at the moment I’m honestly worried. How can so many Americans be blind to who Trump is and what he is up to?

I don’t think this is all due to misogyny and racism. Certainly gender and race continue to play a large role in our politics, but they alone cannot explain what is happening.

I also don’t think it’s because of our collective amnesia about the chaos Trump wrought during his presidency. Most of us remember how terrible it was, including a pandemic that he refused to acknowledge or combat for months.

One reason for this could be that we want to normalize our politics and pretend that this election is like any other, even when there is evidence to the contrary.

Accepting the reality of who Trump is and what he wants to do is just too scary.

Part of it may also be that many Americans would prefer to blow up the system as a whole, destroying democracy and our institutions of self-government, rather than settle for incremental change, because they feel that the system is hopelessly stacked against them.

Beyond these possible explanations, there are certain people who are also responsible for bringing us to the brink of this catastrophe.

At the top of my list is Rupert Murdoch — whose Fox News, New York Post and Wall Street Journal editorials have amplified Trump’s lies and repeatedly spread them to tens of millions of Americans.

There is also Elon Musk, the richest person in the world whose X platform, formerly known as Twitter, has become a source of disinformation, inflammatory conspiracy theories, pro-Trump garbage and hateful lies about Harris.

For example, Musk continues to claim that Democrats are flying large numbers of illegal immigrants into swing states to vote illegally. One such post was viewed 34 million times.

Musk’s pro-Trump Super Pac has hired an estimated 400 employees in the seven key battleground states, as well as a platoon of Republican party officials.

The New York Times reports that Trump and Musk speak directly to each other several times a week. This is likely a violation of campaign finance laws, which prohibit coordination between candidates and Super Pacs.

Trump’s other big donors They include a cavalry of billionaires – notably Miriam Adelson (wife of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson), Liz and Dick Uihlein (owners of packaging materials company Uline), and Timothy Mellon (scion of Gilded Age baron Andrew Mellon).

Another reason why Trump and Harris are neck and neck is the silence of respected business leaders.

At the top of the list is Jamie Dimon, CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, who describes himself as “a patriot before I was the CEO of JPMorgan” and who regularly speaks out about the injustices and inequalities in today’s world America expresses.

Dimon, a lifelong Democrat, is considered a “spokesman” for American business.

But when it comes to denouncing the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War, Dimon’s silence is deafening.

Who else is responsible? I wouldn’t be surprised if Vladimir Putin again populated the election with hackers and bots that favor Trump, like Putin did in 2016.

At this point – two weeks before Election Day, with the race virtually undecided in battleground states – none of us who care about the future of this country can afford to be mere spectators.

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. A five-alarm fire. A Category 5 hurricane.

Do what you can.

• Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good.” His latest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is available now. He is a columnist for the Guardian US. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com