With Donald Trump now having secured the Republican nomination, Democrats and the dwindling number of “never-Trump” Republicans are once again rolling out the type of apocalyptic rhetoric about democracy’s imminent demise that dominated US political discourse in the late 2010s. “We have eight months to save our republic,” warned Liz Cheney. Likewise, the neoconservative Robert Kagan has prophesied that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” and “we should stop pretending” otherwise.

Despite Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, this doom-and-gloom narrative, which frames democracy as perilously teetering on the verge of collapse, never really went away. During the 2022 midterm electoral campaign, well before Trump’s return, President Joe Biden argued that the “extreme MAGA philosophy” was “like semifascism,” while the liberal media anxiously worried that a tsunami-like “Red Wave” would wash away the republic.

After these various prognostications proved incorrect, one might have expected politicians, analysts, and casual observers to temper their rhetoric. Instead, the opposite happened. Commentators like Tara Setmayer, for example, maintained that “the intangible, largely esoteric concept of defending democracy” had been the cause of the Democrats’ success. Specifically, she claimed that high turnout in Georgia and Michigan, as well as increased voter engagement from younger Americans throughout the United States, proved that “democracy emerged as the big winner of 2022.” Put another way, Setmayer suggested that the apocalyptic rhetoric of the midterm campaigns was effective and thus should remain de rigueur.