Something profound happened the day that Joe Biden withdrew his re-election bid and threw his support behind Kamala Harris. It wasn’t just the feeling of relief that we were not going to be biting our fingernails to our shoulder blades until election day. It was much more. Many people I have spoken to expressed a relief and even elation that now we had a better chance of avoiding the fascist dictatorship that Trump’s backers are trying to make a fait accompli.

Even more than that, we seemed to have turned a corner on what would be our future reality as a nation. The notion of the United States becoming a fascist stronghold has been the stuff of dystopian fiction for decades. The horror of that idea was made profoundly vivid by Margaret Atwood’s in her books The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, its sequel. Once you’ve read these books it becomes clear that these are viewed by many in the Trump camp not as cautionary tales but as “how-to” books.

Nothing expresses the far right’s arrogance in that direction more than their published plan, Project 2025. When you look at the time spent in developing that plan, the number of people involved, the money that had to have been poured in to finance the work, it becomes an even scarier prospect. The feeling develops that these guys are well organized, well financed and are capable of ending the nearly 250 years of the United States.

Sometimes when you see a disaster unfolding a realization hits you of, “Damn. This was planned. How could someone do this?” Two events in over the past 20 plus years generated that impression for me. The first one was the second plane hitting the Twin Towers. The next one was the appearance of the gallows at the January 6th insurrection. Both delivered the clear message: not random, this is a planned attack.

Evil is hard to confront. But there it was in these two examples, practically chiseled in stone for everyone to see. There have now been about 900 prosecutions and sentences of the latter event and the DOJ is not done yet. But still the evil intent of the far right is expressed by their members in Congress and their felonious candidate for the White House—calling those convicted or awaiting trials political prisoners or hostages. The clear intention to overthrow our Constitution is still present.

The corner we have turned is the feeling that the certainty of their intended outcome no longer exists. The possibility is still there of course, but it no longer seems inevitable. There is a lot that can and will happen in the next five weeks before the election. But what is happening across the country now is a sea change.

Reality is the sum of our agreements. And as a nation we’re starting to move in the direction of agreeing more that our Constitution is a good idea. We’re starting to more and more broadly agree that there is something profoundly wrong about the fact that a convicted felon, an adjudicated sex offender and a person accused and indicted for even more Federal crimes is a legitimate candidate for the Office of President.

Trump’s obsessive attention to his crowd sizes is a great indicator of this change happening. The Harris/Walz campaign is regularly filling venues to over capacity. Trump is failing to fill smaller venues and then is plagued by people walking out, bored, while he is speaking.

A new reality is building by the accumulation of agreement behind Harris and Walz and their pragmatic and sensible policy positions as opposed to Trump’s continued screeds that we are under attack, the economy has failed and that if we dare to venture outside we better be armed to the teeth and wearing Kevlar. A simple glance around our daily lives instantly shows which view jives with actual reality.

So there is cause for optimism. But that optimism has to be cautious in 20-foot high concrete letters. Why? Because criminals think they can outsmart everyone. Trump already told followers he didn’t really need their votes. He tried to throw out everyone’s vote back on January 6th.

Trump placed a big bet in people who turned out to be utterly incompetent after he lost in 2020. He’s placing a similar bet now in a bunch of people with a similar mindset. But, as much as our vaunted media outlets are trying to treat this election like just another business-as-usual event, the picture is utterly different. The Harris/Walz campaign got off to a sprinting start and has never slowed down and is becoming a juggernaut.

Meanwhile flanking organizations like Mark Elias’s Democracy Docket are arrayed around the country to tackle the dirty tricks the Trump camp has been setting up. One of those schemes, the plan to usurp the lone electoral vote in Nebraska just failed, at the hands of a Republican who had the guts to say, “No.”

More and more Republicans are turning out to say “No” to Trump. He has destroyed their party, bending it to an allegiance to him rather than to the Constitution. More and more Republicans are choosing to honor  their Oath of Office, putting the country and the Constitution first. This is in stark contrast to Trump’s continual “America First” chant which is actually just the slogan of the KKK.

The growing hope is that on November 6th we will see that Trump has lost by the largest margin in history, a true popular vote landslide. That will then be the fuel of agreement to help prevent the shenanigans and scams he will use to try to steal the Electoral College. Then we will have truly turned that corner away from fascism. And January 20, 2025 see the return of the our tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.