You only need to answer to a single question in order to cast your vote in November: What would happen to America if Trump were re-elected? You might think the answer requires speculation. It does not. It can be answered by simple observation. There is another country whose previous leader was reelected in 2022 thanks to a fanatical adoring base consisting of about 25% of the electorate, a wave of anti-democratic nationalist populism, and a political deal giving ultimate power to religious fundamentalists. I refer to Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel.

David Shulman, a professor emeritus at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and 2016 winner of the Israel Prize (the country’s highest cultural honor), in a recent piece in The New York Review of Books, gave the following account of what followed Natanyahu’s reelection in 2022:

For the last fifteen months, since this government was sworn in, we have watched the accelerating disintegration of the state and its institutions. No one, not even the most optimistic of our [Israel’s] enemies, could have predicted this swift decline. We have a prime minister whose main talent is to contrive ever more unscrupulous schemes for his own political survival . . . a society hovering on the brink of civil war; a sick economy impoverished by unimaginably vast transfers of citizens’ tax money to the ultrareligious factions and their yeshivas; a civil service that has been gutted by the appointment of political hacks and sycophants in place of professionals; a legal system, once more or less functional, in danger of being destroyed . . . once-banned violent . . . extremists, relegitimized by Netanyahu, in the Knesset and high-ranking positions in the government . . . [It is as if the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had been appointed head of the FBI.] This is the short list. I won’t ruin your day with the long one.

He did ruin my day. I hope I have ruined yours.