Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They’re not acting like it.

For a fractious coalition that at times seems to be held together with spit, baling wire, and old memories of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party has a remarkably singular message: Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country. For the Biden campaign, the existential threat to democracy has become the overriding theme in his […]

For a fractious coalition that at times seems to be held together with spit, baling wire, and old memories of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party has a remarkably singular message: Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country.

For the Biden campaign, the existential threat to democracy has become the overriding theme in his bid for reelection. “There is one existential threat: It’s Donald Trump,” Biden said at a fundraiser in February.

For the environmental activists in the party, climate change is the existential concern, and a Trump victory would be devastating for the planet, as Biden himself argued at Thursday’s debate: “The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and [Trump] didn’t do a damn thing about it.” 

Reproductive rights, too, are cast in existential terms. “Trump poses an existential threat to abortion rights in Pennsylvania,” Democratic US Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon said at a press conference in April. “If given the chance, he will ban abortion across the country with or without Congress.”

Existential math

As it happens, I know a little bit about existential threats, having written a book in 2019 on the subject. It refers to those threats that could conceivably risk the extinction or widespread destruction of humanity.

The real way to tell the difference between an existential threat and a more ordinary one is not what people warning say, it’s what they do. Existential threats demand existential responses. After all, if you conceivably felt the country and perhaps even the world were truly at risk, you’d presumably do everything you could to prevent that catastrophe. 

When it comes to the Democrats and the left — from the Biden campaign on down to the activists — it is impossible to look at what they’re doing and conclude that they truly believe Donald Trump is an existential threat. And that may pose an existential challenge to the party.

Winning is the only thing

Biden entered Thursday night’s debate clearly losing, and it’s safe to say that afterward, very few people — outside perhaps Biden’s inner circle — think the president is positioned to win this election. The debate spotlighted the one issue that voters have repeatedly told pollsters is a serious problem, the one issue Biden can do almost nothing to change: his age. And rather than seizing a rare opportunity to disprove those fears, Biden’s halting, often disoriented performance did the opposite. 

Cue the Democratic panic and an entire New York Times editorial board worth of columnists urging Biden to step aside. The campaign instantly said, as it has said every time these calls have been made, that the president would do no such thing, and at this point there’s little reason not to believe them.

Some of this is risk aversion: A president has never called off a reelection bid this late in the campaign, and no one really knows what would come next. Some of it is presumably pride. Biden is a proud man who was on his third try for the presidency when he finally won in 2020. Giving up is not really in his DNA. 

Some of it is political calculation. If the president steps aside, the logical candidate is Vice-President Kamala Harris, but Harris has struggled in office and her poor poll ratings mirror those of Biden. If the Democratic Party tries to sideline Harris and open the door to other candidates through an open convention, they risk alienating her and her supporters and opening up further wounds in the Democratic coalition. 

Bad choices, all. But the nature of an existential threat is that everything else — feelings, ambition, everything — is put aside. Yet even as the chance of a second Trump presidency rises by the day, the Democratic political establishment does nothing. That’s not how you act in the face of an existential threat. 

Existential until it isn’t

It’s not just politicians, though. The winners of presidential elections pick Supreme Court justices, and it was obvious that a then-83-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg might not make it through the next presidential term after the 2016 election, potentially imperiling abortion rights, among other Democratic priorities. Yet Ginsburg — buoyed by a number of Democratic supporters who viewed calls for her retirement as sexist — refused to step down. We all know what happened later. 

One would think that sitting Democratic justices would have learned from Ginsburg’s example and acted differently in the face of a new supposedly existential threat from Trump. Yet Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — who are 70 and 64, respectively — have so far refused to heed increasingly desperate calls from writers like my colleague Ian Milhiser to step down and lock in their seats for decades. Each has perfectly good reasons to stay on, as did Ginsburg; none of those reasons make sense in the face of a true existential threat.

Nowhere is the gap between existential rhetoric and existential action greater than in climate change, which has emerged in recent years as one of the top priorities for Democrats. 

You can’t find a climate activist — and, increasingly, a Democratic politician — who doesn’t frame climate change as an existential issue. With reason — the worst-case climate scenarios really do represent something like an existential threat to the future of not just the US, but the entire world. And given Trump’s determined opposition to actual climate policy, it’s fair to view his potential return to the White House as a part of that threat. 

Yet there is a clear and yawning gap between climate rhetoric and climate action. On the Democratic political side, that’s perhaps understandable; climate change is not a top priority for most voters, and politicians have to grapple with that fact. (You can’t save the Earth if you don’t have the votes.) 

Too often, though, climate activists and groups end up opposing many of the new energy projects that are needed to actually decarbonize energy, from transmission lines to solar projects to wind power, often tying them up in years of litigation. The Sunrise Movement, one of the most radical climate activist groups out there, has bafflingly withheld its endorsement from Biden so far, even though he prioritized passage of the most ambitious climate bill in US history. 

The groups have reasons for what they’re doing — there are always reasons — but if climate change were treated as the existential threat the loudest activists say it is, those reasons wouldn’t matter.

Do you believe what you say?

Treating an existential threat as existential requires the one thing that the Democratic coalition has increasingly struggled to do: prioritization. It means putting aside personal feelings, individual ambition, and subjective preferences in favor of a single goal: success. Otherwise, it’s just empty rhetoric.

As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who has been pushing the possibility of an open convention to replace Biden, said on his podcast after Thursday’s debate: “If the fate of American democracy is hinging on this election — as Democrats are always telling me it is and as I think there is a chance that it is — then you should do everything you can to win it.” That a strategy, any strategy, might make people or groups uncomfortable cannot be a reason not to pursue it in the face of an existential threat. Not if you believe what you’re saying.   

This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.