his is not a normal election. I don’t say that because it is now clear that, against some stiff competition, Donald Trump is the most repellent individual ever to have sought, let alone won, the presidency of the United States. The latest proof comes in a quadruple-sourced account of Trump describing US troops who died for their country as “losers” and “suckers”, and demanding that a military parade exclude wounded veterans, lest spectators glimpse an amputee. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said. There was a time when the Atlantic’s jaw-dropping report, later corroborated “in its entirety” by the Associated Press, would have proved terminal for a politician in a country where respect for the military supposedly has the status of a religious obligation. But that time is long past. It ended in 2015 when Trump branded John McCain – who had spent more than five years in a Hanoi cell as a prisoner of war – a “loser”, though of course now Trump swears blind that he never said any such thing, despite the existence of video showing him saying exactly that. In a normal election, you’d be running the numbers on the harm this would do to Trump among his avowedly patriotic base. But wiser heads have learned to give up on such calculations. Trump’s supporters will write this off as more fake news, and stick with their man even as he tramples on everything they claim to hold dear. Like he always said, he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and they’d still vote for him. Which is why it will similarly make no difference that this week he spouted conspiracist garbage about Joe Biden being controlled by people “in the dark shadows”, or reheated a Facebook-spread fantasy about black-clad looters boarding planes to fly around the country causing trouble – think of it as RiotAir – offering no evidence. Of course that won’t move the needle. Remember, this is a country where close to 200,000 people are dead thanks to a pandemic that Trump refused to admit was happening, and for which his proposed remedy was self-injected bleach. The US economy lies in tatters, racked by mass unemployment. And yet, despite that record of lethal failure, this inadequate, malignant man still has the support of 42% of the American people. That fact alone makes this an abnormal election. But that’s not the exceptional circumstance I have in mind. Rather, it is that the critical contest on 3 November is not so much between Democrat and Republican as between democrat and anti-democrat. It is that nothing less than the US’s standing as a democracy is at stake. Consider the evidence. This week, the president urged his supporters to vote twice. It wasn’t a joke. It was a message delivered in earnest. In a series of Twitter messages that the social media company hid from view for violating its rules on “civic and election integrity”, Trump told his followers to vote early by mail-in ballot and then turn up in person on election day to vote again. Here was the self-styled law-and-order candidate urging Americans to break the law. He claimed he only wanted people to test the robustness of the system – because if the system worked, then his supporters shouldn’t be allowed to cast that second ballot – but that’s the logic of the bank robber who insists he’s only emptying the safe to help the bank improve its security. Besides, there’s a pattern here. Little more than a month ago, Trump suggested that, since postal voting – set to increase massively because of the pandemic – was bound to lead to “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT election in history”, it would be best to delay the election, even though the constitution bars him from making such a move. At his convention last month, he urged the crowd, who had been chanting for “four more years” to call instead for “12 more years”, even though that too would violate the constitution. Most troubling, he has repeatedly refused to say whether he will accept defeat and leave office if that’s what the voters decide. This is what his now-constant attacks on mail-in voting are about: Trump is preparing the ground to challenge the electorate’s verdict, arguing that the result cannot be trusted because postal votes shouldn’t count. He has seen the data that shows mail-in voters are more likely to lean towards Biden, and so wants to be able to argue, come 4 November, that tens of millions of postal votes should be chucked out – leaving only the votes cast on election day, from which Trump reckons he could achieve a narrow victory. That’s why he installed a Republican donor as head of the US Postal Service, a man who has set about gutting the service’s ability to process mail-in ballots in time. And that’s why he’s starving the post office of cash. This is not guesswork, or the analysis of hostile commentators. Trump has admitted as much. Explaining why he was seeking to cut off two sources of postal service revenue, he said: “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” With Trump, he always says the quiet part out loud. Given that the polls suggest he cannot win a straight fight, Trump’s next best scenario is a cloud of confusion and doubt hanging over the November result. Sackfuls of uncounted ballots stuck in postal depots; his base crying fraud, groundlessly suggesting that the mail-in votes are forgeries: this is the context in which he reckons he could argue that the election was disputed and therefore there was no good reason for him to leave office. And who would stop him? Note that the attorney general, William Barr, supposedly the most senior law enforcement officer in the land, this week refused to say whether voting twice was against the law. Trump’s enablers have come this far. Why would they change course now? The danger is clear, even before you reflect on the decades-old Republican effort to suppress the vote, especially the Black vote – an effort whose motive Trump brazenly disclosed when he told Fox News that if voting was easier and turnout went up, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”. Not for nothing did Barack Obama, a man not prone to hyperbole, warn last month that Trump is willing to “tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win”. Consider all that Trump has been willing to do already. Imagine what he would do if he received the mandate of re-election. Except there’s no need to imagine it. Trump’s contempt for democracy is in plain sight. • Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist