Americans are starting to get it: we can’t let Trump – or Trumpism – back in office | Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut

Republicans have put all their chips on extremism. But voters are sending more and more signals that they're fed up with it

Polls and election results over the last week reminded Americans that politics seldom moves in a straight line. As in physics, action produces reaction. Overreach invites backlash.

For a long while former President Trump and his cronies seemed to be immune from this rule of political life and from the consequences of even the most outrageous conduct. As Trump himself once famously said, I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."

Austin Sarat is a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College and the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy