In President Biden’s increasingly stark telling, an America led by former president Donald Trump in 2025 would be a dystopian dictatorship with American values constantly on the brink of collapse.

“The greatest threat Trump poses is to our democracy,” Biden said earlier this month at a fundraiser in Bethesda. “Because if we lose, we lose everything.”

Trump, who has used terms like “vermin” to describe his enemies and called 2024 “the final battle,” has said if Biden wins a second term, Americans would “no longer have a country” and the globe would quickly descend into a third world war.

“As long as Joe Biden is in the White House, the American Dream is dead,” Trump said during a rally in Durham, N.H., where he also accused migrants of “poisoning the blood” of the nation. Trump calls adversaries “vermin,” echoing Hitler and Mussolini

As the two leading candidates trade depictions of doom, the 2024 race for president is increasingly dominated by dark sentiments and appeals to fear — a phenomenon experts and pollsters say is reflective of the country’s broadly pessimistic and apprehensive mood.

As Democrats often point out, while Biden’s warnings repeat Trump’s explicit promises about what he would do if he wins, Trump’s predictions often reflect baseless hyperbole. But the result is that if either man wins next November, nearly half of the country could be primed to believe it spells the end of the nation and its values.

White House officials and Biden campaign aides have said they feel compelled to respond to the former president’s growing use of hateful, bleak messaging. As recent polls have shown Trump with a commanding lead in the Republican primary and a consistent, if smaller, lead in a general election matchup with Biden, the president and his aides have increasingly invoked ominous language as they seek to raise an alarm about the potential return of his predecessor.

“What’s at stake in 2024: Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” Biden told donors in Weston, Mass., this month. “And that, again, is not hyperbole. That’s a fact. The former president makes no bones about it. Don’t take my word for it. Just listen to what he has to say.”

He went on to read a list of some of Trump’s most incendiary quotes.

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