Trump and Harris are neck-and-neck. This is a five-alarm fire | Robert Reich

With two weeks to go before election day, Kamala Harris and Donald J Trump are essentially tied.

Neither candidate is ahead by even a single point in the New York Times’s polling average of five critical battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

How is this possible? Even if polls were systematically off and Harris were ahead of Trump by, say, 5%, I’d still be appalled that so many Americans in swing states were supporting Trump.

I’ve spent most of my life fighting bullies, from the grade-school bullies who teased and threatened and occasionally pummeled me, to the white supremacists of the 1960s who murdered my friend Mickey Schwerner when he was trying to register Black voters in Mississippi.

I’ve protested Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War and worked to get Richard Nixon – whose henchmen broke into the Watergate complex and who then tried to cover up his illegal acts – impeached.

I watched Ronald Reagan bully Americans into accepting the cruel hoax of “trickle-down” economics and legitimize corporate bashing of labor unions.

I witnessed George W Bush insist on invading Iraq based on a lie that Iraq contained “weapons of mass destruction”, invading Afghanistan because it contained terrorists, and establishing a gulag of torture chambers across the world.

When I was US secretary of labor, I fought Republican bullies who wanted to make it easier for CEOs and their major investors to become richer by shafting their workers. Later, I fought Wall Street bullies who gambled away other people’s money and then, when their bets turned bad, got bailed out by taxpayers.

But in all my years, I have never come across a bully more squalid than Donald Trump.

He is the bully of all bullies. He emits dangerous lies like most people breathe.

He has demeaned and degraded our system of self-government, attempted a coup against the United States, divided Americans with venomous bigotry, and rewarded his rich backers with tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

Trump created a supreme court that took away women’s rights over their own bodies and immunized presidents from criminal liability.

In recent weeks, he has become even more untethered from reality, more unhinged, even less coherent.

He says that if he gets back in power he will wreak vengeance on his political opponents – including many loyal Americans who have stood up to him – calling them the “enemy within” and openly threatening to use the US military against them.

He says he wants to cleanse America of “scum” and “vermin”, including refugees, immigrants, and Democratic officials like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi.

He is threatening to strip television networks of their ability to broadcast news because of coverage he doesn’t like.

On Sunday, he said he had subpoena the records of CBS, claiming that the network’s edit of Harris’s recent appearance on “60 Minutes” was misleading.

He refuses to be bound by the results of the upcoming election. This means America will likely suffer weeks or months of litigation following election day, perhaps even accompanied by violence.

I felt hopeful in late July, when Joe Biden selflessly bowed out of the election and passed the baton to his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

And even more hopeful as Harris has proven herself a tough, exuberant, powerful campaigner and force for positive change. Her debate performance against Trump was the best I’ve ever seen.

But at this moment, I’m frankly worried. How can so many Americans be blind to who Trump is and what he intends to do?

I don’t believe it’s all due to misogyny and racism. Surely, gender and race continue to play a large part in our politics, but they alone cannot explain what is happening.

Nor do I think it’s because of our collective amnesia about the chaos Trump wrought during his presidency. Most of us recall how horrific it was, including a pandemic that for months he refused to acknowledge or act on.

Part of the reason may be that we want to normalize our politics and pretend that this election is like any other, even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.

To accept the reality of who Trump is and what he aims to do is simply too frightening.

Part of it also may be that many Americans would prefer blowing up the system as a whole – destroying democracy and our institutions of self-government – than settle for gradual change because they feel the system is hopelessly rigged against them.

Beyond these possible explanations lie specific people who are also responsible for bringing us to the brink of this disaster.

High on my list is Rupert Murdoch – whose Fox News, New York Post, and editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal have amplified Trump’s lies, spreading them repeatedly to tens of millions of Americans.

There’s also Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, whose X platform, formerly known as Twitter, has become a font of disinformation, incendiary conspiracy theories, pro-Trump garbage, and hateful lies about Harris.

Musk continues to claim, for example, that Democrats are flying huge numbers of undocumented immigrants into swing states to vote illegally. One such post got 34m views.

Musk’s pro-Trump Super Pac has hired an estimated 400 staffers in the seven key battleground states and a platoon of Republican party operatives.

The New York Times reports that Trump and Musk are speaking directly multiple times a week. That’s a likely violation of campaign finance laws barring coordination between candidates and Super Pacs.

Trump’s other major financial backers include a cavalcade of billionaires – notably Miriam Adelson (wife of deceased casino magnate Sheldon Adelson), Liz and Dick Uihlein (owners of packaging-materials company Uline), and Timothy Mellon (scion of the Gilded Age baron Andrew Mellon).

Another contributing reason Trump is running neck-and-neck with Harris is the silence of respected business leaders.

Heading the list is Jamie Dimon, CEO and chair of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, who calls himself “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan” and who regularly speaks out about the injustices and inequalities of contemporary America.

A lifelong Democrat, Dimon is considered the “spokesman” of American business.

Yet when it comes to denouncing the biggest threat to American democracy since the civil war, Dimon’s silence has been deafening.

Who else is responsible? I wouldn’t be surprised if Vladimir Putin were again seeding the election with hackers and bots favoring Trump, as Putin did in 2016.

At this juncture – two weeks from election day, with the race virtually tied in battleground states – none of us who cares about the future of this country can any longer afford to be a mere spectator.

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. A five-alarm fire. A category 5 hurricane.

Do whatever you can.

• Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com