New American Journal graphic by Evan Riddle
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It won’t be so long now.
The excruciating wait will be over in a few days.
Exacerbated by the stress, anxiety and existential dread of the coronavirus pandemic and economic uncertainty, it will all be over soon one way or another.
We should know in less than three weeks whether democracy and the planet have a chance at a future or not.
The result may not in the end be comforting, but at least we will have an inkling of whether the fight is worth continuing.
We may not know the final tally of the 2020 election on Election Day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. But we should have a good idea whether education, merit and altruism matter at all anymore in this screwed up world, or whether the selfish gene and the uneducated masses will propel Donald Trump into a second hellish term in the White House.
Maybe it’s because the polls seem to have settled into a predictable pattern indicating Trump is going down to ignoble defeat. Or maybe it’s because I’ve finally hit the open road after months of rural seclusion. Either way, or maybe it’s both, I don’t feel as if we are perched on the precipice of a dark and foreboding Armageddon.
That’s not to say I’ve lost all fear or worry about the direction our country and the world are headed. Far from it.
Even if the Democrats are successful at electing someone else besides Trump as president, and even if the lesser of two evils party manages to take back control of the United States Senate and hold onto a majority in the House, there are major pitfalls and battles ahead in the war to save democracy and the planet.
But it is important to remain focused on the immediate task before us.
As The New York Times Editorial Board recently phrased it, we must start by ending “our national crisis.”
“Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II,” the paper of record concludes in a series of editorials which finally brings The Times into full alignment with the views I’ve held and expressed for the past four years.
“… the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve the nation’s pressing problems because he is the nation’s most pressing problem.”
Yes, and he must go — one way or another — even though the divide in America is not just a partisan divide, a racial divide or a gender divide. What will be revealed on this Election Day is also not just a class divide, which is there by the way but never talked about. It is an intellectual divide, with people who have sought and attained an education in their lives on one side, and those whose seminal experience in life harkens back to high school on the other, where they barely passed enough classes to find jobs in the classified ads of the local newspaper, clearly something they have obviously never bothered to read in the years since.
The most important demographic factor that will show up in the votes cast on Nov. 3 will be education level. The vast majority of those who will vote for Trump never studied anything beyond high school. This has never been as stark a divide in any previous election before.
Even many Republicans with a college degree are not going to vote for this “clown” of a president, as Democrat Joe Biden put it in the first debate, who according to The Times, his “ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.”
In painstakingly making the case against this president, the editorial board says it “does not lightly indict a duly elected president.”
Yet, it says, “During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box.”
“Nov. 3 can be a turning point,” it says, optimistically. “This is an election about the country’s future, and what path its citizens wish to choose. The resilience of American democracy has been sorely tested by Mr. Trump’s first term. Four more years, the damage may be irreversible.”
“… even as Americans wait to vote in lines that stretch for blocks through their towns and cities, Mr. Trump is engaged in a full-throated assault on the integrity of that essential democratic process. Breaking with all of his modern predecessors, he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, suggesting that his victory is the only legitimate outcome, and that if he does not win, he is ready to contest the judgment of the American people in the courts or even on the streets.”
Yes, the “enormity and variety of Mr.Trump’s misdeeds can feel overwhelming. Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars,” The Times concludes.
Yes, they say: “This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage.”
For those who still either can’t afford to pay for real journalism, or refuse because they are satisfied with the free stuff they can read online without having to pay, here’s the remainder of the introductory editorial.
Mr. Trump stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history. In 2016, his bitter account of the nation’s ailments struck a chord with many voters. But the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve the nation’s pressing problems because he is the nation’s most pressing problem.
He is a racist demagogue presiding over an increasingly diverse country; an isolationist in an interconnected world; a showman forever boasting about things he has never done, and promising to do things he never will.
He has shown no aptitude for building, but he has managed to do a great deal of damage. He is just the man for knocking things down.
As the world runs out of time to confront climate change, Mr. Trump has denied the need for action, abandoned international cooperation and attacked efforts to limit emissions.
He has mounted a cruel crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration without proposing a sensible policy for determining who should be allowed to come to the United States.
Obsessed with reversing the achievements of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, he has sought to persuade both Congress and the courts to get rid of the Affordable Care Act without proposing any substitute policy to provide Americans with access to affordable health care. During the first three years of his administration, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 2.3 million — a number that has surely grown again as millions of Americans have lost their jobs this year.
He campaigned as a champion of ordinary workers, but he has governed on behalf of the wealthy. He promised an increase in the federal minimum wage and fresh investment in infrastructure; he delivered a round of tax cuts that mostly benefited rich people. He has indiscriminately erased regulations, and answered the prayers of corporations by suspending enforcement of rules he could not easily erase. Under his leadership, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stopped trying to protect consumers and the Environmental Protection Agency has stopped trying to protect the environment.
He has strained longstanding alliances while embracing dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom Mr. Trump treats with a degree of warmth and deference that defies explanation. He walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a strategic agreement among China’s neighbors intended to pressure China to conform to international standards. In its place, Mr. Trump has conducted a tit-for-tat trade war, imposing billions of dollars in tariffs — taxes that are actually paid by Americans — without extracting significant concessions from China.
Mr. Trump’s inadequacies as a leader have been on particularly painful display during the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of working to save lives, Mr. Trump has treated the pandemic as a public relations problem. He lied about the danger, challenged the expertise of public health officials and resisted the implementation of necessary precautions; he is still trying to force the resumption of economic activity without bringing the virus under control.
As the economy pancaked, he signed an initial round of aid for Americans who lost their jobs. Then the stock market rebounded and, even though millions remained out of work, Mr. Trump lost interest in their plight.
In September, he declared that the virus “affects virtually nobody” the day before the death toll from the disease in the United States topped 200,000.
Nine days later, Mr. Trump fell ill.
The foundations of American civil society were crumbling before Mr. Trump rode down the escalator of Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his presidential campaign. But he has intensified the worst tendencies in American politics: Under his leadership, the nation has grown more polarized, more paranoid and meaner.
He has pitted Americans against each other, mastering new broadcast media like Twitter and Facebook to rally his supporters around a virtual bonfire of grievances and to flood the public square with lies, disinformation and propaganda. He is relentless in his denigration of opponents and reluctant to condemn violence by those he regards as allies. At the first presidential debate in September, Mr. Trump was asked to condemn white supremacists. He responded by instructing one violent gang, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by.”
He has undermined faith in government as a vehicle for mediating differences and arriving at compromises. He demands absolute loyalty from government officials, without regard to the public interest. He is openly contemptuous of expertise.
And he has mounted an assault on the rule of law, wielding his authority as an instrument to secure his own power and to punish political opponents. In June, his administration tear-gassed and cleared peaceful protesters from a street in front of the White House so Mr. Trump could pose with a book he does not read in front of a church he does not attend.
The full scope of his misconduct may take decades to come to light. But what is already known is sufficiently shocking:
He has resisted lawful oversight by the other branches of the federal government. The administration routinely defies court orders, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly directed administration officials not to testify before Congress or to provide documents, notably including Mr. Trump’s tax returns.
With the help of Attorney General William Barr, he has shielded loyal aides from justice. In May, the Justice Department said it would drop the prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn even though Mr. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. In July, Mr. Trump commuted the sentence of another former aide, Roger Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rightly condemned the commutation as an act of “unprecedented, historic corruption.”
Last year, Mr. Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of his main political rival, Joe Biden, and then directed administration officials to obstruct a congressional inquiry of his actions. In December 2019, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Mr. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors. But Senate Republicans, excepting Mr. Romney, voted to acquit the president, ignoring Mr. Trump’s corruption to press ahead with the project of filling the benches of the federal judiciary with young, conservative lawyers as a firewall against majority rule.
Now, with other Republican leaders, Mr. Trump is mounting an aggressive campaign to reduce the number of Americans who vote and the number of ballots that are counted.
The president, who has long spread baseless charges of widespread voter fraud, has intensified his rhetorical attacks in recent months, especially on ballots submitted by mail. “The Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED,” he tweeted. The president himself has voted by mail, and there is no evidence to support his claims. But the disinformation campaign serves as a rationale for purging voter rolls, closing polling places, tossing absentee ballots and otherwise impeding Americans from exercising the right to vote.
It is an intolerable assault on the very foundations of the American experiment in government by the people.
Other modern presidents have behaved illegally or made catastrophic decisions. Richard Nixon used the power of the state against his political opponents. Ronald Reagan ignored the spread of AIDS. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying and obstruction of justice. George W. Bush took the nation to war under false pretenses.
Mr. Trump has outstripped decades of presidential wrongdoing in a single term.
Frederick Douglass lamented during another of the nation’s dark hours, the presidency of Andrew Johnson, “We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man, we shall be safe.” But that is not the nature of our democracy. The implicit optimism of American democracy is that the health of the Republic rests on the judgment of the electorate and the integrity of those voters choose.
Mr. Trump is a man of no integrity. He has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Now, in this moment of peril, it falls to the American people — even those who would prefer a Republican president — to preserve, protect and defend the United States by voting.
That is by voting Trump out.
Anticipating his what seems like inevitable defeat at this point, maybe because someone in his sycophantic White House or campaign must have finally told him he is going to lose, Trump couldn’t resist going on another super virus spreader campaign trail of events this week. And he hinted he might have to leave the country when he does lose, probably because his debt and back taxes are going to be too great for him to pay and he may finally face the indictments he managed to escape as president.
He asked loyal MAGA followers in Georgia: “Could you imagine if I lose?” Then he said, “I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know.”
Trump Talks of ‘Leaving the Country’ if He Loses
Fine with me. Just get him the fuck out of our government. I have often talked about the possibility that he might have to go into exile, like tin pot dictators in third world countries. He clearly likes dictators who rule through fear and violence more than real leaders who inspire people with hope for a better day.
So let it be so.
