Trump's War on Democracy
I really fear for the state of US democracy. I mean, really. Things are dire in a way that Republican supporters and voters don't realise, like lobsters slowly boiling in a pot not realising as, incrementally, the temperature rises.
There is so, so much I could write about here. I'll try to pick my choices in honour of parsimony.
Mail-in voting
Let's start with the USPS. As I wrote recently, the POTUS is trying desperately to dismantle the US Postal Service. If he scuppers the ability of people to vote by mail, then he scuppers the ability of the Democrats to win. We know, from FiveThirtyEight that "Biden’s Voters Appear Far More Likely To Vote By Mail Than Trump’s. That Could Make For A Weird Election Night." To remind you, of what USPS Trump appointee, DeJoy, has done amongst a host of other things:
- He has reassigned or fired two dozen executives, including two officials in charge of day-to-day operations.
- He took 671 high-volume mail processing machines out of commission.
- Service has been severely curtailed, with overtime eliminated, mailboxes unbolted and carted away by the hundreds, and delivery delays now measured in weeks instead of days.
- And now, the USPS has sent letters to 46 states warning that there may not be enough time for ballots to be requested, completed, and delivered in time for Election Day.
This is a tandem approach because Trump is also lying about mail-in voter fraud to win the propaganda war. As Reuters report, in contradiction of Trump:
Voting by mail is not new in the United States — nearly 1 in 4 voters cast 2016 presidential ballots that way. Routine methods and the decentralized nature of U.S. elections make it very hard to interfere with mailed ballots, experts say....
Election experts say it would be nearly impossible for foreign actors to disrupt an election by mailing out fake ballots, a scenario floated by Attorney General William Barr....
As with other forms of voting, documented cases of mail-ballot fraud are extremely rare.
The conservative Heritage Foundation, which has warned of the risks of mail voting, found 14 cases of attempted mail fraud out of roughly 15.5 million ballots cast in Oregon since that state started conducting elections by mail in 1998.
The most prominent cases of mail fraud have involved campaigns, not voters. North Carolina invalidated the results of a 2018 congressional election after state officials found that a Republican campaign operative had orchestrated a ballot fraud scheme....
Turnout rates tend to be higher in states that conduct elections by mail. A Stanford University study found that participation increased by roughly 2 percentage points in three states that rolled out universal voting by mail from 1996 to 2018. It had no effect on partisan outcome and did not appear to give an advantage to any particular racial, economic or age group.
This last point is hugely important. We know that if turnout is up, Democrats win. When turnout is low, Republicans win. Trump and his team know this. Voter suppression, as a result of this, is the staple diet of Republican candidates and lawmakers (take Brian Kemp, for example).
This is about election rigging. You know, what the US complains about in third-world countries.
The GOP/Trump breaking the law
The Hatch Act law is aimed at preventing public officials from using their power for partisan political activity. NPR elaborate:
As part of Tuesday night's prime-time convention programming, Trump granted a presidential pardon from the White House. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared from Jerusalem, where he was on official state business, to make a campaign speech with the Old City as backdrop. First lady Melania Trump delivered a speech from the White House Rose Garden. And acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf performed a naturalization ceremony on television as Trump looked on.
The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity inside federal buildings or while on duty. Though the president and vice president are exempt from the civil provisions of the Hatch Act, federal employees like Pompeo, Wolf and any executive branch employees who helped stage the events are not.
Ethics watchdogs harshly criticized Trump's merging of official and campaign acts during the Tuesday night telecast.
Whilst these law breaks might seem small compared to other infringements and crimes (say, 18 U.S. Code § 872), they are important. Ignoring a stop sign at one time might not be that important, but if everyone did it, you would have chaos. This is a flagrant, open, insulting abuse of law and convention from Trump's campaign.
Abuse of the truth
One thing that is certain, Trump's abuse of the truth and not being held to account by half of the electorate and his fellow Republicans is a real threat to the future of democracy and information dissemination. The RNC was ample evidence of this, and Trump's own 70-minute drag of a speech contained at least 20 obvious lies:
This is after a "parade of dishonesty" from night 1, a "bunch of false claims" on night 2 and "so much dishonesty" on night 3. This is doing untold amounts of damage to the integrity of the US and those who hold office there. When truth is treated in this way, it will come back and bite you on the ass.
What interests me as well is how Republican Trump supporters deal with this. There are many of these irrational people on the threads here and I would like to know what their cognitive dissonance will produce to harmonise such outright dishonesty. Do they simply ignore, or do they refuse to admit these are lies, or do they claim these aren't important in the long run, perhaps that it is all worth it as a means to an end?
Just imagine if Obama had done half of what Trump has done! They would be apoplectic. Remember when they attacked him for the colour of his suit! As of July 9th, in 1,267 days, President Trump has made 20,055 false or misleading claims.
Trump can openly lie, just blatantly mislead his followers into thinking more of him and less of his opposition and there is no comeback, there are no ramifications. There should be some punitive action that should be taken against this. This should not be allowed to happen. The world must learn from this because it appears that what everyone will be learning is that you CAN actually lie about anything and get away with it as long as only the opposition media whinge about it but all of your own side lap it up.
Dangerous. Immensely dangerous.
We should learn not to pay the slightest bit of attention to Trump, a man who just spews stuff like this:
I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it [sic] better than anybody I know. It’s [sic] very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured — tremendous, if you’re into this, tremendous fumes, gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So [a] tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything — you talk about the “carbon footprint” — fumes are spewing into the air, right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything, right?
So they make these things, and then they put them up, and if you own a house within vision of some of these monsters, your house is worth 50 percent of the price. They’re noisy, they kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go, take a look, a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill some day. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life …
Trump wants to run a dictatorship
Americans so often proudly proclaim their country is the greatest in the world, that they are the champions of democracy. Well, here is a list of indications that Trump is actually a champion of dictatorship:
1. Trump uses military power and federal law enforcement to suppress peaceful political protest.
2. Trump persistently lies about voter fraud, setting the stage for him to use emergency powers to seize control of the election or challenge the results if he loses.
3. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he might remain in office after a second term and has offered reason to doubt he’d leave peacefully after this first term.
4. Trump appears to believe he has the power to outlaw speech critical of him, and he calls the free press “the enemy of the people.”
5. With Fox News promoting Trump’s lies as truth, the president controls one of the most powerful propaganda machines ever created.
6. Trump believes that he has the power to do what he wants, regardless of Congress or the courts. Last year Trump asserted he could personally take over special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible Russian influence in the 2016 election and his own role in it "if I wanted to." Emboldened after being acquitted by the Senate on the House's impeachment charges, he said, "I'm actually, I guess, the chief law enforcement officer of the country." And he has claimed that, as president, the Constitution gives him "the right to do whatever I want."
7. Trump acts as if he owns our government and can fire any official who defends the law.
8. Trump uses federal prosecutorial powers to investigate his opponents and anyone who dares scrutinize him or his allies for the many crimes they may have committed.
9. Trump viciously attacks his critics and has publicly implied that the Ukraine whistleblower should be hanged for treason.
10. Trump has messianic delusions that are supported with religious fervor by millions of his supporters.
11. Trump subscribes to a doctrine of genetic superiority and incites racial hatred to scapegoat immigrants and gain power.
12. Trump finds common ground with the world’s most ruthless dictators while denigrating America’s democratic allies.
13. Trump has praised dictators consistently (here is a list of 15 times).
14. Trump "purges" anyone who disagrees with him.
15. If Trump wins a second term "you will see a flurry of executive orders, you will see the President pull out of foreign alliances, you will see the President align with dictators around the world. If right now we're less safe because we have fewer friends and stronger enemies than before, you can expect to see that on steroids in another four years of the Trump administration", says lifelong Republican Miles Taylor. "There are people who are serving very close to the president that have told me verbatim 'we should expect shock and awe'".
16. He has said he is willing to deploy up to 75,000 federal officers to flood Democratic-controlled cities.
In "History Will Judge the Complicit: Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?", Anne Applebaum (no liberal herself) writes:
In practice, Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview.
More important, he has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. He threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, in late February, after her too-blunt warnings about the coronavirus; Rick Bright, a top Health and Human Services official, says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” and America’s intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the “deep state” and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced “acting” officials to run America’s most important security institutions. He has systematically wrecked America’s alliances.
His foreign policy has never served any U.S. interests of any kind. Although some of Trump’s Cabinet ministers and media followers have tried to portray him as an anti-Chinese nationalist—and although foreign-policy commentators from all points on the political spectrum have, amazingly, accepted this fiction without questioning it—Trump’s true instinct, always, has been to side with foreign dictators, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. One former administration official who has seen Trump interact with Xi as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encounter a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people; he simply wanted their aura—of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame—to rub off on him and enhance his own image. This, too, has had fatal consequences. In January, Trump took Xi’s word when he said that COVID‑19 was “under control,” just as he had believed North Korea’s Kim Jong Un when he signed a deal on nuclear weapons. Trump’s fawning attitude toward dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”...
Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. Far too many Trump collaborators say to themselves ‘If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?'
Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better. If, following what is almost certain to be one of the ugliest elections in American history, Trump wins a second term, these people may well accept even worse. What would it take for Republican leaders to admit to themselves that Trump’s loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love?
The article is a tour de force. Read it all.
"The very best people"
The cognitive dissonance will be strong here. He's a great employer of quality people, right?
Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, George Nader... and so on. Criminals at the heart of what he does.
The census
A politicized Census Bureau is being urged to rush through completion of this year’s Census before hard-to-reach populations (read: poor, nonwhite, and non–English speaking) have been successfully canvassed and counted; to use secretive modeling programs, based on data from the Social Security Administration and other agencies, to guesstimate the number of undocumented immigrants in each state and region at the back end of the Census process; and to then use those numbers—which will be certified by Congress before the inauguration of the next president and the swearing in of the next Congress—as the raw material for a reapportionment of congressional seats clearly designed to negatively impact California and other progressive states with large numbers of immigrants. [source]
Add this to other things, like that Trump has issued executive orders that defer tax payments vital to funding Social Security and Medicare and that extend unemployment compensation through questionable means.
And finally...
I could list Trump's litany of crimes of common decency and integrity, from sexual harassment (over twenty cases) to impeachment, from foreign policy bungles (remember the Kurds) to Helsinki and cosying up to enemy dictators over his own intelligence agencies. You know I could go on. And on. And on.
I find the constant deluge of leaks very representative. Miles Taylor, the latest one, has revealed some startling things, not least that Trump wants to swap Greenland for Puerto Rico because Puerto Ricans are dirty and poor. Great universal leader, that.
We have already had his sister disparaging him in an audio leak, and his niece destroying him in a book. But even this all seems water off a duck's back.
But what might offer some serious damage is what is about to come out via Melania Trump. We know things aren't good between the two. Take a look at the excruciatingly painful viewing of this footage:
And the famous look she gave Ivanka:
The revelations are just about to hit the headlines big time because Malania's former confidant is releasing a tell-all book. We will have audio leaks of her disparaging Trump himself and his children. Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady is due out soon and will no doubt present more evidence, this time from the person closest to him, that Trump is not fit for President, is not at all liked or likeable (acolytes aside - he'd drop them in a flash if they served him no purpose).
Trump's assault on democracy is systemic, but his assault on the electorate ranges into personal territory, especially when those moral gatekeepers, evangelical Christians, overwhelmingly support him.
It's all looking so broken and I'm not sure how you fix it. If Biden gets in, half of the country seems to have become rabid Trump acolytes. There is no way this ends well.
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