Trump’s Path

Bob Sheak, August 29, 2024

Who he is

The New York Times Editorial Board offers a summary of Trump’s moral unfitness to be president (https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/11/opinion/editorials/donald-trump-2024-unfit.html).

“He lies blatantly and maliciously, embraces racists, abuses women and has a schoolyard bully’s instinct to target society’s most vulnerable. He has delighted in coarsening and polarizing the town square with ever more divisive and incendiary language. Mr. Trump is a man who craves validation and vindication, so much that he would prefer a hostile leader’s lies to his own intelligence agencies’ truths and would shake down a vulnerable ally for short-term political advantage. His handling of everything from routine affairs to major crises was undermined by his blundering combination of impulsiveness, insecurity and unstudied certainty.

This record shows what can happen to a country led by such a person: America’s image, credibility and cohesion were relentlessly undermined by Mr. Trump during his term.

“None of his wrongful actions are so obviously discrediting as his determined and systematic attempts to undermine the integrity of elections — the most basic element of any democracy — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.

“On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump incited a mob to violence with hateful lies, then stood by for hours as hundreds of his supporters took his word and stormed the Capitol with the aim of terrorizing members of Congress into keeping him in office.”

“He praised these insurrectionists and called them patriots; today he gives them a starring role at campaign rallies, playing a rendition of the national anthem sung by inmates involved with Jan. 6., and he has promised to consider pardoning the rioters if re-elected. He continues to wrong the country and its voters by lying about the 2020 election, branding it stolen, despite the courts, the Justice Department and Republican state officials disputing him. No man fit for the presidency would flog such pernicious and destructive lies about democratic norms and values, but the Trumpian hunger for vindication and retribution has no moral center.”

Thom Hartmann comments on Trump’s involvement in the insurrection (https://commondreams.org/opinion/the-politics-of-joy-versus-the-only-thing-republicans-have-left-cruelty). He writes:

“When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, he sent a violent mob against the US Capitol. As they tried to murder the vice president and speaker of the house, covered the walls of the building with feces and defaced priceless paintings, Trump gleefully watched on live television for over three hours while refusing to call in the national guard or take any other meaningful action.

“Five civilians and three police officers died as the result of his sending that murderous mob because all he and his GOP have left is cruelty.”

Ignoring the law

In a report for Citizens for Ethics (CREW), Brie Sparkman and Sara Wiatrak write that, as of March 2024 [updated June 4], “Donald Trump has been personally charged with 88 [now 91] criminal offenses in four criminal cases” (https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/trumps-91-criminal-charges-and-where-they-stand). They continue:

“This total reflects charges related to Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, election interference in Georgia, falsifying business records in New York, and mishandling classified records after leaving the presidency. Donald Trump is the first former president in U.S. history to be criminally indicted.”

Responses to the 2020 presidential loss

Here is a summary from Melissa Murray and Adrew Weisman’s book, The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents With Commentary.

“Trump’s alleged scheme to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election involved: pressuring state legislators in battleground states, through threats and lies, to alter the vote tallies; enlisting slates of fake electors, including through fraud, in battleground state; filing false lawsuits; breaking into state election machines; plotting to seize voting machines; lying about Georgia election workers and pressuring them to lie about election fraud; enlisting the DOJ to say that it was investigating serious allegations of fraud when it was not and had in fact reported it had found no material fraud; and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to violate his oath of office on January 6 and lying about his supposed assent that he had the power to reject the counting of the votes, when he told Trump he did not” (p. xxvii).

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What next from Trump?

If elected in November, Trump, his party, and allies have a plan referred to as “2025.” The plan, over 900 pages in length, is aimed at destroying American democracy. It has been developed by people at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and other Trump adherents. If implemented, it would make Trump an unaccountable and authoritarian/fascist “leader” and give him the power to turn the Department of Justice and other executive agencies into compliant extensions of this power.

The Plan calls for the removal of thousands of experienced civil servants who will be replaced by Trump loyalists, regardless of their competence. Given the opportunity, he will further stack the courts with ultra-conservative judges. The plan includes proposals for the detention or deportation of tens of millions of undocumented U.S. residents – and anyone Trump and his minions identify as opponents. They will push for tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, while privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and other parts of the social safety net. Trump wants to replace the Affordable Care Act, but hasn’t offered an alternative. He favors the privatization of the public schools and likes the idea of diverting funds from them to private and charter schools.

Although Trump argues from one side of his mouth that he will not support a national ban on abortion access, his record against reproductive rights is well known and suggest that it is naïve to believe there will not be a ban. He brags to right-wing evangelicals, an important Trump constituency that America is indeed a Christian society, ignoring the constitutional separation of religion and the state and that the majority of Americans do no hold extremist religious views. His notion of “freedom” (for employers) does not allow much room for occupational safety laws or unions. Generally, he and his allies want massive deregulation. This is also true of his energy policy, one that is based on maximum use of fossil fuels, including coal. Trump and his allies reject the findings of experts that the planet is growing hotter as the U.S. and other rich countries continue to increase their use of these fuels. Trump has recently said that he wants to impose high – tariffs on products from China, having little knowledge about their potentially detrimental effects on American consumers. It is well known that he is attracted to authoritarian leaders.

We should not forget that his angry, spiteful, maliciously narcissist person would, as president, have the power to start a nuclear war.  

Twenty-seven psychiatrists and mental health experts came to the following conclusion, among others, in their book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.

“We are gravely concerns about Trump’s abrupt, capricious 180-degree shifts and how these displays of instability have the potential to be unconsciously dangerous to the point of causing catastrophe, and not only for the citizens of the United States”

Rejecting the results of the 2024 presidential election if he loses

C. J. Polychroniou, a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. points to relevant information (https://commondreams.org/opinion/implications-2024-election-us). The article was published on August 24, 2024.

“The 2024 U.S. presidential election is enormously important for many of the reasons you cited, although we shouldn’t be oblivious of the fact that parochialism is what drives most American voters. That said, this election is indeed unlike any other in modern history also because American voters are so polarized that the threat of civil breakdown is real. In fact, I believe that Trump is already laying the groundwork for rejecting the election result if he loses. This is why he calls Democrats’ replacement of Biden a ‘coup’ and even ‘a violent overthrow’ of a president. And back in March, he said that there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the November election.

Ignoring global warming

Andes Oppenheimer, journalist at the Miami Herald, worries whether U.S. voters will elect a climate skeptic in times of record-breaking heat? (https://miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article289090739.html). The article was published on June 7, 2024.

“Trump has repeatedly mocked climate change warnings and promotes fossil fuels, ignoring the scientific consensus that climate change is likely caused by man-made greenhouse emissions. As crazy as it sounds at a time of record heat waves, Trump is publicly vowing to reverse the Biden administration’s ambitious laws to combat global warming. According to the Trump campaign website, a second Trump administration would unleash a wave of oil drilling and speed up approvals of fracking permits in public lands. ‘To keep pace with the world economy that depends on fossil fuels for more than 80% of its energy, President Trump will DRILL, BABY, DRILL,’ the campaign’s official website says. The Trump campaign website also says that, ‘from day one,’ the former president would kill hundreds of laws to combat global warming adopted by the Biden administration, including rules to reduce car emissions and subsidies for buyers of electric vehicles. Trump would also again order a U.S. withdrawal from the 2016 Paris Agreement to control climate change, which calls on countries to substantially reduce planet-warming emissions. Trump had pulled out of the Paris Agreement at the start of his term, but Biden later reversed that decision.”

“At an April fundraiser with oil company owners and executives at his Mar-a-Lago compound, Trump promised to go out of his way to help fossil fuel industries if they donated $1 billion to his campaign, The Washington Post reported. Trump specifically vowed to scrap current policies that encourage production of electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, and other green power sources opposed by the oil industry, the Post said.”

Hardly a friend of workers

Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany who has written extensively on peace movements, foreign policy, and economic inequality, considers Trump’s record on American workers (https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-working-class). The title of his article, published on May 21, 2024, says it all: “Trump Didn’t Lift Up the Working Class. He Stepped on Its Neck.” Here’s some of what he writes.

“Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in workers’ wages, the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.

“Only the preceding year, Trump derailed vital wage legislation. In July 2019―with the pathetically low federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 per hour for a decade and some 13 million workers holding two or more jobs to support their families―the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the Raise the Wage Act. If enacted, the legislation would have gradually increased the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour over a six-year period. But, instead of supporting the legislation or proposing an alternative, the Trump White House announced that, if the Senate passed the House bill, Trump would veto it.

“Consequently, the measure died in the Republican-controlled Senate. According to the AFL-CIO, the legislation would have raised the pay of 40 million American workers.

“That same year, Trump’s Department of Labor succeeded in rolling back planned wage increases for millions of workers by restricting eligibility for overtime pay. In 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, the Labor Department had issued a rule substantially raising the income level below which workers were paid time and a half for work done beyond 40 hours per week. But the Trump Labor Department, seizing on a delay in implementation occasioned by a judicial decision, lowered the level by more than $20,000, thus depriving 8.2 million American workers of the right to overtime pay secured under Obama.

“In August 2018, Trump canceled a scheduled 2 percent pay raise for millions of civilian federal employees, leading to criticism even from some Republicans. This action, plus other administration assaults on the rights of public employees, led to a massive flight of workers from government service. By the fall of 2019, there were 45,000 vacancies in the Department of Veterans Affairs alone. To fill these vacancies, the Trump administration hired large numbers of temp workers at low wages and with minimal benefits.

“Yet another administration policy that undercut workers’ wages emerged with the Trump Labor Department’s issuance of a “joint-employer” rule. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been fashioned to ensure that businesses using staffing companies or subcontractors would be accountable for complying with basic workplace protections. Even so, the Trump administration’s joint-employer rule substantially limited liability for wage and hour violations, thereby making it harder for workers to hold all parties accountable. As a result, U.S. workers lost an estimated $1 billion annually thanks to subcontracting or wage theft by employers.

“Of course, not all Trump administration attempts at holding down wages succeeded. In 2017, the Trump Labor Department proposed that employers could simply pocket workers’ tips, as long as the workers were paid the minimum wage. Economists estimated that this policy would lead to the loss of $5.8 billion per year in tips for workers, 80 percent of whom were women. But after the discovery that Trump’s Secretary of Labor had gone to great lengths to hide his department’s findings about how harmful the new policy would be, Congress stepped in and amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to prohibit employers from seizing the tips of their employees.

“Another Trump administration failure occurred in connection with reducing the wages of farmworkers, some of the most exploited, lowest-paid workers in the United States. In mid-2019, the Labor Department proposed a new regulation that would change the rules of the H-2A visa program, used by agricultural employers to hire migrant farmworkers for seasonal work―for example, by President Trump’s wineries. As one of the rules changes would lower wage rates for H-2A farmworkers and, consequently, for their U.S. counterparts, the United Farm Workers challenged it in federal court and, ultimately, prevailed.”

Concluding thoughts

Trump is the head of the Republican Party, enjoys support from large swaths of corporate America, has a hardcore, cult-like following of tens of millions who seem to welcome the thought of having a king-like president. He benefits from the conservative Supreme Court. He preaches violence and retribution. His policy views are essentially anti-democratic and self-serving. If he wins the presidential election, the US will look more like, say, Hungary, with an authoritarian government, the absence of civil and political rights, a court system that legitimates whatever the leader does. Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at the Atlantic magazine and author, has published a book titled “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World,” that delves into such issues.

The big question is whether Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, the Democratic Party, and their supporters can win enough votes – and electoral votes –  in November to alter the dire path on which Trump would govern. The platform is strong on progressive taxes, civil and gender rights, support for workers and unions, strengthening gun regulation, and protecting consumers. But it is weak or unclear on how to stop and reverse global warming, seems to reject an arms embargo on US weapons sent to Israel, and needs to flush out the details on what an “opportunity economy” includes. So far, under Biden’s presidency, there are also plenty of laudatory developments, namely, the economy has grown, wages are up, inflation has fallen. At the same time, sadly, they endorse the bipartisan call for ever higher military spending.