Bob Sheak, Dec 6, 2024

Trump won despite his poor record

The final vote count gave Trump 77,232,887 votes, or 49.9% of the total votes. Kamala Harris received 74,935,796, or 48.4%. Trump’s 1.5% advantage was lower than recent presidential winners received. Nonetheless, it gave the presidency to Trump, a convicted felon with a long record of indictments. His dismal record in dealing with the Covid pandemic is a not-too-distant example of his ineptness. Helio Fred Garcia writes in his book, The Trump Contagion:

“In December 2021 NPR broadcast a report that Trump supporters were far more likely to die of Covid-10: Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from Covid-19 as those who live in areas that went or now President Biden” (pp. 224-225).

Overall, Trump has accumulated 91 criminal indictments, according to a detailed account in Ali Velshi’s book, The Trump Indictments. Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissman have also compiled this outrageous record in their book, The Trump Indictments. These charges will most likely be vacated or postponed, which would ultimately mean that he may not ever be held accountable for his lawless behavior.

He lies. Washington Post journalist Glenn Kessler and his colleagues identified 30,753 false and misleading statements from Trump during his first presidential term (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years).

He pushed and got lower tax rates for the rich and corporations, while increasing the national debt by over 8 trillion dollars. According to US Budget Watch 2024, the national debt increased by $8.4 trillion during Trumps first presidential term (https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt).

Inequality rose during the Trump presidential years. Jeffrey Kucik reports on this (https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/535239-how-trump-fueled-economic-inequality-in-america). The article was published on Jan. 1, 2021. Kucik writes:

“It is difficult to select just one issue that defines President Trump’s legacy. There is his tragic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is his alienation of America’s allies. There are even his wars on science and the rule of law. Any of these disasters would provide a suitable byline for the history books.
But we need to add something equally important to this list: Four years after Trump took office, income inequality continues to grow. And it is growing at a faster rate than during any of the last five administrations.”

Now Trump wants complete power

Trump Is Using “Unitary Executive” Theory in His Bid to Amass Supreme Power

Marjorie Cohn considers this issue in an article published on Dec 3, 2024
(https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-using-unitary-executive-theory-in-his-bid-to-amass-supreme-power). Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Veterans For Peace and Assange Defense, and is the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.

Here’s some of what she writes.

“Trump is claiming total executive power that would eclipse the legislative “co-equal” branch of government.

“In the weeks since the presidential election, president-elect Donald Trump and his allies have made a series of moves that indicate their intent to dangerously consolidate executive power under the controversial ‘unitary executive’ theory of the Constitution.

“During the presidential campaign, Trump posted a video on Truth Social that referred to his second administration as a ‘unified Reich,’ invoking Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazi Germany. As president-elect, Trump’s cabinet selections have corroborated his campaign pledge to be a dictator on day one.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority decided to grant Trump absolute immunity while in office. On this, Cohn writes: “With the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s decision granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his core ‘official’ functions, and the 920-page ‘Project 2025’ right-wing blueprint for an autocratic government, Trump is positioning himself to change the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over all aspects of the executive branch — and thereby becoming a ‘unitary executive.’”

Cohn continues. “Proponents of the unitary executive say that Article II establishes a ‘hierarchical, unified executive department under the direct control of the President’ who ‘alone possesses all of the executive power and … therefore can direct, control, and supervise inferior officers or agencies who seek to exercise discretionary executive power.’”

Cohn points out that “Project 2025, the right wing’s roadmap to an imperial presidency, is anchored in the unitary executive scheme. ‘This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI….’”

Furthermore, as revealed in Project 2025, “Trump would circumvent Congress by taking complete control of all administrative agencies that protect our health, safety, food, water, climate and labor rights. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a federal agency doesn’t have the last word on protecting these rights. When a statute is ambiguous, an agency must now defer to courts (many of which are staffed by judges appointed by Trump) instead of following interpretations of agency experts.” For example, Project 2025 will reinstitute Schedule F that
“would reclassify 50,000 of the 2 million merit-based civil service employees as political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president with no civil service protections.”

Cohn offers a summary of how Project 2025 could undermine the constitutional checks and balances.
– Curtailing the independence of independent agencies;
– Weaponizing the Department of Justice to serve Trump’s political agenda;
– Replacing civil servants with political supporters;
– Impounding funds Congress has appropriated and using them for other purposes;
– Neutralizing the press and independent media;
– Misapplying the Insurrection Act to suppress protests and deport undocumented immigrants;
– Misusing the recess appointment process to confirm executive branch nominees without Senate approval; and
– Deconstructing the administrative state to help corporations maximize profits.

The creation of a “king” in the White House

Cohn writes: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” and quotes Sonia Sotomayor who wrote in dissent. ‘The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.’ The immunity the court established now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president to use for his own political gain or financial interests, with the knowledge that he is inoculated from criminal liability.”

“As a result of Trump v. U.S., Trump’s election victory, and the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, Trump’s criminal cases — comprising 91 charges — are evaporating.”

Trump’s appointments to his administration: examples

His appointments emphasize loyalty over competence. Trump wants people in advisory or cabinet positions who will implement his right-wing agenda, basically, in various ways, to support a fossil-fuel energy system, to allow liquified natural gas exports to continue, to open up public lands to private investors, to ignore or deny the climate crisis, to drastically cut spending by the federal government on programs that benefit wide swaths of the population, to cut taxes on the rich and corporations, to begin the deportation of millions of undocumented residents, to impose ill-considered tariffs, especially on China, Canada, and Mexico, and to use the FBI and other executive branch agencies to punish Trump’s critics, viewed as “enemies.”

Consider three

Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense

One of his least defensible picks is Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. Jane Mayer has written at length about Hegseth, and how he was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job (https://newyorker.com/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history). Here’s just two paragraphs from Mayor’s article.

“But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

“A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’ In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

Kash Patel to head the FBI.

Chris Lehmann argues in a Dec. 3, 2024, article that “Kash Patel is Trump’s Scariest Cabinet Appointment Yet (https://thenation.com/article/politics/kash-patel-trump-cabinet). Lehmann identifies Patel as “a deep state conspiracy theorist” who Trump has appointed to head the FBI.

“Patel has…duly minted his battles over control of the deep state into a book, Government Gangsters, which derides the agency he’s now charged with administering as ‘one of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State,’ where rampant corruption has become ‘an existential threat to our republican form of government.’ He has also vowed, should he be entrusted with overseeing the agency’s operations, to shut down its Hoover Building headquarters in Washington on day one, and convert it into ‘a museum of the deep state.’”

Patel complains that the FBI is “overrun with self-protecting raging liberals—another plaint cribbed entirely from the persecution fantasies of Trump. Patel’s own history with the agency dates from his tour at the House Select Committee on Intelligence, where he reportedly penned the ‘Nunes memo,’ which castigated FBI officials for approving a baseless FISA surveillance order on former Trump campaign official Carter Page. That caught the eye of Trump, who appointed Patel to the National Security Council after the GOP lost its House majority in the 2018 midterms, and then promoted him to serve as the NSC’s senior director of the agency’s counterterrorism directorate.”

“…as with Trump himself, the conspiratorial logic behind Patel’s advancement has curdled into additional shocking and dangerous breaches with reality. Patel is a champion of the Trump-aligned QAnon cult and conspiracy theory, announcing in a 2022 podcast appearance that the mythical figure at the center of Q ‘should get credit for all the things he has accomplished.’ He’s also joined Mike Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser, for the Q-promoting ReAwaken America tour. In his role as all-purpose MAGA hustler, Patel has hawked a dietary supplement that supposedly reverses bodily damage wrought by the Covid vaccine, dubbing it ‘a homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax.’”

“Patel’s conspiracy-mongering finds a frequent outlet in his broadsides against the press—an especially troubling penchant for the leader of an agency like the FBI, which has stood stoutly athwart basic civil liberties. ‘We’re going to put in all-American patriots from top to bottom,’ Patel announced in a 2023 appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. ‘We will go out and find the conspirators not just in the government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly—we’ll figure that out.’

What Kash Patel Could Do to the F.B.I.

Garrett M. Graff, a journalist, a historian and the author of “The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War” and “Watergate: A New History,” among other books,
also considers the implications of Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel to head the FBI (https://nytimes.com/2024/12/02/opinion/kash-patel-trump-fbi.html).

“It goes almost without saying that Kash Patel, whom Donald Trump picked over the weekend to lead the F.B.I., is supremely unqualified to direct the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.

“That’s what even those who know Mr. Patel well are saying. ‘He’s absolutely unqualified for this job. He’s untrustworthy,’ his supervisor in the first Trump administration, Charles Kupperman, told The Wall Street Journal. ‘It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature.’ Mr. Kupperman’s view is hardly an outlier. In Mr. Trump’s first term, Bill Barr, then the attorney general, and Gina Haspel, then the C.I.A. director, went to great lengths to prevent Mr. Patel from being installed in senior intelligence and law enforcement roles.”

“Unlike Mr. Patel, who has never been nominated for a Senate-confirmed position, every F.B.I. director in modern times has been vetted and confirmed (often repeatedly) by the Senate to another position first. Three F.B.I. directors were federal judges before being selected. Robert Mueller had been nominated by both Republican and Democratic presidents and confirmed by overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the Senate; James Comey, Barack Obama’s nominee, had been in front of the Senate twice for confirmation. Mr. Wray had been the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, a role that earned him the department’s highest award for leadership and public service.

“Moreover, the idea of appointing a Trump loyalist like Mr. Patel goes against the fundamental approach all recent presidents have taken, which is that they’ve appointed nonpartisan figures, known for their independence. Directors, in turn, usually go out of their way to demonstrate clear independence from the presidents who appointed them. Bill Clinton’s relationship with his choice, Louis Freeh, was so tested during the Clinton scandals that the two men weren’t even on speaking terms, and Mr. Freeh turned in his White House pass to avoid even the appearance of familiarity with the president. Mr. Comey infamously took it upon himself to excoriate Hillary Clinton publicly over her handling of emails as secretary of state to demonstrate his independence from the Obama administration and Justice Department.

“What this independence illustrates is that the F.B.I. is not, as many MAGA loyalists believe, some liberal bastion of wokeness. No Democrat has ever served as an F.B.I. director. Even Democratic presidents appoint Republican officials to head the bureau, as Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton did in their presidencies.

“Mr. Trump has been clear in what he is trying to do with a nominee like Mr. Patel: He wants to bend and break the bureau and weaponize it against those he sees as his political enemies and domestic critics. Mr. Patel said last year that he hopes to prosecute journalists.”

“…a Patel directorship of even a few years could cause grave, lasting harm to the institution. One of the key ways a director shapes the bureau is through the promotion of top agents, from section chiefs to unit chiefs to special agents in charge to assistant directors and executive assistant directors. His choices of those leaders would shape the bureau for decades.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head HHS

Lauren Weber, Lena H. Sun and David Ovalle, Washington Post journalists, assess 10 of RFK Jr.’s “conspiracy theories and false claims” (https://washingtonpost.com/health/2024/11/15/rfk-jr-views-conspiracies-false-claims).

“The ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, to the nation’s top health post has alarmed medical experts, who point to his history of trafficking in conspiracy theories as disqualifying to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Kennedy, whom President-elect Donald Trump selected as health secretary on Thursday, will be charged with a massive portfolio overseeing Americans’ insurance, drugs, medical supplies and food if the Senate confirms him.”

“This is troubling. ‘He is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the United States and globally, and he has been at this for 20 years,’ said Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

“Here are 10 false health claims Kennedy has publicly made over the years:
Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism
Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’
Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments
Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public
Kennedy has falsely linked antidepressants to mass shootings
Kennedy incorrectly suggests AIDS may not be caused by HIV

“Kennedy, who founded a prominent anti-vaccine group, has repeatedly linked the childhood vaccine schedule to autism — a claim that has been debunked by scientists. Kennedy has falsely blamed autism on thimerosal, a compound safely used as a preservative in vaccines, and decried the number of shots on the childhood vaccination schedule.

Weber and her colleagues continue. “‘I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,’ he [Kennedy] said last summer in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters.”

“A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination. Dozens of studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals have also disproved the notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

“Hotez and many other public health experts say they worry that Kennedy, as health secretary, will do irreparable harm to already declining confidence in vaccines.

“Hotez pointed to the fivefold rise in pertussis, or whooping cough, in the past year; the 16 measles outbreaks reported by the CDC so far this year, compared with four in 2023; and the detection of polio in New York in 2022.

“‘So our baseline is a fragile vaccine ecosystem that could be on the brink of collapse,’ Hotez said. ‘I worry that now with this appointment, that could actually happen.’”

“Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments.”

Consider the reasons why milk is pasteurized.

“Raw milk is unsafe to consume, and the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC have strongly advised against consuming it because it can contain dangerous bacteria, such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria. It can also contain viruses, including the H5N1 bird flu virus that is causing an outbreak in dairy cattle and has sickened at least 46 people in the United States. Unpasteurized milk from infected cows can contain high levels of infectious H5N1 virus.”

“Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public.

“‘The agency, the USDA, the FDA have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate, and they all have an interest in subsidies and mass poisoning the American public,’ Kennedy told Fox News in August.

“Kennedy has repeatedly spoken about wanting to eliminate industry interests from the government, but public health experts say it is slander to imply that government employees are purposefully harming Americans.

“That’s just an inflammatory statement that has no basis in reality,” Hotez said. “I’ve worked with the scientists at the [health] agencies, at CDC and FDA, at the National Institutes of Health, and they are the most dedicated civil servants the nation has ever seen.”

Kennedy has also falsely linked mass shootings to antidepressants and video games and asserted that AIDS is not caused by HIV. His views on covid-19 follow his dangerous and untrue claims.

“Kennedy falsely claimed in a July interview last year with Fox News that fewer people would have died of covid-19 if the United States had deployed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Multiple studies have concluded that the antiparasitic and antimalarial drugs are ineffective against covid-19, despite the promotion of the drug by right-wing media.”

Initial responses from the Left to Trump’s election

Calls to action

1 – John Nichols emphasizes Trump’s narrow victory over Harris and that he does not have a mandate (https://thenation.com/article/politics/donald-trump-vote-margin-narrowed). He points out:

“Why make note of all the presidents who ran better than Trump? Why discuss the narrowness of his advantage over Harris? Why consider, in addition, that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate will be among the narrowest in modern American history? Because it puts the 2024 election results in perspective—and, in doing so, gives members of both parties an understanding of how to respond when Trump claims that an unappealing nominee or policy should be accepted out of deference to his “powerful” mandate.

“Trump’s victory was not of ‘epic’ or ‘historic’ proportions. There was no ‘landslide’ for the once and future president, as Fox News suggested repeatedly in postelection headlines. The election did not produce the ‘decisive victory’ for Trump that the Associated Press referred to in the immediate aftermath of the voting. Nor did it yield the “resounding defeat” for Harris that AP reported at the same time.”

Nichols continues.

“We now confront a second Trump presidency.

“There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country.

“We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

“Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance.”

2 – Kamala Harris say we must continue the fight for democracy

In her concession speech, Harris urged her supporters to “continue ‘the fight that fueled this campaign” (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-election-loss-speech-howard-university). The following quote from her speech captures her commitment to continue the fight for America.

“Let me say my heart is full today. My heart is full today, full of gratitude for the trust you have placed in me, full of love for our country, and full of resolve,” Harris said. “The outcome of this election was not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for, but hear me when I say the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

3 – New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is concerned about what Trump will do with the power of the presidency, but hopes there will be resistance

(https://nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-future-mourn.html).

“Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also [the popular vote]. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.”

“But eventually, mourning either starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will differ from what came before. Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us.”

“There’s no point in protesting his inauguration, as millions did in 2017. But hopefully we will take to the streets if his forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away. We will need to strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions, especially if Trump’s Justice Department cracks down on the mailing of abortion pills or his F.D.A. withdraws approval of them. In state and local elections, I’ll want to know how candidates promise to protect us from the MAGA movement’s threats to reshape our public health systems and our schools.”

“Ultimately,” Goldberg writes, “Trump’s one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure ‘some temporary hardship.’ We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it.”

“The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system will still be standing, and whether Trump’s opponents have built an alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the work of the next four years — saving what we can and trying to imagine a tolerable future. For now, though, all I can do is grieve.”

Others see a grim future for the country

1 – Elie Mystal argues that “Trump is Not a Fluke – He’s America” (https://thenation.com/article/politics/trump-is-america-not-a-fluke). The article was published on Nov. 7.

“America deserves everything it is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance….”

“Like I said, Trump is the sum of our failures. A country that allows its environment to be ravaged, its children to be shot, its wealth to be hoarded, its workers to be exploited, its poor to starve, its cops to murder, and its minorities to be hunted doesn’t really deserve to be ‘saved.’ It deserves to fail.
Trump is not our ‘retribution.’ He is our reckoning.”

2 – Peter Baker, New York Times journalist, analyzes how Trump’s threats and language sometimes are linked to a fascist past (https://nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/trump-fascism.html).

“While presidents have pushed the boundaries of power, and in some cases abused it outright, no American commander in chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad. Although plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their opponents, none has been publicly accused of fascism by his own handpicked top adviser who spent day after day with him….

“Mr. Trump does not use the word to describe himself — in fact, he uses it to describe his adversaries — but he does not shrink from the impression it leaves. He goes out of his way to portray himself as an American strongman, vowing if re-elected to use the military to crack down on dissent, to use the Justice Department to prosecute and imprison his foes, to shut down news media outlets that displease him, to claim authority that his predecessors did not have and to round up millions of people living in the country illegally and put them in camps or deport them en masse.

“He has already sought to overturn a free and fair election that even his own advisers told him he had lost, all in a bid to hold onto power despite the will of the voters, something no other sitting president ever tried to do. When that did not work, he spread demonstrable lies about the 2020 vote so pervasively that he convinced most of his supporters that Mr. Biden’s victory was illegitimate, according to polls, eroding faith in the democratic system that is key to its enduring viability. He then called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution so that President Biden could be instantly removed from power and himself reinstalled without a new election.”

“Gen. Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, was quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, ‘War,’ calling Mr. Trump ‘fascist to the core.’ In recent days, 13 other former Trump aides released a letter backing Mr. Kelly’s assessment and warning of the former president’s ‘desire for absolute, unchecked power.’

“Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has fueled concerns about fascism since the day he first descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid in 2015. As he kicked off his campaign that day, he demonized Mexican migrants as rapists and within months he vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country.

“He fashioned a foreign policy around the themes of isolationism and nationalism. When told by New York Times reporters that it sounded as if he were talking about an ‘America First’ approach, he happily appropriated the term. The fact that it was a term discredited by history because of its association before World War II with isolationists, including some Nazi sympathizers, did not matter to him.

“Nor did he mind citing fascists like Benito Mussolini. When Mr. Trump retweeted a quote that ‘it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,’ NBC’s Chuck Todd told him that it was from Mussolini. “I know who said it,” Mr. Trump replied. ‘But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?’ He also came to use language familiar to victims of Joseph Stalin when he declared journalists who angered him to be ‘enemies of the people,’ a phrase used to send Russians to the gulag.
“While he was president, Mr. Trump told staff members that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” At another point, he complained to Mr. Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals,” meaning those who reported to Hitler. In interviews with The Times and The Atlantic in recent days, Mr. Kelly confirmed those anecdotes, first reported in several books over the last few years. Mr. Trump denied this past week that he ever said them, and last year he denied ever reading “Mein Kampf.”

“The former president has likewise affiliated himself with the modern world’s autocrats. He has praised some of today’s most authoritarian and, in some cases, murderous leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia (‘genius’), President Xi Jinping of China (‘a brilliant man’), Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea (‘very honorable’), President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt (‘my favorite dictator’), Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (‘a great guy’), former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines (‘what a great job you are doing’), President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (‘a hell of a leader’) and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary (‘one of the most respected men’).”

Mr. Trump during his four years in office regularly asserted the most expansive view of presidential power. “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he once said, referring to the article in the Constitution that deals with executive power, ignoring the limits built into the document.”

“An early sign of the tension came during a meeting when Mr. Trump was pushing the generals to stage a military parade down the streets of Washington, the kind of spectacle not typically seen outside of a moment of wartime victory. General Paul Selva of the Air Force, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, objected, explaining that it reminded him of his childhood in Portugal when it was a military dictatorship. “It’s what dictators do,” General Selva told him. Mr. Trump was undeterred and brought up the idea dozens of times again, officers later said.

“The rift grew over time and culminated in Mr. Trump’s final year in office. When some of the protests over Mr. Floyd’s murder turned violent, the president’s first instinct was to use the armed forces. He repeatedly pressed his team to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 so that he could send active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted 10,000 troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne Division called up.

“Mr. Trump demanded that General Milley personally take charge, but the Joint Chiefs chairman resisted, saying the National Guard would be sufficient. Mr. Trump shouted at him in a meeting. “You are all losers!” he yelled and then repeated the line with an expletive. Turning to General Milley, he said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

“Over the past four years, Mr. Trump has escalated his threats to use the power of the presidency to punish his antagonists. He has vowed to prosecute Mr. Biden and other Democrats if he wins the election and threatened prison time for election workers who he deems to have cheated in some way.

“He promoted a social media post saying that former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, should face a military tribunal for investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He calls Democrats ‘the enemy from within’ and suggested that he would order the National Guard or active-duty military members to round up American citizens who oppose his candidacy.

“He has signaled that he would go after the news media as well. After ‘60 Minutes’ edited an interview with Ms. Harris in a way that Mr. Trump did not like, he said that “CBS should lose its license.” He said similar things this year about NBC, ABC and CNN. While in office, aides have said he pressed them to use government power to punish corporations affiliated with CNN and the owner of The Washington Post, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.”

“He has called for the summary execution of shoplifters and ruminated about unleashing the police to inflict ‘one really violent day’ on criminals or even ‘one rough hour — and I mean real rough’ to bring down the property crime rate.
In a 2021 podcast, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, now Mr. Trump’s running mate, said that if the former president won again he should ‘fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,’ in effect turning the nonpartisan government work force into a partisan cadre of loyalists.

Concluding thoughts

Nearly half of all voters registered support for Trump and gave the Republicans slim leads in both chambers of the U.S. Congress. They voted for a man and a political party that will try to destroy American democracy, ignore the US Constitution, create a king-like president, and find justifications for their extremist agenda. Trump and his administration are committed to capturing, detaining, and deporting millions of undocumented residents, and, in the process, separating many children from their parents. He will look for ways to compel local officials to go along. He will, as emphatically promised, impose inflation-driving tariffs, and thus increase the costs of goods to American consumers and many businesses. He and his administration will go after their domestic “enemies.” These efforts will likely be supported by a right-wing Supreme Court and many federal courts across the country.

Alternatively:

In his new book, On Freedom, historian Timothy Snyder describes what a real democracy entails.

“A large representative democracy works only when people are in fact represented. Democracy is rule by the people, so nonhuman entities (algorithms, corporations, and foundations) should neither vote nor pay for political campaigns. No American should count for more than any other American. Campaigns should be transparently and publicly financed. Candidates should be publicly financed; voter registration should be automatic; voting stations should be plentiful; ballots should be paper; gerrymandering should be outlawed” (p. 241).

12 Reasons to vote against Trump

Bob Sheak, Oct 11, 2024

Introduction

This post offers twelve reasons to vote against Trump/Vance in the November presidential election. The reader may think of more reasons. It will take a large vote for Harris/Walz to accomplish this goal and thus end Trump’s dominating influence on the Republican Party and US politics. It is a truly epical fight about democracy vs fascism.

#1 – Cognitive decline

Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman report on Trump’s increasingly angry and rambling speeches (https://nytimes.com/2024/10/06/us/politics/trump-speeches-age-cognitive-decline.html). Peter Baker covered the Trump presidency and wrote a book on it with his wife, Susan Glasser. Dylan Freedman is a machine-learning engineer and a journalist working on A.I. initiatives. Here’s some of what Baker and Freedman consider.

“Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.”

“He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.”

Baker and Freedman continue. “With Mr. Biden out, Mr. Trump, at 78, is now the oldest major party nominee for president in history and would be the oldest president ever if he wins and finishes another term at 82. A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. They point out that Trump “has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.

“According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

“Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)

“He cites fictional characters… like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.”

“Sarah Matthews, who was Mr. Trump’s deputy press secretary until breaking with him over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, said the former president had lost his fastball.

“‘I don’t think anyone would ever say that Trump is the most polished speaker, but his more recent speeches do seem to be more incoherent, and he’s rambling even more so and he’s had some pretty noticeable moments of confusion,’ she said.”

Some of Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries had a running debate over whether the president was “crazy-crazy,” as one of them put it in an interview after leaving office, or merely someone who promoted “crazy ideas.” There were multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause should be invoked to remove him from office, although the idea never went far. His own estranged niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, wrote a book identifying disorders she believed he has. Mr. Trump bristled at such talk, insisting that he was ‘a very stable genius’.

“Ms. Matthews said of her time in the White House. ‘No one wanted to outright say it in that environment — is he mentally fit? — but I definitely had my moments where I personally questioned it.’

“A 2022 study by a pair of University of Montana scholars found that Mr. Trump’s speech complexity was significantly lower than that of the average president over American history. (So was Mr. Biden’s.) The Times analysis found that Mr. Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who speaks at an eighth-grade level, which is roughly average for modern presidents.”

There is more. Baker and Freedman write:

“Mr. Trump has appeared tired at times and has maintained a far less active campaign schedule this time around, holding only 61 rallies so far in 2024, compared with 283 through all of 2016, according to the Times analysis, although he has picked up the pace lately. He appeared to nod off during his hush-money trial in New York before being convicted of 34 felonies.”

“Now his rallies are powered as much by anger as anything else. His distortions and false claims have reached new levels. His adversaries are ‘lunatics’ and ‘deranged’ and ‘communists’ and ‘fascists.’ Never particularly restrained, he now lobs four-letter words and other profanities far more freely.”

“But like some people approaching the end of their eighth decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he said recently in Wisconsin. ‘I am never, ever wrong.’” And his millions of followers believe him.

#2 – Moral unfitness

The New York Times Editorial Board has offered 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.

#3 – Law breaker

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.”

#4 – Opposed to abortion access

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ending the right to abortion that had existed since 1973. Nina Totenberg and Sarah McCammon review the new law for NPR (https://npr.org/2022/06/24/1102305878/supreme-court-abortion-roe-v-wade-decision-overturn). Here are excerpts and comments from their analysis.

“The decision, most of which was leaked in early May [2022], means that abortion rights will be rolled back in nearly half of the states immediately, with more restrictions likely to follow. For all practical purposes, abortion will not be available in large swaths of the country. The decision may well mean too that the court itself, as well as the abortion question, will become a focal point in the upcoming fall elections and in the fall and thereafter.”

Concurring with Justice Samuel Alito 78-page decision were Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by the first President Bush, and the three Trump appointees — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush, concurred in the judgment only, and would have limited the decision to upholding the Mississippi law at issue in the case, which banned abortions after 15 weeks.”

“Dissenting were Justices Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed by President Obama. They agreed that the court decision means that ‘young women today will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers.’ Indeed, they said the court’s opinion means that ‘from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term even at the steepest personal and familial costs.’”

#5 – Building a right-wing and lawless army of militia to advance Trump’s authoritarian agenda

Bob Dreyfuss delves into this issue in an article for The Nation on Sept 5, 2024

(https://thenation.com/article/society/donald-trump-squadristi-nazies). Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an independent investigative journalist who specializes in politics and national security.

Dreyfuss writes: “Trump, of course, has a long history of supporting and encouraging potentially violent supporters. In 2016, during his first campaign, he suggested that ‘the Second Amendment people’—i.e., his gun-owning backers—might be able to stop the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court choices. In 2019, he said, ‘I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.’ And in 2020 Trump famously told the Proud Boys militia to ‘stand down and stand by.’ Ultimately, the Proud Boys would help lead the January 6 insurrection.”

There is a pattern. Dreyfuss reports, “Certainly, Trump has summoned US militias and other extremists to his cause. In 2020, for instance, at the height of nationwide protests against lockdowns, mask requirements, and school closures at the start of the coronavirus crisis, Trump issued a series of viral tweets urging his followers to ‘liberate’ Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, where armed adherents were mobilizing in street demonstrations. For instance, on April 17, 2020, Trump tweeted—characteristically, in all caps—’LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ Soon afterwards, gun-toting Trump supporters invaded the state capitol in Lansing. Most egregiously, he called on supporters to gather in Washington on January 5-6, 2021—’Be there, will be wild’—for a rally that ended in the occupation of the Capitol and led to Trump’s impeachment.”

Trump has an armed and cult-like following that seems prepared to take up arms on his behalf. This is in a context in which the nation is bitterly divided “in which a substantial portion of the populace believes that violence may be necessary.

“According to a survey by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security & Threats, as many as 14 percent of Americans say that violence is justified to ‘achieve political goals that I support,’ and 4.4 percent—that’s more than 11 million US adults—agree that ‘the use of force is justified to return Donald Trump to the presidency.’”

#6 -Trump’s January 6 Culpability

Brett Wilkins reports on a new case for Trump’s culpability on January 6

(https://commondreams.org/articles/bombshell-new-motion-lays-out-legal-case-for-trumps-culpability-on-january-6).

“Jack Smith, the special counsel probing former U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential contest, on Wednesday [Oct 2] presented a massive trove of fresh evidence supporting his election interference case against the 2024 Republican nominee.

“Smith’s sprawling and highly anticipated 165-page motion — which was partly unsealed Wednesday by presiding U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — states that Trump ‘asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so.’

“Trump — who in August 2023 was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights — contends that his actions were taken in his official capacity as president and not as a private individual.

“Bottom of Form

In July, the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing justice— including three Trump appointees — ruled that the ex-president is entitled to ‘absolute immunity’ for ‘official acts’ taken while he was in office, raising questions about the future of this case. According to Smith’s motion:

“Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one. Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as president, had no official role.

“In Trump v. United States… the Supreme Court held that presidents are immune from prosecution for certain official conduct—including the defendant’s use of the Justice Department in furtherance of his scheme, as was alleged in the original indictment—and remanded to this court to determine whether the remaining allegations against the defendant are immunized.

“The answer to that question is no. This motion provides a comprehensive account of the defendant’s private criminal conduct; sets forth the legal framework created by Trump for resolving immunity claims; applies that framework to establish that none of the defendant’s charged conduct is immunized because it either was unofficial or any presumptive immunity is rebutted; and requests the relief the government seeks, which is, at bottom, this: that the court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.

Smith’s filing details what Trump told various people in his inner circle, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, his now-disgraced and twice-disbarred lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and leading White House and Republican Party figures — some of whose names remain undisclosed.”

Smith’s motion states:

“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”). His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’ certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification.”

Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and co-chair of the Not Above the Law Coalition praises Smith’s efforts says “Jack Smith has shown us yet again the merits of his case against former President Trump.”

“In his filing, Smith clarifies that the alleged criminal actions occurred while Trump was acting as a private citizen,” Gilbert added. “The desperate plan that Trump embarked on to try and overturn the results of a legitimate election was reprehensible, irresponsible, and — the document shows — criminal. Accountability to the American people and our democracy is our only path forward.”

#7– Encourages violence among his supporters

Sasha Abramsky reports on the fascist calls to violence by Trump and his supporters in an article on The Nation, Oct 4, 2024

“Late last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump, who has long fetishized what he sees as strongman behavior and language, took another leaf out of the Duterte and Bolsonaro playbooks. Specifically, he aped both authoritarians in their approach to crime and punishment.”

“Trump, in Erie, called for shoplifters to face ‘one really violent day’ and ‘one rough hour’ at the hands of the police, arguing that it was Democratic policy to coddle offenders, and that taking the gloves off in the fight against street crime was the only way to render communities safe again. In a rambling speech notable both for its utter lack of syntax and its extraordinary embrace of illegal violence by state and federal agents, Trump declared ruefully: ‘They’re [police officers] not allowed to do it, because the liberal left won’t let them do it. If you had one real, rough, nasty day with the drug stores as an example.… she [Harris] created something in San Francisco, $950 you’re allowed to steal; anything above that you will be prosecuted. Originally you saw kids walking with calculators, standing there with calculators adding it up. If you had one really violent day, put Congressman Mike Kelly [a local GOP representative who was attending the rally] in charge for one day. Mike, would you say, if you’re in charge, ‘Don’t touch them, let them rob your stores’?… it’s a chain of events, it’s so bad. One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately, end immediately, it will end immediately.’”

Abramsky continues.

“The violent sentiments underpinning Trump’s word-salad sentences were in and of themselves appalling—as appalling as his reported desire during his time in the White House to let Border Patrol agents shoot undocumented immigrants in the legs as a form of deterrence. Equally disgusting was the reaction of his crowd. At each turn of phrase, at each homage to violence, the crowd roared its approval.

“There’s been a lot of talk recently about ‘understanding’ the Trump voter, about not tarring them all with their leader’s fetid brush. Good luck on that front. For, based on that particular interaction between cult leader and cult followers in Pennsylvania, I’d say a significant portion of them, at least the ones who think it a worthy investment of time and energy to attend a Trump rally, are now reveling in out-and-out fascist calls to violence. They’re supporting Trump not despite his propensity to devolve into ugly calls for clearly illegal acts of violence but because of it. And, in these rallies, they are provided the cover of numbers to give their worst, most vicious impulses free rein. That’s the emotional timbre of the lynch mob.”

Since the end of his presidency, Trump has “sought to invoke the Insurrection Act against racial justice protesters; and he described police violence as a ‘beautiful thing to watch.’ And while his 2016–20 presidency did see some criminal justice reform legislation signed into law, since then Trump has leaned into tough-on-crime policies: he has pledged to dramatically expand the use of the death penalty, to introduce summary executions for drug dealers, and Project 2025, which his campaign is closely tied to, has promised to pull back on federal probes into police violence against suspects. He has also repeatedly stated that he will use the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents, elections workers, and even members of the media.”

#8- A long record of ignoring the law 

Abramsky also addresses this issue. “If the GOP and the MAGA movement were even remotely concerned with true crime fighting, they wouldn’t have nominated a man convicted of 34 felonies—not for stealing a few hundred dollars’ worth of drugstore items but for illegally paying off a porn star to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep quiet about her affair with Donald J. Trump. They would not have nominated a man whose business enterprises have been found to have committed fraud and who boasts about his fine-tuned ability to avoid paying taxes. They would not have nominated a man found liable for sexual abuse, fined millions of dollars for defaming the victim of that sexual abuse, and caught on tape bragging about his ability to grab and grope the private parts of any woman he wants. They would not have nominated a man twice impeached, once for holding up aid to Ukraine in hopes of strong-arming that country’s government into dishing up political dirt on Joe Biden, the other time for inciting an armed uprising aimed at preventing the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. They would not have nominated a man facing dozens of additional state and federal felony charges for everything from hoarding top-secret documents through to trying to bully state officials in swing states into changing the election tallies to benefit Donald Trump.”

#9 – Trump suggests there will be violence if he loses the November Election and seems to welcome the thought

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.

#10 – Dismisses the threat of  global warming

Tob Engelhardt considers how Trump’s policies would intensify global warming in an article for Tom Dispatch, Sept 26 2024

(https://tomdispatch.com/in-a-lost-universe-with-you-know-who).

“After all, right now, in September 2024, we’re living on a planet that has never, not at any time in human history, been hotter. Our world has, in fact, been setting remarkable heat records, one after another, month after month — August was the 15th straight month to be the hottest of its kind ever — year after year. In fact, 2023 set a global heat record and 2024 has a 95% probability of smashing that record. And the weather of such an overheating planet should already be taking your breath away, even if we’re still early (more or less) in a process that could indeed create nothing less than a genuine hell on Earth.

“All the greenhouse gases that have been and are being sent into the planet’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are creating ever more heat, about 90% of which is at present being absorbed by global waters and is already altering our world in stunning ways. Recently, for instance, there has been devastating climate-change-related flooding globally, whether you’re talking about parts of China, Nigeria, or most recently central Europe that suddenly found themselves underwater (while, by the way, Portugal was burning with more than 100 fires). The droughts have similarly been horrific, while the fires — oh, yes, those fires! — have been beyond fierce, including the recent blazes in Southern California and the 1.9 million (yes, 1.9 million!) acres scorched in Oregon’s record summer fire season. And don’t forget those Canadian fires of 2023 and 2024 that set such grim records in a world where “nearly 12 million hectares [of forests] — an area roughly the size of Nicaragua — burned in 2023, topping the previous record by about 24%.”

“And the heat? …. This year, records have been smashed again (and again) across the American West — and significant other parts of the planet.”

“In fact, to be fair to The Donald, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did indeed take some significant steps toward greening this country, mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), during their time in office, the U.S. has remained the leader globally in producing oil and natural gas. In 2023, for the sixth year in a row, it set an all-time global record for oil production and another for natural gas exports. And don’t forget about methane, a truly potent greenhouse gas, where the American record is equally grim.

“Still, the man who demanded a billion dollars in campaign contributions from a group of leading oil executives and lobbyists at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago last spring, while promising to reverse Biden administration environmental rules and regulations, has, as Kamala Harris reminded us in their debate, repeatedly dismissed the phenomenon as a ‘hoax.’ Worse yet, it’s obvious that, should he enter the White House again, Trump and his compatriots are planning to let the fossil-fuel companies run wild and wreak havoc. He also plans to do his damnedest to limit the production of electric cars (despite the backing of Elon Musk) — ‘I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day 1’ — and so much else to ensure that we live on what, barring some remarkable surprise in the decades to come, will be a planet from… yes, hell.

“And oh yes, that Heritage Foundation plan, Project 2025, that he claims he hasn’t read (and it’s true that, as far as we know, he doesn’t read much, other perhaps than Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the collection of that monster’s speeches, which he once reportedly kept near his bed). Still, Project 2025, created by so many people connected to his first term in office, already promises, according to the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman, “a widespread evisceration of environmental protections, allowing for a glut of new oil and gas drilling, the repeal of the IRA and even the elimination of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service so they can be replaced by private companies. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025, has said a new Trump administration should ‘eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.’”

“The estimate is that if Project 2025’s authors have their way, the result will be an added 2.7 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2030 and 26 billion tons (no, that is not a misprint!) by 2050. A cheery prospect for sure on a planet already heating in a historic (or do I mean post-historic?) fashion.”

“We’re talking, of course, about the man who generally summarizes his stance on energy and this planet in a simple phrase: ‘Drill, baby, drill”’— sometimes adding ‘and drill now!’ Honestly, you couldn’t be blunter than that, could you, when it comes to the fate of our world?”

#11 – Trump’s Politicization of Hurricane Helene Is Scandalous, Even for Him

Ed Kilgore reports on Trump’s politicization of Hurricane Helene in an article on New York Magazine, Oct 7,2024 (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-politicization-of-hurricane-helene-is-scandalous.html).

Trump has been alleging without evidence of a highly incompetent and even indifferent Biden administration response. “As CNN reports, it’s mostly a pack of demonstrably fabricated lies:

“Though the Biden administration’s response had certainly received criticism, it had also been praised by various state and local leaders — including the Republican governors of some of the affected states and the Democratic governor of North Carolina, plus local leaders including the Democratic mayor of the hard-hit North Carolina city of Asheville.

“For example, Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said at a Tuesday press conference that federal assistance had ‘been superb,’ noting that Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had both called and told him to let them know whatever the state needed. McMaster also said FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell had called…. The FAA is coordinating closely with state and local officials to make sure everyone is operating safely in very crowded and congested airspace.”

Kilgore refers to NBC News reports:

“False claims that federal emergency disaster money was given to migrants in the U.S. illegally have spread quickly in recent days, boosted by former President Donald Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters. Trump repeated one of the more extreme baseless allegations during a rally Thursday in Saginaw, Michigan, saying that the money had been stolen. 

More lies. Trump also said, “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”

Combine all the false claims Team Trump is promoting right now “and they tell a tall tale of worthless deep-state bureaucrats (whom Trump wants to replace with loyalists once he’s back in office) politically persecuting his suffering followers (just like the Biden administration persecuted him via ‘lawfare’), as they pursue their horrifically anti-American project of drowning the country and its voters in a sea of violent pet-eating migrants deeper than any flood waters. Needless to say this campaign of slander offers Helene victims nothing other than another grievance and makes an ongoing tragedy just another chapter in the saga of Trump’s earth-scorching return to power.”

#12 – Trump would add twice as much to national debt as Harris

Jacob Bogage, who covers economic policy in Congress for The Washington Post,  reports on a study documenting that Trump’s agenda would add to national debt (https://washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/07/harris-trump-national-debt).

“Trump’s campaign proposals would increase the ballooning national debt by $7.5 trillion; Harris’s would add $3.5 trillion, according to a nonpartisan think tank.”

“Trump has called for extending his 2017 tax cuts, which would add more than $5 trillion over 10 years to the United States’ $35.7 trillion national debt, according to a study from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). His plan to end taxes on overtime wages, Social Security benefits and tips would add another $3.6 trillion in debt. And his call for a nationwide campaign to detain and deport undocumented immigrants would cost $350 billion.

“Trump says major new tariffs on imports would bring in enough revenue to offset all the tax cuts, but the study doesn’t support that claim, and many economists say the tariffs would also drive prices up for U.S. consumers.

“All told, CRFB found that the Trump policies it studied would add $7.5 trillion of debt — more than twice as much as the Harris proposals the group scrutinized.

“Harris would add $3 trillion to the debt by extending the 2017 tax cuts for those earning less than $400,000 a year, and $1.35 trillion through a major expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, according to the study. Harris’s campaign says those programs would cost far less.

“Major portions of Trump’s 2017 tax cut expire in 2025, and without new legislation, individual tax rates will increase sharply. Congress’s nonpartisan bookkeeper projects the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio, a key metric of financial health, will reach a new all-time high within the next decade, imperiling financial stability. And Social Security and Medicare will also be insolvent by 2035 and 2036, respectively, forcing mandatory benefits cuts by those dates without congressional action.

“If we don’t take this seriously, it sort of becomes like bankruptcy, which happens very slowly and then suddenly, all at once,” said Jason Fichtner, chief economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank. “What that means for individuals, households, consumers, investors, borrowers, is that they will see the value of the dollar decline. They’ll probably see interest rates go up and they will see inflation go up, as well. Does that mean an apocalypse and there’s nothing to buy anymore? No. It means things become more expensive and we have a hard time funding the things you want to pay for now, like roads, bridges and education.”

“Both candidates do have plans to raise some federal revenue: The tariffs Trump has proposed would reach as high as 20 percent on all $3 trillion of annual imports, which could bring in $2.7 trillion in revenue, according to CRFB.

“But, by some of his own economic advisers’ analysis, the tariffs could also dramatically increase prices and depress U.S. economic output, because producers often pass on the cost of import duties to consumers. Lower economic output might also mean lower tax revenue.

“‘Tariffs are just a tax, no question about it,’ Stephen Moore, an economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and a Trump economic adviser, told policymakers at an event hosted by Politico this spring. “I don’t always agree on everything with Donald Trump. He knows I don’t agree with the monetary policy. A tariff is just a consumption tax.”

“Trump would also dramatically expand domestic energy production and recoup funding from some of President Joe Biden’s climate investments, worth up to $700 billion. And Trump has pledged to end the Department of Education at a savings of $200 billion, though much of that money would probably have to be reprogrammed into state education grants.”

“Harris has said she would pay for each of her policy proposals, and under one budget model CRFB studied, her plans would not raise the debt at all.”

“Under the most realistic scenario CRFB studied, Harris would raise $900 billion in revenue by increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, plus another $900 billion from additional tax revenue. Much of that would be generated from new funding for the IRS to investigate tax cheats.

“Harris has not yet proposed new tax rates for those earning more than $400,000, but less than roughly $600,000. Rates for that tax bracket would be worked out in negotiations with Congress, she has said. Rates for the wealthiest earners would be set at 39.6 percent, according to Harris’s plan.

“The vice president would also increase tax rates on capital income, including on gains, dividends and corporate stock buybacks, for $850 billion in revenue, and allow Medicare to more aggressively negotiate prescription drug prices, worth $250 billion in debt reduction.”

Concluding thoughts

Trump’s presidential candidacy poses an existential threat to American democracy and to the wellbeing of the great majority of Americans. As discussed in this post, there are reasons to take the threat Trump poses seriously. The only way to stop him and his allies is to vote for Harris/Walz and other Democrats. The hope is that such votes would not only give the Democrats the advantage in the popular vote but also enough electoral college votes to certify their win. The hope then is that a Harris-led administration would continue the economic policies that have reduced inflation, raised wages, and created millions of jobs and address the problem with more determination than heretofore.