(Please...dear humans who are still on the fence, or
planning on holding their noses/closing their
eyes/plugging their ears/ignoring their gut and voting
for him: Please just take a moment and a deep breath, and
reconsider, as if your lives literally depended on
it...because they do...)
***
Too many Americans seem to be ignoring the risks that
another Trump presidency would pose to the U.S. This is a
warning to them.
Donald Trump is an existential threat to American
democracy.
Trump tried to stage a coup in the months after his
defeat in the 2020 election and then incited a violent
insurrection in an illegal attempt to stay in power. He
is a convicted felon, a twice impeached, four-times-
indicted con man and fraudster, the leader of the MAGA
cult who uses conspiracy theories and lies about
immigrants and minorities to stoke fear and hatred.
Above all, he is a clear and present danger to the modern
American way of life. His greatest ambition is to become
a dictator.
American voters need a concise closing argument, one that
explains the stakes in the 2024 presidential election and
makes clear why Trump can never again be trusted with
power. Too many Americans seem to be ignoring the risks
that another Trump presidency would pose to the nation,
and so it is important to warn about him one more time.
All the President’s Crimes
Threat to Democracy
Trump is a fascist who wants to overthrow the United
States’ democratic system of government. He doesn’t hide
his openness to ending American democracy, telling
supporters they will never need to vote again after he
wins this election. “Get out and vote, just this time,”
he said in July, before adding: “You won’t have to do it
anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed,
it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”
He fawns over his role model, Vladimir Putin, the
autocratic Russian president who helped Trump get elected
in 2016. Trump has already suggested that he won’t accept
the results of the 2024 election if he loses, just like
he refused to accept defeat in 2020.
In a court filing in early October, Jack Smith, the
special counsel who has charged Trump in connection with
the January 6 insurrection and his illegal efforts to
stay in power, reminded Americans of the threat that
Trump poses. With damning new details, Smith laid out the
facts of how Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election,
showing that Trump knowingly pushed bogus claims of voter
fraud with outrageous conspiracy theories in an illegal
scheme to cling to power.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election,
he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” Smith
wrote in the brief.
When those efforts failed, Trump used a speech at a rally
outside the White House on January 6, 2021, to incite
thousands of his followers to descend on the U.S.
Capitol, where the election was in the process of being
certified by Congress. Trump “knew that he had only one
last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President:
the large and angry crowd standing in front of him.” So
he “delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters
and motivate them to march to the Capitol.”
He plans to weaponize the legal system by packing federal
judgeships, the Justice Department, the FBI, and other
federal law enforcement agencies with lackeys and right-
wing extremists in order to prosecute his political
enemies. He falsely claims that he is a victim of
persecution, but in reality that is what he plans to
inflict on his political rivals. He will pardon the
January 6 insurrectionists and fire Smith and the other
prosecutors who have handled the federal criminal cases
that have been brought against him. He plans to use the
antiquated Insurrection Act to get the military to crush
dissent.
He will likely direct the Justice Department to challenge
the votes of minorities, as he tried to do in swing
states after the 2020 election, and may try to get
compliant judges to throw out election results in key
races in which Democratic candidates win. He is likely to
repeat the tactics he used in 2020 to incite his
brownshirt militias, like the Proud Boys, to intimidate
voters at polling places. Just this month, Trump said the
military should be used against Americans who disagree
with him and said that liberals are “the enemy within.”
Dissent against Trump “should be easily handled by, if
necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary,
by the military,” he has said.
Eliminate Reproductive Rights
Trump installed the three judges on the Supreme Court who
provided the margin to overturn Roe v. Wade, and those
justices now threaten to roll back reproductive rights
even further. Worse, his own MAGA cult will probably
pressure him to agree to a national abortion ban, despite
his claims on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t sign
such legislation. In October, Trump finally admitted that
he was open to considering it. After saying in an
interview that a national ban is “off the table,” he
quickly reversed himself and said that he might be open
to the idea, adding that “we’ll see what happens.”
Trump and the MAGA Republicans will try to put other
extremist proposals into law to further restrict
reproductive rights.
The next step would be a national ban on contraception.
Earlier this year, Republicans in the Senate voted
against a bill to protect access to contraception; many
conservatives also oppose in vitro fertilization
treatments. After crushing reproductive rights, the Trump
Republicans want to impose a ban on no-fault divorce to
increase the legal power of men over women, while
trapping people in abusive marriages.
Concentration Camps and Mass Deportations for Immigrants
Trump’s campaign this year is just one long racist rant
against immigrants. When he was president, Trump imposed
cruel immigration policies, including family separation,
but now his anti-immigration rhetoric and proposals are
much worse. He traffics in racist tropes and conspiracy
theories pulled from a weird alternate reality where
immigrants kidnap and eat cats. He is exploiting the
hysteria that has gripped many white Americans over their
fear of becoming a minority. Trump stokes those worries
by using Nazi-style rhetoric that nonwhite immigrants are
“poisoning the blood of the country.”
Trump vows to order the mass detention and deportation of
undocumented immigrants, which could mean the forced
removal of an estimated 11 million people from the
country.
That would inevitably lead to the creation of a network
of concentration camps bigger than the entire U.S. prison
system. And once those camps are built, Trump and his
allies are likely to find other uses for them as well.
Create a Theocracy
Trump’s most dangerous supporters are Christian
nationalists, a growing cadre of evangelicals who don’t
believe in the separation of church and state and don’t
even really believe in democracy. They share a dystopian
vision for a Christian-dominated fascist regime and yearn
for a dictator who will impose a religious order on
society. Trump appeals directly to Christian nationalists
in his campaign speeches when he talks of the need to
reclaim a mythical lost white Christian past: “If I get
in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that
you’ve never used before. … I really believe it’s the
biggest thing missing from this country, the biggest
thing missing. We have to bring back our religion. We
have to bring back Christianity in this country.”
Trump’s bogus religiosity is purely opportunistic; he is
a deeply immoral man who couldn’t care less about
Christianity except as a way to motivate his political
base.
Increase Censorship and Destroy the Media
Trump wants to crush dissent and impose broad censorship
over the media. He will seek retribution against the
press for criticizing and investigating him, and if he
gains power he will bulldoze the First Amendment in order
to crush independent journalism.
Trump has repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the
people,” and promises to use the government and the
courts to seek revenge against individual reporters and
entire news organizations that have dared to reveal the
truth about him.
Trump will also enable more book banning by right-wing
groups who have hijacked public school boards and state
government agencies to block books from being taught in
schools or being held in libraries. Those groups have
frequently targeted books about gender and racial
identity, but with Trump in office they are likely to go
after many more books about history and politics and
current events than ever before.
A Puppet for Putin
Trump is eager to bow down once again before his master,
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Trump and his minions, including many right-wing pundits,
have worked tirelessly over the last few years to try to
convince Americans that Trump is not Putin’s pawn, and
that the Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax.
But Trump is Putin’s lackey, and the Trump-Russia case
was not a hoax.
Putin ordered Russian intelligence to help Trump win the
2016 election, and Trump was happy to go along with it.
The Trump-Russia case was a counterintelligence and
criminal inquiry into a Russian covert action operation
to manipulate the 2016 presidential election by hacking
and releasing Democratic emails and related documents to
damage the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. The
Russian operation, which also included a disinformation
campaign that was spread on social media platforms, was
designed to help Trump win the election. There is no
doubt today that Russia worked to help get Trump elected;
the only question that remains unresolved is the degree
to which Trump and his lieutenants actively collaborated
with Russia in 2016. But there is no doubt that they knew
about and welcomed the help.
Trump is bitter at Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy, because he refused to buckle under pressure
from Trump in 2019 to fabricate a damaging investigation
of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden and thus help
Trump’s political fortunes. When Trump’s scheme was
uncovered, he was impeached by the House.
But right-wing hatred of Ukraine runs even deeper than
Trump’s personal grievances. Christian nationalists love
Putin; they see him as their fundamentalist ally in a
global culture war against the liberal West. They hate
Ukraine because they see it as allied with liberal
Western Europe.
Christian nationalists want Putin to win the war and
crush Ukraine. They also want the United States to
withdraw from NATO to end American support for “woke”
Western Europe. Trump is likely to go along with Putin
and the Christian nationalists and abandon both Ukraine
and NATO, leaving Western Europe on its own to face an
emboldened Russia.
Christian nationalists are also ardent supporters of
Israel’s right-wing leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and so
Trump would give Israel a green light to conduct an even
more brutal military campaign in Gaza, southern Lebanon,
and the West Bank. Trump would be happy to watch Israel
crush the Palestinian people; he doesn’t support the
creation of a Palestinian state, while his MAGA
Republican supporters in Congress have already proposed
banning Palestinians from entering the U.S. and demanding
the deportation of Palestinian passport holders already
living here.
Dictator for Life
If Trump wins, he might not go away after just one more
four-year term. Despite the fact that he is already 78
and is increasingly showing signs of mental decline, he
may try to stay in power, despite the two-term
presidential term limits imposed by the Constitution. And
he might get the blessing of the right-wing Supreme
Court.
If Trump does so, he could follow Putin’s example, who
circumvented Russia’s constitution that limited the
country’s president to two consecutive terms. At the end
of his second term as president in 2008, Putin became
prime minister for four years before becoming president
again in 2012. He then changed the Russian Constitution
to eliminate the two-term limit.
Trump could argue that under the 12th Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution, he could serve as vice president under
a compliant president and then return to power when the
president resigns to make room for him. That would
circumvent the 22nd Amendment’s two-term presidential
limit. Some constitutional scholars have been warning
about this kind of scheme for years.
If you think that is too far-fetched, you haven’t been
paying attention to Trump.
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