America is now three and one-half years into the Presidency of Donald Trump and, perhaps, staring at another four and one-half years of his unique brand of politics.
God save us.
Lots of people saw this grotesque presidency coming, but not enough of them actually got off their asses and went to their polling places. The warning signs were clearly evident to anyone who was paying attention. The candidate was a narcissist, a spoiled child who liked to play with other people’s money, and a businessman with a history of bad ideas, jilted investors, gypped vendors, mistreated minority tenants, and a bunch of bankruptcies to his credit.
Donald Trump had no experience in politics or government when he ran for the highest political office in the land. He also had very little grasp of the policy differences in the major political parties. In fact, he changed party affiliation five times from 1987 to 2012. Trump is famous for demanding and valuing loyalty; however he has been a Republican only since 2012 (when he decided to run for President).
And, beginning in 2016, he remade the Party in his own image.
Conservatives were worried when Trump began to make political noise. Way back in 2015, when he was beginning to make waves, conservative commentator Mary Katherine Ham characterized Trump as a “casual authoritarian”, saying “he is a candidate who has happily and proudly spurned the entire idea of limits on his power as an executive and doesn’t have any interest in the Constitution and what it allows him to do and what (it) does not allow him to do. That is concerning for people who are interested in limiting government.”
How insightful that conservative Republican turned out to be.
Fellow conservative Republican Charles Cooke of the National Review expressed similar views, terming Trump an “anti-Constitutional authoritarian”.
No truer words were ever spoken.
It is ironic that the Republican Party, which for over one hundred years had stood for “states rights”, strict interpretation of the Constitution, balanced budgets, strong military and economic alliances, and opposition to despotic regimes, decided in 2016 to throw their lot in with this anti-Constitutional authoritarian.
It was desperation time for a Party that was losing out to demographics. Time for a Hail Mary pass. “Let’s bring Trump off the bench and see what he can do”, Republicans thought. “What do we have to lose?”
It is very obvious now, knowing what we do after three and one-half years of Trumpism, that Donald Trump lied when he took the Presidential Oath of Office in January, 2017. At his inauguration, the new President swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America”.
And then, almost immediately, commenced to ignore provisions that he didn’t agree with, undermine the separation of powers, and find ways to expand the authority of the President by edict, by threatening members of his own Party, and by packing the Supreme Court with bootlickers. He was (and is) what Mr. Cooke thought he was, an “anti-Constitutional authoritarian”.
Think about that: an anti-Constitutional authoritarian leading a Constitutional democracy. How’s that going to work out? Autocracy vs. democracy: they are polar opposite concepts.
As we head for the 2020 elections, we have a President who:
Does not support the free speech of opponents
Thinks journalists are “enemies” of the State
Believes that minority Americans are lesser citizens than Caucasian citizens
Eschews balanced budgets and ignores the Congressional role of setting budget priorities
Flaunts the Constitutional prohibition against self-dealing (emoluments)
Consistently takes actions which favor Christian citizens over those of other religions
Administratively defunds regulatory agencies and functions established by Congress
Extorts foreign governments to aid in his reelectionAuthorizes unidentified, uniformed, masked and unbadged goons to quell anti-government protests
Refuses to allow Administration officials to testify before Congress
A sacred cornerstone of our democracy is the right of American citizens to vote for their governmental leaders. The elections function is administered by the States. Within certain parameters, each State determines how it conducts its elections and counts ballots, etc.
Probably because he doesn’t truly believe in a democratic form of government, Donald Trump has bad-mouthed the electoral process throughout his adult years. “It’s rigged”, he fond of saying. That was simply his opinion when he was a citizen voter; however, that kind of rhetoric coming from a leading American politician is inappropriate and, potentially, destabilizing to democracy.
Perhaps that is his intent.
The rigging of elections, according to Trump, is commonplace. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, President Trump took to bad-mouthing the elections process per a strategy developed by his political advisor Roger Stone (whose campaign improprieties in that election resulted in a felony conviction, and whose prison term for those offenses was commuted this month by his buddy Donald Trump).
Stone’s advice was for the President to publicly warn that “the system is rigged against the citizens”. Accordingly, Trump went on the attack, publicly calling the primary process “a rigged, disgusting dirty system”, advising that “early voting in Florida is very dishonest”, and complaining about massive “voter fraud” to deny him victory.
In fact, just before the election in 2016, the candidate told a crowd in Columbus, Ohio that, “The election is going to be rigged —I’m going to be honest. People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote ten times, maybe.” A few days later, in Pennsylvania, he told supporters that, “The only way we can lose…is if cheating goes on”. At campaign stops he routinely made claims that Clinton was “out to steal the vote”.
The Trump/Stone campaign to delegitimize a national election while running for President was effective. A majority of Republican voters polled in October, 2016, a month before the election, believed that there is “a great deal of fraud in American elections”.
And then, surprising even himself, Donald Trump won the “rigged” election.
Once the dust had settled, Trump resumed his task of delegitimizing elections. Narcissist that he is, Trump had to bad-mouth the process…because he had lost the popular election by 3 million votes, casting some doubt upon his mandate to govern. According to the President, he would have steamrollered Hillary Clinton if not for millions of fraudulent votes cast by illegal immigrants, dead people, Democrats trucked into neighboring States, and bad guys stuffing mailboxes with fraudulent absentee ballots.
All of these imagined offenses were on the new President’s mind when in May 2017 he formed a Voter Fraud Task Force headed by Kris Kobach, then the Secretary of State of Kansas, who had long campaigned for more restrictive voting laws. (This task force was quietly disbanded in January 2018 after finding no evidence of widespread voting improprieties.)
Questioning the legitimacy of elections, even when it isn’t happening, serves the political goals of President Trump, whose bona fides with his conservative base are cemented by his strong stance on stricter immigration enforcement. The threat of illegal immigrants voting (there’s no evidence of that) against Republican candidates is a dog whistle that justifies, in conservative circles, harsher voting laws. These laws, which have been enacted in many Red states, have tended to suppress voting by minorities, thereby denying Democratic victories in districts that are majority Democratic in registration.
In 2018, when vote counting was finished and the Democrats had retaken control of Congress, President Trump declared that elections were being “stolen”.
With another three months or so left in the 2020 campaign, the President of the United States is again bad-mouthing the electoral process. In May, he warned that November would see “the greatest rigged election in history”.
Of concern to the President in 2020 is the effect that the Covid-19 pandemic will have on the conduct of elections. It has been probable for about six months now that routine, in-person polling place voting would be not possible, or prudent, in November because of the Covid-19 danger to voters and polling place workers, most of whom are elderly. Accordingly, many states have decided to expand the use of mail-in or absentee voting to ensure a good turnout without jeopardizing public health.
The President is enraged by this because: (1) it lends credence to the severity of the pandemic, which the President has strived to minimize; (2) it would probably result in more people voting, which is not in the President’s favor; and, (3) it would tend to thwart Republican voter suppression tactics which tailored to make in-person voting difficult if not impossible for minorities/economically disadvantaged citizens.
So, it is not surprising that President Trump has turned up the volume on claims of potential voter fraud. He’s now loudly complaining about “electoral corruption” in Blue states, predicting that foreign countries will print and submit phony mail-in ballots, forecasting a flood of undocumented immigrants voting in November, alleging that there will be illegal “ballot harvesting”, and claiming that mail-in voting is a lawless, unregulated exercise where ballots are stolen from mailboxes, voter signatures are routinely forged, etc.
The President of the United States has also publicly stated that “kids go and they raid the mailboxes and they hand them to people that are signing the ballots down the end of the street, which is happening, they grab the ballots. You don’t think that happens? There’s ballot harvesting.”
There is no evidence to back up Trump’s claims. If there was, he’d be touting it.
A Loyola Law School professor reviewed US elections from 2000 to 2014 and found 31 incidents of voter fraud from that time, during which more than a billion votes were cast. In both 2016 and 2018, approximately 25 percent of US voters cast mail ballots. Military personnel stationed overseas routinely vote by mail, as do American diplomats. President Trump has voted absentee (by mail) while in office: he must trust the process.
In fact, the only notable example of alleged fraud took place in 2018, when absentee ballots allegedly were picked up and falsified in a North Carolina congressional race under the direction of a political operative who was working on behalf of the race’s Republican candidate. That operative now faces obstruction of justice and perjury charges.
Despite the evidence that states, both Red and Blue, have systems and processes in place to prevent forgery, theft, and voter fraud, President Trump continues to blast his bullhorn at full volume. One of his latest targets is California’s Governor Gavin Newsome who, in the face of a raging resurgence of Covid-19 infections, issued an executive order expanding vote-by-mail in the state. “But in California, the governor sent, I hear, or is sending millions of ballots all over the state. Millions. To anybody. To anybody. People that aren’t citizens, illegals, anybody that walks in California is gonna get a ballot”.
Just recently our President has labeled voting-by-mail “corrupt”, “dangerous”, “fraudulent”, and susceptible to “cheaters”. This has to be unwelcome news for the Republican-controlled state of Utah, which has utilized 100 percent mail-in voting for quite some time.
Is President Trump alleging that those Republican Senators, Congressmen, and the Governor in Utah were fraudulently elected?
Typically, though, mail-in voting disadvantages Republican candidates because legislatures, governors and courts in Blue states have devised voter suppression efforts which focus on in-person voting. President Trump admitted as much recently when he said that voting-by-mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans”.
Actually, it works out fine for Republican voters, because of convenience, but not for Republican candidates, because more opposition voters are allowed to vote.
This is the bottom line for Trump: he doesn’t care about rigged elections when the Russians help him rig one, but only cares if his voter suppression schemes are foiled.
Just what one would expect from an anti-Constitutional authoritarian.
UPDATE: President Trump’s new campaign strategy, to scare the Hell out of American citizens by proclaiming rampant anarchy that needs to be quelled by his anonymous Stormtroopers, seems to be working to his satisfaction.
He announced yesterday that he intends to send more armed, masked men in camouflage uniforms to other cities in the country…places that are governed by Democrats and are “out of control”. He’s now putting out campaign ads that portray him as “the law and order candidate” and describe opponent Joe Biden as encouraging violent “mobs” and being in favor of “defunding police departments”.
Those are lies, but Americans have come to expect that from the President of the United States.
This development has been awhile in coming, but is predictable. The economy is in shambles because Trump mis-managed the Covid-19 pandemic. The President has little positive to brag about right now. Traditionally, Presidents who are in trouble with a few months until an election pull a rabbit out of a hat…often its a war…to distract voters. Political scientists refer to it as an “October Surprise”.
This week President Trump pulled two rabbits out of the hat: (1) Igniting a war of words with China over alleged theft of scientific property; and, (2) Throwing jet fuel on Black Lives Matter protests, with the hope that armed conflict will erupt in more cities…justifying hero Trump and his posse of Brown Shirts to ride in and kick citizen ass.
He also not-so-loudly changed his tune about public health measures to combat the pandemic…after 141,000 deaths.
He said that he now supports and encourages the wearing of face masks in public to prevent the spread of infection. Well done, Sir! You’re only four months late.
The President stuck to his guns on Covid-19, though. He still insisted that “it will just go away some day”.
Like him, I hope.