Photo via Donald J. Trump - Facebook
Donald Trump making McDonald's french fries
That’s easy. Donald Trump’s been explicit. They’re Democrats and anyone else who votes against him. That’s one way to win elections.
It started on Fox News when former president Donald Trump was asked one of their leading questions whether he expected chaos from outside agitators including terrorists or criminal immigrants on Election Day.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy within,” Trump replied. “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military because they can’t let that happen.”
The End of Democracy
It was the first time a presidential candidate and a former president has ever openly proposed calling out the military to stop American voters from voting against him in a presidential election. It would literally end democracy as we know it.
It took a civil war, the women’s suffrage movement, the ‘60’s civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement and decades of anti-discrimination laws but our diverse democracy has finally created a political party that promotes the voting rights of every American regardless of race, gender or national origin.
Democratic support of American democracy is not a sick, radical, leftwing, lunatic cause. The alternative – support for Trump’s Republican Party of White male supremacy excludes the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Outlaw the Opposition
That’s why Vice President Harris’s closing argument calls attention to Trump’s clear intention to destroy free and fair elections in our democracy and outlaw opposition political parties just like his role model Russian president Vladimir Putin does.
You don’t have to take a liberal columnist’s word for that. Trump and his Republican operatives around the country are poised to challenge millions of legally cast votes if Trump loses. A single corrupt Trump judge could tie up the election results for months.
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Even worse, if Trump is elected to a second term, his vice president J.D. Vance promises to do everything possible to replace legitimate state elector votes with fake Trump votes. Ultimately, election challenges will go to Trump’s supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court that’s in the process of writing new rules permitting presidents to commit crimes as “official acts.”
If Trump’s elected to a second term, Trump’s rightwing extremists at the Heritage Foundation have laid out Project 2025, a detailed plan for Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act on Day One to put America under martial law, just the opposite of the ideals our founders envisioned of a democracy in which all Americans were endowed with equal rights.
A Court to Depend On
Can he get away with that? Not if we have a Supreme Court majority that we can trust to protect democracy. But do we have that anymore? That’s the other obvious reason we need to elect Harris to appoint justices we can depend upon to uphold the Constitution.
Military leaders including Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s former chair of the joint chiefs of staff; Jim Mattis, Trump’s former defense secretary and John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, have all publicly warned about the threat to democracy from a second Trump term. Military leaders swear an oath to protect the Constitution and the United States of America from all enemies foreign and domestic. Trump is one of them.
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is from the people who know him best, from the people who worked with him side-by-side in the Oval Office, and in the Situation Room,” Harris told reporters. “In a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there … Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there.”
Early Voting Turnout
That’s why the enormous turnout in early voting should be highly encouraging for the Harris campaign. She is the only new personality in the race and she has been creating excitement about an election in which voters were unenthusiastic about their choice between old White guys. The most heartfelt cries at her rallies are: “We’re not going back!”
Trump just keeps recycling the same hatred of women and Black and Brown immigrants that worked for him eight years ago. He already had the corner on that market. Trump’s angry three-hour speeches that increasingly wander into sheer gibberish these days are becoming an embarrassment. They do little to expand his base beyond the hard-core who either believe all his vile lies or nod along to get another tax cut for the wealthy.
Both parties initially had candidates who were past their due dates. President Biden recognized it and did something about it. Trump wasn’t bright enough to recognize that and no other Republicans had the political courage to tell him the truth.
Republicans may be about to discover what all the rest of us who have watched their deterioration as an American political party have always recognized. Republicans are the enemy within their party.
