I’ve been worrying as much as anybody about what the re-election of Donald Trump would mean for American democracy: watching the brazenness of Trump’s authoritarian perversions of the American system following immediately upon his “acquittal” by the Republicans in the Senate, it was all too easy to imagine that Trump — were he to win the 2020 Election — would complete the breakdown of the Constitutional order that he’s already advanced to an amazing degree.
But now I’m thinking: hell, if American democracy doesn’t spit this monster out — after everything that he’s displayed so openly that should be an automatic disqualifier — then American democracy is already so far gone that there’s not much more left to lose.
(I won’t go into the almost limitless catalogue of what should be quite sufficient grounds for Trump to be overwhelmed by Joe Biden in a landslide electoral rejection of this unspeakable President. But just to take a few things off the top— meaning just the past few weeks:
- the continuing botching of the pandemic that is unnecessarily costing many tens of thousands of American lives and livelihoods;
- the Atlantic article that recounts how Trump thinks people who die for their country are “losers”:
- the corrupt and blatant politicization of the Justice Department (Barr’s Trump-serving travesties), the Postal Service (a campaign to disenfranchise his opponent’s voters), and the Department of Homeland Security (refusal to brief Congress, as required by law, on how the Russians are working to help Donald Trump win re-election).
(Enough! Hardly a day goes by when this “President of the United States” does not commit impeachable offenses and/or commit some scandal that would be sufficient to scuttle any previous American presidency.
(Trump’s list of crimes, corruptions, and betrayal of the nation probably by now exceed the combined total of any such offenses of all 44 of the American Presidents who preceded him.)
If the political institutions and the legal structures and the press and the people of the United States — all working together — cannot get rid of this profoundly broken and dangerous man (this unspeakable monster), then our Democracy is already so broken it’s beyond repair.
One more point: I do not believe that is the case. I believe that there’s enough that’s good and that’s intact left that the nation will manage to throw this bum out, and bring in Joe Biden to restore integrity to the system our Founders gave us.