Trump Has A Message For Democracy
“You’re fired.”
He’d like to delay the election. Still think I’m overreacting?
If you’ve been hiding out from the news (understandable) or under a rock this week, it’s possible you missed Trump’s now-infamous tweet on July 30:
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
I can generally count on being told to calm down when I raise alarms about the prospect of the Current Occupant either refusing to accept the results of the coming November election or suborning it entirely.
My response to such comments all amount to the same thing: my friend, I sure hope you’re right. But with Trump’s bald-faced suggestion that we should trash one of our most foundational institutions — free, fair, and timely presidential elections, which we’ve held ever since our inception, including during the Civil War and the Spanish Flu pandemic — I feel like I’m waking up in my worst nightmare.
Some, including Jonah Goldberg writing in the Baltimore Sun, dismiss the GDT (Great Delay Tweet) as nothing more than a distraction, a typical show of Trumpian tactics. It’s true that the tweet was released, like a pathogenic microbe, less than 20 minutes after the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) decreased by an annualized rate of 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020. That’s the biggest single drop in GDP in a single quarter since, well, since ever. Not a great look for the President who’s taken all the credit for our great, big, beautiful economy.
So, yes, the timing was probably calculated — or as calculated as anything that Trump, who operates straight from a limbic system driven by venal self-interest, ever does. But it isn’t just a shot over the bow. It’s a broadcast preview of what we can expect this fall and winter.
He doesn’t have the power to do it. But that’s not the point
It would take an act of Congress to change the date of the election, and that’s not about to happen. The purpose of Trump’s delaying tactic is to undermine public trust in the election process itself. He’s been hard at work toward that goal even since before the 2016 election, which he claimed was rigged until he won — and even afterward disputed the results of the popular vote, claiming without the merest vapor of fact that the 3 million votes Hilary Clinton received in excess of his count were all from illegal immigrants.
Back in April, Joe Biden saw it coming. In April, he told supporters at a fundraiser, “I think he (Trump) is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.” And since Trump’s reelection prospects have been looking more and more feeble based on any credible polling, the Current Occupant’s campaign against American’s faith in the election has been unrelenting.
With help from his Henchman General William Barr, who took to Breitbart News and Fox News in June to opine — utterly without regard for how thoroughly the claim has been debunked — that mass-scale mail-in voting “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud,” Trump is increasingly rabid in his efforts to undermine American’s access to vote-by-mail — or, in the case of the Delay Tweet, to vote at all.
Trump belched out an all-caps tweet on June 22: “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” Again, not a shred of evidence for that, but when has that ever stopped Trump?
Hence his attacks on the U.S. Postal Service — which Biden warned about in April as well:
“he’s going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote. That’s the only way he thinks he can possibly win.”
The recent appointment of Trump crony and mega-donor Louis DeJoy to the position of U.S. Postmaster General is already threatening to slow down regular mail delivery. Imagine what could happen in November.
Look at the Great Delay Tweet again
Especially that last sentence (or what passes for a sentence):
Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
If it’s possible to cause one’s blood to both boil and run cold at the same time, this statement just about does it for me. It would be outrageous and destructive enough were Trump to float the idea of postponing the election to some definite date, or for some number of weeks or even months. But when, in his view, will people be able to “properly, securely and safely” vote? How long would we have to postpone the vote for that to happen?
The answer? Of course, there isn’t one. Maybe until we have a universally effective and available vaccine. In other words, indefinitely.
What Trump is suggesting here is no less than a proposal that he remains in power for, well, who knows? An indefinite term. It’s the equivalent of telling the Founding Fathers to drink bleach.
Put that together with his fondness for turning militarized feds on his own people, and it’s clear that Trump will admit to no limits to his grip on power. This is perhaps what caused Steven G. Calabresi, a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law and a co-founder of the Federalist Society — whom no one could describe as a liberal, having voted Republican in every election since 1980 and one of the most influential conservative thinkers outside of government — to write an opinion piece in the New York Times.
Mr. Calabresi writes:
. . . I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.
I doubt Mr. Calabresi and I would agree on much else in politics, but we sure do here. Patriotism makes strange bedfellows.
So what do you and I do about it?
The answer is simple, although it may prove to be anything but easy if Trump and his minions have their way:
Vote.
Don’t let anything stop you. Stand in line for hours if you have to, wear a face mask, gloves, and a face shield if you have to, or hand-deliver your mail-in ballot to a polling location if you have to. And from now until the election, make all the noise you can with every elected official and every platform you can find to insist on your right to vote and to have your vote counted.
Make it your number one priority, because everything else, and everyone else, depends on you. This time it is literally that important.