Trump, Burning Down Democracy

Our Democracy is in crisis, and Donald Trump is burning it down. The nation has watched him closely during the past four years with optimism and apprehension—the former by viewing him as an alternative to Hillary Clinton whom they disliked and the latter because of his mercurial and increasingly dangerous response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump has also strategically tapped into the remaining embers of racism, white nationalism, and xenophobia that persist in our nation’s steady demographic transition toward no racial and/or ethnic group with majority status. As his prospects for an easy ride to reelection have nose-dived, Trump has repaired full bore to the crass ratcheting up of racist tropes and practices—from defending the Confederate flag to preserving racist statutes.

In her recently published memoir, Too Much and Never Enough …, his niece, Dr. Mary Trump, a licensed clinical psychologist, has characterized the Trump family as enveloped in psychopathology, which she says was spearheaded by Trump’s father, Fred Trump, who ruled as a tyrant. Throughout his lifetime, whether in business or politics, Donald Trump has been enabled by everyone he has interacted with. He identifies malleable and/or weak individuals and exploits them for personal gain until they leave or get fired.

Now that the election is only four months away, Trump is leaning in as far as possible to the most racist and conservative elements of his base, a hard-core one-third plus of the national electorate. He and his campaign staff have reasoned that an extraordinary turnout of those voters, coupled with the aggressive suppression of Democratic-leaning voters, will be sufficient for him to pull out another narrow electoral victory.

We must realize that there are hundreds of thousands of hidden Trump voters who refuse to declare him as their preferred candidate when they are contacted by pollsters. These are the same voters who helped him squeeze out a win in traditionally Democratic states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) in 2016. They may well do so again.

As expected, Trump is rapidly expanding his voter suppression arsenal on a weekly basis. Having already employed the coronavirus contagion as a weapon, he is now resorting to Nazi Stormtrooper tactics in his attempt to terrorize average citizens in cities led by Democratic mayors. Masked, unnamed federal agents have swooped into cities, where residents are continuing to protest police brutality and social injustice in the wake of the George Floyd murder, arresting them with no stated reasons and whisking them off to undisclosed locations.

These very public examples of intimidation are another way of telling average voters to stay in line and not disobey their “dear leader.” The Democrats remain stunned in their ability to anticipate and respond to Trump’s continuously changing tactics to facilitate his return to office. As noted before, it is time for Democrats to create a fully-staffed political war room to track Trump’s ever growing, underhanded, and illegal campaign schemes.

A detailed analysis of the many polls which show that Trump is trailing Biden nationally and in key battleground states reveals a virtual tie between the two on leadership of the economy. Trump voters, however, continue to outdistance Biden by a wide margin in energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to vote. This scenario places Trump in a position to steal the election with a last-minute surge in nefarious voter suppression maneuvers.

Biden has stated that he has a team on the ground to monitor the election process in all 50 states and territories, but that effort is not enough. Who will lobby the Senate to appropriate funding for voting by mail and the timely processing of ballots during the pandemic? Who is in charge of the upgrading of voter machines and voter security? Who will scrutinize the United States Postal Service (USPS) and its handling of absentee voter requests now that Trump has installed his handpicked Postmaster? And who will be in charge of identifying and eradicating Russian trolling?

These areas will be crucial for an honest November 3rd election, and without such close inspections, Trump will continue to sit in the people’s White House and burn down our Democracy. It is not enough for us to point out how he lies to us and how he deceives us with ease. He lives in a narcissistic haze of self-importance and is immune to such criticism.

His niece, Dr. Mary Trump, concludes in her memoir “that Trump likely has dependent personality disorder, an undiagnosed learning disability (making it difficult for him to process and retain new information about the world), and sleep disorders (likely related to his habit of ingesting some 12 Diet Cokes a day), and that he is also, very possibly, a sociopath.”

She also states that his troubled childhood imbued him with a bitterness and cruelty that he has incessantly visited upon friend and foe alike as he seeks ongoing adulation. Dealing with Trump’s frequent dark moods has become a form of self-protection and preservation by his staff, political allies, and the general public—a reality which accounts for frequent staff turnover and swift punishment of perceived disloyalty.

The Biden campaign must quickly grip the fact of who their opponent is. He is irretrievably mentally and socially broken and more than willing to break and burn down our Democracy for his own egotistical needs. Are we, as a country, willing to devolve into Fascism to satisfy Donald Trump’s insatiable neediness?