President Trump has turned in the most incompetent and destructive presidential performance ever in the last four years, indeed worse than anyone could have imagined in 2016. As a result, a sizeable majority of Americans are “strongly opposed” to giving him a second term. A majority of the country does not want four more years of a coronavirus response engineered by Trump’s overpowering ignorance and incompetence. They want an end to the scandals, the trashing of American institutions and principles, the steady weakening of the country and precipitous drop in our reputation as a country that can get things done and which actually does have principles. The only way to reverse course is to show Trump the door on January 20, 2021. Four more years of monumental misrule would be beyond catastrophe for America.
Recognizing how widely he is disliked and how likely he is to lose a fair election, Trump by his own acknowledgement is trying to steal the election by defunding the Post Office to prevent mail-in votes from being counted, among other plans. He has set out to undercut postal services in the midst of a dangerous viral pandemic—for the mismanagement of which he bears primary responsibility. Trump’s winning the election in a fair vote is one thing. His blatantly stealing the election is quite a different thing. That way lies violence, insurrection, civil war and secession. The American people won’t stand for such a thing and they will make sure any such usurpation doesn’t last long. No one should even want to be president under such conditions. A stolen election is Nixon’s last year times 10 and then some.
Almost everything Trump says is a lie or (assuming he knows what truth is) a shading of the truth. An excellent book documenting Trump’s lies has been published by the Fact Checker reporter at the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler. The Fact Checker and his two assistants Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly begin their book, Donald Trump and his Assault on Truth” with a quotation from Jonathan Swift’s The Art of Political Lying published in 1710: “As the vilest writer hath his readers, so the greatest liar hath his believers, and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work.” From the start of Trump’s presidency, The Washington Post authors have “catalogued every false or misleading statement he has made.” As of January 20, 2020, three years after Trump took the oath of office, the count stood at 16,241, making Him the greatest and the most mendacious of political liars in the history of this country. “That works out to 15 [false] claims a day. But the pace of deception has quickened exponentially. He averaged about six claims a day in 2017, nearly 16 a day in 2018 and since then 22 a day in 2019,” say the factcheckers.
Trump lies to cover up (among other failures) his sorry leadership during the pandemic. As of August 15, the U.S. has recorded well over five million cases and seen 170,000 consequent deaths—approximately a quarter of the world total, with only five percent of the world’s population. Were one to look at the scope and moment of Trump’s lying on a scale of artistic political lying, it would not be inappropriate to refer to Trump as the Mona Lisa of political lying. If there were a Nobel prize for mendacity, this politician would win it every year. Nothing he says can ever be believed.
To drive home the magnitude of harm Trump’s lying has occasioned, I turn to Dana Milbank’s August 9 column in The Washington Post, “Suffering the Consequences of Trump.” In mid-March when there was a relatively small number of COVID cases, Trump said that his program was the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history. (Viruses do not have nationalities. Trump now calls COVID-19 the China virus.) Milbank cites an extensive new study conducted by British and Malaysian researchers, rating countries in terms of active cases of the virus, tests, detection, reporting, mitigation and infrastructure. Based on the ratings, countries are assigned a “Recovery Index.” On the Recovery Index, the U.S. ranked 127 of 184 countries. Quoting Milbank, “Here in the United States, testing, isolation and tracing capability lag badly while (as we contemplate opening schools again) Trump falsely claims children are ‘almost immune’ from the virus and his so-called education secretary claims children are ‘stoppers’ of the disease. How was the most powerful and advanced nation on earth brought so low? Of the various possible causes one rises above all: the incompetence and selfishness of just one man.”
There are many reasons for voters to say no to a Trump second term.
- Trump is trying to rig the election by defunding and destroying the Post Office in an attempt to make voting by mail impossible during a deadly pandemic. The Washington Post notes in an editorial on August 14 that rather than helping to make the democratic process stronger, “A desperate demagogic president, behind in the polls, would sow confusion and conspiracy theories, trying to delegitimize in advance any result other than a victory for him. That is what Mr. Trump is doing.”
- Trump is wrecking the effort in this country to mitigate the effects of climate change, thereby ensuring that the world will not be able to mount a defense against this terrible existential threat. The result will quite likely be a fiery end to human civilization as we know it, in a few decades. Trump’s latest move is the repeal of the rules controlling methane leaks during operations in the energy sector. The Washington Post denounced such actions in its August 15 editorial: “With climate change an ever-growing threat, and the United States paralyzed in its response, the willful negation of a useful and obviously needed remedy is perverse almost beyond imagination.”
- Trump endangers Americans by his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic as described above, with a resulting approx. 5,325,000 cases and 170,000 deaths by August 15, most of which might have been avoided but for Trump’s failure to lead.
- Trump has mismanaged our national economy, reducing its operations to near Great Depression levels, and necessitating a long recovery ahead and ultimately a serious effect on the stock market, which is currently holding (at least at the Dow Jones level) close to pre-pandemic numbers on the basis of hope and computer manipulation.
- Trump lies incessantly, cannot be believed and, as a result, has neither the capability nor the credibility to advise and lead the American people.
- As Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose argues, “After nearly four years of turbulence [under Trump], the country’s enemies are stronger, its friends are weaker, and the United States itself is increasingly isolated and prostrate. . . . Most of the world looks at Washington with horror and pity rather than admiration and respect and the one thing many of Trump’s domestic supporters and critics agree to there is no going back.”
- Ben Rhodes, another author of the September-October Foreign Affairs, “agrees that the liberal international order is defunct. Rather than try to revive it, he [Rhodes] warns Washington to shape a new and better one [order] by checking its privilege, avoiding hypocrisy and attacking global inequality.” Obviously, this would have to be done under new management after January 20.
Other reasons: Mr. Trump’s racist and fascist policies and attempted elimination of American democracy; his urging foreign countries to illegally intervene in the election on his behalf; the seemingly daily scandals and endless corruption; his belittlement of women; the degradation of immigration policy into savagery at our southern border with attacks on minority citizens, and policies to eject hard working residents who have lived in the United States for years—but not as citizens—who have nonetheless contributed much to our society and economy. Then, there is the deliberate encouragement of hatred and mistrust among us all.
There is yet one more issue worth discussing here—one Michael Gerson lays out in his August 11 Washington Post column, “See no Russia, hear no Russia.” Gerson writes, “President Trump’s ongoing attempt to dismiss or minimize Russian interference in U.S. elections is self-serving to the point of subversion. It is difficult to determine where vanity ends and betrayal begins.” Trump in public invited Russia to interfere in the 2016 election and in a public press conference with President Putin in 2018 accepted Putin’s denials over the considered consensus view of his own intelligence community. He said, standing beside Putin in front of the world press, “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” In 2020 he dismissed as a hoax the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan for killing American soldiers and refused to even ask Putin about the subject. Gerson asks, “Why has an American president ceased to defend his own country from sustained aggression?” And in the wake of all that had been revealed about 2016, how does the fact that the Russians are doing the same thing and perhaps more in 2020 and Trump’s indifference to such activity square with President Trump’s constitutional oath to protect the nation? Gerson concludes, “As much as anything, this is the reason Trump must be defeated in November.”
America has had many different types of people as her president, but never until now has she had a chief executive who behaves like an employee of the chief executive of our country’s principal enemy. Why Trump’s subservience to Putin? Some have suggested ego, others admiration of dictators, still others speculate about financial reasons. Noting Trump’s refusal to make his tax returns public as all other presidents and presidential candidates in the last 30 years have done, can we assume that Trump and his company are substantially indebted to Putin?
Whatever the cause, think of the terrible influence on the younger generation of seeing our country regarded as a tool of our principal enemy. Think of the impact on the morale of career government officials, indeed on all citizens of seeing our beloved America dragged through Russian mud and not defended by our own president. Such debasement must change and hopefully it will begin to do so after the third of November. Trump’s accession and performance is exactly what Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper, Number 68 warned against in 1788 as one of the greatest dangers that our Republic must always be on guard against:
“Nothing was more to be desired than that every practical obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally to have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our counsels. How could they better gratify this than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistery of the Union?” – Alexander Hamilton, 1788
November 3rd is now not far away. Many fear that President Trump will undermine the integrity of our elections. He knows that a decisive majority “strongly opposes” him and he has refused to pledge that he will accept the outcome of the election, claiming without evidence that it will be rigged. David Ignatius in his July 24 Post column gives some advice on “How to avoid the worst in November.” He advances two guiding principles:
Be prepared. Assume that there might be one or more attempts to overturn or steal the election. State election officials must take every precaution to ensure that every citizen has a safe and secure way to cast his or her vote in person or by mail and also to provide safe, secure and reliable means to accurately and promptly count the vote.
Be patient. It may take a week or more to confirm a reliable national count. Partisans on both sides should remain calm, “law and order—and their essential companion,—justice, will be the people’s friend.
The people have two other allies—the military’s allegiance to the Constitution and the independence of the courts. No matter what president-for-life fantasies President Trump may entertain, the United States isn’t Russia or China. Our top military leaders—from General Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down—have stated emphatically that their oath is to the Constitution, not to Trump. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. this year reaffirmed the independence and the integrity of our judicial system.
Fellow Citizens, as we consider our November 3rd elections and its significance, let us remember what distinguishes us as Americans: our adherence to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;—that, to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
And when approaching the voting booth or putting our signature on our mail-in ballot, let us remember Abraham Lincoln speaking on the field of Gettysburg. We must “highly resolve” “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Do these things, trust one another and all will be well.
John Jay