Why, Oh Why?

Tighten your chinstrap, democracy. We're in for a rough ride.

A selfish, self-centered interloper has cast so much doubt on our elections and judicial institutions as to have single handedly undermined our democracy in ways previously unthinkable—even though we were warned at the beginning of the American Experiment that the system was fragile and susceptible to abuse by anyone with the desire, and enough power, to do so.

Now, he, and his minions are on the record hedging, saying they will not honor the results of the November election “if there is fraud again.” This, despite 60+ failures in courts across the land to declare fraud in the 2020 election. Beat it, truth. There’s no place for you here.

Following the now usual course, our presidential election will be decided by about 300,000 out of more than 168,000,000 registered voters. An argument for winner-take-all can be made here, but this commentary is not about the anachronistic Electoral College.

A significant minority of the American people now believe that elections are rigged, law enforcement is dishonest, and the judiciary can’t be trusted. It’s the polar opposite of everything the American Right believed until the Age of Trump. Turning themselves inside-out, they now think everything in our political life is corrupt, and only one man, the grifting, lying, self-centered, adulterous, convicted sex-offender, Donald Trump, can be trusted.

Talk about Bizarro World: it’s the Superman comics as Nostradamus, or maybe Cassandra.

All of the evidence shows that Donald Trump cares not a whit for the United States, or really anything except himself. He’s been willing to say and do anything to 1) keep himself in the news (ratings are everything), and 2) defy all norms of decency by demonizing the press, ridiculing American war heroes and the disabled, and using the most divisive rhetoric he can muster.

Yet he leads certain polls. Why oh, why are tens of millions of Americans willing to turn a blind eye to his behavior? There are no easy answers.

Here’s conservative commentator Bret Stephens: “Any good analysis of the Trump phenomenon has to begin with an analysis of the ‘Us’ phenomenon, if you will: Where did those of us who were supposed to represent the sensible center of the country go so wrong that people were willing to turn to a charlatan like Trump in the first place? I have endless theories, but here’s another one: We tried to change the way people are instead of meeting them where they are. Neocons (like me) tried to bend distant cultures in places like Afghanistan to accept certain Western values. Didn’t work. Progressives tried to push Americans to accept new values on issues like identity, equity, pronouns and so on. That isn’t working, either.”

The scariest part of the Trump plan for a second term is to weaponize the executive branch to reflect their goals as established in Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership,” part of their larger (887 pages) “Project 2025,” wherein they call for an end to the historical independence of the Justice Department. Their occluded vision calls for an “alignment” between Justice, the FBI, and the Attorney General. The document calls itself a blueprint for the next Conservative president, but it reads like Mussolini’s porn stash.

The Department of Health and Human Services would become the “Department of Life” and “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” (Goodbye gay marriage.) It reminds me of the deceitful Awaken “Church” which cloaks its militancy in terms that belie the violence-provoking ideas and videos on its affiliated RMNT website.

We’re considering adding an overstuffed chair to our bedroom so our new overlords will be more comfortable.

To disrupt the Constitutional checks and balances, they want the executive to override laws, saying “The legal function cannot be allowed to thwart the administration’s agenda.”

Beyond the eyebrow-raising idea that the Justice Department should not be independent, the document is filled with the anti-democratic agitprop that is now standard hard-right fare like tax cuts for the very wealthy, neutering the EPA and the rest of the alphabet-soup regulatory agencies, and its companion, the deregulation of industry.

After he told his lackeys in Congress to scrap a bipartisan border bill, Anne Applebaum on Washington Week in Review said, “Trump has decided that he doesn’t want money to go to Ukraine…It's really an extraordinary moment; we have an out-of-power ex-president who is in effect dictating American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign dictator or with the interests of a foreign dictator in mind.” 

The latest is the leaked tape from a meeting at Mar-a-Lago where the once and perhaps future king, who is always about the transaction, tells oil execs that for a campaign contribution of a billion dollars, he’ll repeal every Biden executive order aimed at reducing pollution and reliance on fossil fuels.

This is the leading Republican presidential candidate.

©2024 Jon Sinton