TRUMP IS SOUNDING MORE LIKE A DICTATOR BECAUSE HE IS ONE
As our country gets closer to November 5th Trump is sounding like other wannabe dictators who gets themselves elected by scaring people into voting for them and vilifying certain groups of people that they want their followers to blame for all their troubles. Trump has already vilified immigrants. Now he has taken it further. He is saying Democrats are the “enemy from within” and claiming they are worse than immigrants. He is threatening to use the military against people who are critical of him or were trying to hold him accountable for the laws he broke. He has named Adam Schiff, who led the House Select Committee. This is very very scary stuff. It’s the way most strongmen get into power and change the country into a dictatorship. After that happens it is extremely hard to impossible to regain a rules based constitutional democracy again.
Here is how Trump is talking:
Trump told host Maria Bartiromo that California Rep. Adam Schiff and other Democrats were “lunatics” and a bigger threat to the U.S. than foreign adversaries like Russia or China. (NBC)
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroying our country, by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated,” he said, referring to immigrants whom Trump has repeatedly attacked with dehumanizing rhetoric.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign seized on Trump’s comments, arguing that they should “alarm every American.”
“Trump is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them,” Ian Sams, a senior spokesperson and adviser for the campaign, said in a statement Sunday. “Taken with his vow to be a dictator on ‘day one,’ calls for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution, and plans to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power if he returns to office, this should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security.”
EITHER TRUMP OR HARRIS COULD WIN RIGHT NOW
With only a matter of days left in this race, polls continue to show Trump and Harris neck-and-neck in the key battleground states. They are tied in the recent NBC national poll (48% to 48%, although she is up 50% to 44% in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll). Harris continues to make her case by blitzing shows like 60 Minutes and appearing on podcasts with influencers to reach larger segments of Americans who could help her win: younger women, Republicans who elected Nikki Haley, voters under 30, Hispanics and Black men.
Harris is talking about her plans to directly help younger Americans including a $6,000 child tax credit and $25,000 down payment assistance for first home buyers. She developed new plans that would specifically help Black men gain success. The campaign understands that dissing Trump is not enough to win Americans who don’t understand the threat level from him and the MAGA movement. The citizens she needs to woo need to know what’s in it for them if they elect her.
She just did an interview with Bret Baier on Fox in which she held her own when Baier interrupted her over and over (something he would not have done to Trump), and when he tried to soft pedal Trump’s comments about the “enemy from within” by playing an edited, cleaned up version of his remarks, she called him out about that.
Meanwhile, Trump continues his rallies where he veers off topic musing about windmills, Hannibal Lector and a dark vision of a failed America under attack from immigrants (which is not true).
Then there was the strange incident from what was billed as a townhall rally in Pennsylvania where Trump stopped speaking after two people in the audience got faint and needed medical attention. Trump just stood on stage and swayed as his favorite music played for about 40 minutes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/14/trump-music-sways-town-hall/
As the Vice President Harris has said, Trump is “increasingly unstable and unhinged.”
TRUMP PLANS TO SAY HE WINS WHETHER OR NOT HE WINS
Why does he talk so much about immigrants being bad, dangerous and eating pets etc? Because (spoiler alert) if he loses, he is planning to say immigrants let into the country “by Kamala Harris” illegally voted for her and that’s how she got so many more votes than he did. The MAGAs will point to some 180 lawsuits they have brought in mostly battleground states (most of them they lost because they brought them beyond the permissible period of time prior to an election) to prove that they tried to purge the voting rolls of illegals and the courts refused to let them do it.
The signs are clear that he will try to wrangle himself into power using tactics many other strongmen have employed to take over democracies and refashion them into autocracies or what is called “illiberal democracies” or democracies in name only. His campaign has almost no ground game in the battleground states. That is telling. Instead of winning outright, the MAGAs plan is to contest the election and try to get into power by creating enough chaos that the decision gets thrown to the states to decide under the 12th Amendment. If there are enough Republican state legislatures that are willing to help him to do that he could wrest victory from the jaws of defeat.
The contrast between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and what they will do if elected could not be more different. And yet, if we are to believe recent polls, these two are neck and neck. When Americans say who they are deciding who to elect they talk about their economic concerns like the higher cost of rent, milk or gas or the difficulty buying a home or paying rent. Many Americans continue to think that Republicans do better with the economy, even though the facts do not support that idea.
TRUTH IS OUR ECONOMY DOES BETTER WITH DEMOCRATS IN CHARGE
A report from the Labor Department … showed that inflation has dropped again, falling back to 2.4%, the same rate as it was just before the coronavirus pandemic. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 400 points to a record high, while the S&P 500 closed above 5,800 for the first time.
Washington Post economics columnist Heather Long noted that “[b]y just about every measure, the U.S. economy is in good shape.” Inflation is back down, growth remains strong at 3%, unemployment is low at 4.1% with the U.S. having created almost 7 million more jobs than it had before the pandemic. The stock market is hitting all-time highs. Long adds that “many Americans are getting sizable pay raises, and middle-class wealth has surged to record levels.” The Federal Reserve has begun to cut interest rates, and foreign leaders are talking about the U.S. economy with envy.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and to impose a 10% to 20% tariff across the board on imported goods and a 60% tariff on goods from China. Tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers, and economists predict such tariffs would cost an average family more than $2,600 a year. Overall, the effect of these policies would be to shift the weight of taxation even further toward middle-class and lower-class Americans and away from the wealthy.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted on October 8 that in March, the Peterson Institute for International Economics pointed out that the immigrants Trump is targeting are vital to a number of U.S. businesses. Their loss will cause dramatic cutbacks in those sectors. Taken together, the study concluded, Trump’s deportations, tariffs, and vow to take control of the Federal Reserve could make the country’s gross domestic product as much as 9.7% lower than it would be without those policies, employment could fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4%.
And yet, in a New York Times/Siena Poll of likely voters released on October 8, 75% of respondents said the economy was fair or poor. Further, although a study by The Guardian showed that Harris’s specific economic policies were more popular than Trump’s in a blind test, 54% of respondents to a Gallup poll released on October 9, thought that Trump would manage the economy better than Harris would. (Heather Cox Richardson)
THE THREAT FROM TRUMP GOES WAY BEYOND DAMAGE TO OUR ECONOMY FROM TARIFFS
Mark Esper, a Trump Defense Secretary, warn[s] that we have to take Trump’s threat to use the military to pursue domestic political enemies – which could include me and others we all know – very seriously. Watch this entire CNN clip :
If that isn’t enough to turn off American voters, there are his hundreds of former legislative and communication aides, military guys and supporters in the White House who are warning Americans, saying he is a menace to our democracy and our country and begging Americans to put country over party. Retired Gen. Mark A. Milley warned that former president Donald Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person (in) this country.” FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY JAMES MATTIS privately told Bob Woodward that he agrees with the assessment laid out in his book War, which paints Donald Trump as a unique and menacing threat to the country.
The definition of fascism is: “A populist political philosophy, movement…that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.” That is clearly what Trump and Project 2025 are going to try to do to our country.
When it comes to who will protect you, Americans seem to have forgotten that Trump was the proximate cause of the deaths of thousands of Americans because he denied reality and science. He told us the pandemic was going away in few days, to inject bleach and hydroxychloroquine, and claimed the pandemic was over when it wasn’t. He continues to have no ability to accept the truth, science, facts and reality when they don’t go his way. Trump recreates reality to fit the version he wants and then he insists that everyone in his cult buy into HIS version of the truth. That is called propaganda, and it is how demagogues stay in power. JD Vance, who was interviewed by the New York Times, was asked point blank five times in different ways whether Trump lost the 2020 election and he deflected and changed the subject each time. Denying reality and the truth is the price you must pay to be successful in Trump’s cult.
Even though Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, as Governor Walz has said- you don’t create a 920 page playbook if you don’t intend to use it.
If Trump gets into power again our democracy will be dismantled and replaced with a dictatorship. Even if our legal system is employed to try to stop it, our slow as molasses courts cannot act fast enough to prevent this from happening. Americans refuse to believe that at their peril. He is following the autocrat’s playbook about how to get into power and stay in power. Read “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder or “Strongman” by Ruth Ben Ghiat if you doubt what Trump is teeing up to do to our country.
WHY WILL YOUR LIFE BE SO BAD UNDER A TRUMP DICTATORSHIP?
When Americans hear that Trump’s intention is to alter the foundational underpinnings of our government and implement Project 2025, too many of us don’t understand how that will damage OUR lives. What does it really mean to get rid of DEI protections and round up illegal aliens to be deported? What will it mean if Trump carries out his threats for retribution and revenge, enforces a national abortion ban, and uses the military against Americans who disagree with him? What if he arrests Democrats who have criticized him? Trump tried to do many illegal things in his first term that his White House staff and lawyers prevented him from doing. If elected again he will surround himself with Yes men and women. There will be no guardrails. Imagine that.
Think about this:
- Do you care about your rights and freedoms? How about free press, free speech, the freedom to be who you are and have a relationship with whoever you love, the freedom to keep government out of your private decisions? The next Trump administration will do away with those freedoms you care about.
- If you are a Black man do you realize that Project 2025 will reinstate stop and frisk by police? Do you realize you could be one of the dark skinned people rounded up and put in detention camps because you look like you could be an illegal alien, or someone reports you to the authorities because they don’t like you? Detention camps and mass expulsions are coming in the next Trump administration according to Trump. You might think it’s a good idea and that it won’t affect you, but the reality will be a nightmare.
- Do you care about Ukraine? Trump will end that war by giving Ukraine to Putin.
- Do you know that Trump has vowed to deport even legal immigrants, like the Haitians in Springfield, who have been law abiding and have helped Springfield become a more economically successful city?
- Do you understand that if you are in a same sex relationship, you will likely be subjected to prejudice without legal recourse as it was before same sex marriage was affirmed by the Supreme Court- Justice Thomas has already hinted that he is ready to overturn that current freedom. We have a Supreme Court with 6 extremist justices who are aligned with Trump and the MAGAs. They got rid of the right to abortion and they are going to get rid of same sex marriage.
- Do you really think Trump will not ban abortion? Do you really think he will be the champion of IVF? He only cares about himself. He needs the support of the religious right to get and stay in power. He will ban abortion and IVF if the Christian Nationalists want him to and he will tell us he isn’t doing that.
- Are you a woman of child bearing age? You will be at risk anywhere in our nation whether or not you get pregnant once Trump allows the Christian Nationalists to reinstate the Comstock Act and he puts a Christian Nationalist in charge of the Food and Drug Administration who will ban contraceptives and mifepristone. The national laws will criminalize abortion nationwide. Anyone helping a woman get an abortion or counseling her could go to jail along with the woman trying to get an abortion.
- Do you realize that Project 2025 plans to create a government watchdog agency that will monitor your menstrual cycles?
- If you are a woman experiencing a miscarriage, do you realize that under a Trump administration with an abortion ban you will risk death as we have seen in the numerous shocking cases coming out of Texas and other southern states.
- If Trump is elected again do you understand that he will stock the Supreme Court with more extreme young justices who will continue to take our country back in time?
- If Trump is elected and our country’s rule based system of government is replaced with a dictatorship, do you realize that our relationship with allies and our business interests will suffer? Trump is very unpredictable. One of the biggest reasons our country is doing so well economically is because the global business community can count on the laws being upheld when they do business with American companies and our government.
- Do you care about climate change? Trump doesn’t. Even with huge hurricanes devastating parts of Florida, he is in denial. As president he will not work to mitigate the effects of climate change with legislation that would prevent greater harm. He has said climate change will create more opportunities for real estate development.
- Do you care about corruption in government? Trump is very corrupt. He is probably already selling influence with his suspect $100,000 “Tourbillion” watches which are available to foreign buyers using bitcoin. [E]very day [Trump] is hawking a new “Trump Coin,” a pack of NFT trading cards, or a Trump Bible. An in-depth investigation into these Trump-branded Tourbillon watches reveals several aspects that could potentially enable secretive and unregulated financial activities, which could allow for large amounts of cash to flow into Donald Trump’s bank account from unknown sources at a critical moment before the 2024 presidential election. (Meidas Touch) If Trump wins he will set the tone for a very corrupt administration in which people will be able to cheat and buy influence.
- Do you know that Trump is planning to put 20% tariffs on almost everything you buy? Do you realize that tariffs are most often paid by the consumer which is why economists are predicting that Trump will set off a recession if he carries out this plan.
- Do you realize that if Trump wins this election, our country will become even more hateful and divided? The Proud Boys, MAGAs, Laura Loomers and Marjory Taylor Greens, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Steve Bannons and Elon Musks and other angry, mean-spirited people will win power along with him? Why would you want that for our country?
TRUMP IS THE DESPOT OUR FOUNDING FATHERS WERE AFRAID OF
Once you understand how dangerous Trump will be if he gets back in power, you would think that anyone would vote for Kamala Harris 0ver Trump. She is sane, rational, capable, empathic, authentic, has been a prosecutor, the Attorney General of one of the largest states in our country, a Senator for that state and Vice President of the United States. She is ready for the job on day one. She will continue most of Biden’s economic policies that help working Americans get ahead and help to make our country as strong and stable as it is, and she will uphold our democracy and legal system.
Trump, on the other hand, is erratic, unpredictable, wants revenge, is corrupt and will usher in a dark, divisive time in America. He was a category 1 or 2 hurricane in his first administration. He will be a Cat 5 if he gets power again damaging our economy, rule of law, our peace of mind and our chance to “turn the page” on this divisive time in our country.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
We can help Harris/Walz win.
This is a turn out election. Whichever candidate gets the most people to the polls in the battleground states will win.
We need to canvass, make calls, text, send postcards to swing states, be sure people are registered to vote, and cure ballots. Tom Bonier and Simon Rosenberg, pollsters and data analysts, have studied close elections and have this advice: “When you vote early, you allow campaigns to shift resources to lower-propensity voters, which increases overall turnout.” Let’s remind our friends and family to vote as early as possible.
