It's Damned Near Time to Panic

 

It’s Damned Near Time to Panic

May 25, 2024

It’s just over five months until the 2024 presidential election, and I am on the verge of panic. The American fascist Donald Trump has been on trial on a felony charge for around one month. The Manhattan prosecutor thinks Trump committed a felony, and he thinks he can prove that he did beyond a reasonable doubt. He wouldn’t have brought the prosecution if that weren’t what he thinks. Yet Trump is still the presumptive Republican nominee for president this year. Neither the felony charge for which he is now on trial nor any of the other three felony cases pending against him has hurt his standing in the polls. True, polls are polls not votes, but that Trump’s support hasn’t completely collapsed is very nearly beyond comprehension. That is hasn’t can only mean that our body politic is sicker than we ever suspected. You’d think that cheating on your wife with a porn star, buying her silence, and then breaking the law to cover up the fact that you did would torpedo the political career of any American politician. Time was when it would have. Cheating on his wife destroyed the political career of John Edwards, a man in whom some of us had placed a good deal of hope. Screwing Stormy Daniels, paying her off to keep silent, and then falsifying business records to cover up the payment has not destroyed the political career of the one American fascist who has ever been president of the United States. Astonishing. And appalling.

Trump’s first term as president was an unmitigated disaster. He won the office through Russian interference in our election. He totally botched the country’s response to the COVID pandemic costing our country hundreds of thousands of lives. He spent most of his energy, such as it was, consolidating his personal control over the federal government, demanding personal loyalty from all federal employees, and firing anyone who wouldn’t give it to him. That’s what he did to the director of the FBI though that man had certainly helped him get elected through a strategically timed announcement about an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Like every Republican president, Trump signed legislation slashing taxes for rich people, thereby increasing the federal deficit and doing nothing to stimulate the economy. He cozied up to Vladimir Putin and took that Russia fascists word denying election interference over that of his own intelligence services. He damaged our relations with our long term allies and made it essentially impossible for anyone in the world to trust us ever again. He politicized the Department of Justice and tried to turn it into his personal law firm. When he lost his bid for reelection, he incited an insurrection in an attempt to stay in power illegally. Trump was surely the worst president this country has ever had.

A second Trump term as president would be worse. It would be worse because Trump would do even more than he did his first time around to turn the United States government into a fascist dictatorship. He does not believe in democracy, he believes only in winning. He does not support the constitution, he supports only his personal power. The Trumpist movement is the current and the strongest manifestation of fascist movements in this country that go back as far as the 1850s (though the term fascist didn’t exist then) and has been active in our politics since the 1930s. As the demographics of our country have changed, that movement has only grown. Putting Trump in office again might well make it permanent and destroy American democracy altogether.

The Trumpist movement is irrational if not insane. There is not one shred of rational justification for it. Yet it lives on. It refuses to die. And now there is a real chance that this country, through collective insanity and indifference, will put Trump back in the White House. His major opponent is President Biden. Biden is not a strong candidate. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves for how good a president he has been, and he’s too old to be president, or at least an awful lot of Americans think he is. There is no way he can handle Israel’s war in Gaza without losing significant support from one element of the Democrat’s coalition or another. Will the 2024 presidential election mark the end of American democracy? Will it be the end of our long history of constitutional government? Will it put an end to the legal principle that no one is above the law? All of those things might well happen if this country reelects Donald Trump, especially if it also gives him Republican majorities in both houses of congress, which it very well might.

It is damned near time to panic. It is damned near time to start thinking about how we will live under an authoritarian government with Donald Trump at its head. It is damned near time to start looking at which other countries would let us settle with them if we couldn’t take it and decided to leave. If Trump is found guilty at his current trial and that verdict does not scuttle his campaign, it will be time to panic indeed.