Donald Trump Destroys Democracy with the Stroke of a Sharpie

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The United States of America’s 244-year-old experiment in representative democracy, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1776, came to an abrupt end in Bedminster, New Jersey on August 8, 2020.

That’s when President Donald Trump, taking a “working vacation” at a private golf course he owns and still makes money on, blatantly and unconstitutionally usurped the authority of Congress over the federal treasury, In a series of executive orders and memoranda, Trump at once extended and slashed the $600 per week in supplemental unemployment benefits millions of Americans forced out of work by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to $400, of which $300 will be paid by the federal government and $100 will have to come from state governments whose budgets have already been decimated by the pandemic.

Trump also helped fulfill one of the long-time dreams of the Republican Party: the destruction of Social Security. He did this by unilaterally imposing a moratorium on collecting the payroll taxes that fund it. What’s more, he framed this as an outright bribe to voters to re-elect him in November. If he loses, he said, workers who weren’t being charged the Social Security tax for the rest of 2020 would have to pay it all back at once. If he wins, he promised, he would make the payroll tax cut permanent and get rid of Social Security’s dedicated funding stream forever. The only actual executive order (as opposed to “memoranda”) in Trump’s package addresses the question of evictions. The last big SARS-CoV-2 relief bill put a federal moratorium on evictions until late in July. The new order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to “consider whether any measures temporarily halting residential evictions of any tenants for failure to pay rent are reasonably necessary to prevent the further spread of COVID-19 [the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus] from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

But it doesn’t actually stop evictions; it just asks various Cabinet members and department heads to work together to minimize them. Trump’s fourth document allows people who owe money on federally backed student loans to “defer” payments on them until the end of the year. But it doesn’t include any debt relief or any provisions allowing student borrowers to renegotiate the loans.

Trump framed his actions as necessary because the two houses of Congress — the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate — had deadlocked over a pandemic relief bill. But eliminating or deferring the Social Security tax has had virtually no support from either party in Congress. As much as they hate Social Security ideologically and have wished they could get rid of it since Franklin Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress first enacted it in 1938, Congressional Republicans also realize that their party’s base skews considerably older than the Democrats’ and it’s not going to be smart politics for them to take money away from the senior citizens who depend on Social Security for food and shelter. But Donald Trump couldn’t care less about the senior citizens who helped elect him.

Nor does he care about the millions of Americans for whom that $600 per week has meant the difference between having a roof over their heads and being evicted, or being able to put food on the table for themselves and their families. Nor does Trump give a damn about the seemingly clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress in general and the House of Representatives (where all funding bills must originate) in particular the right to decide how the U.S. government spends its money.

Asked about whether he’s concerned about the constitutionality of his executive orders in a bizarre August 7 press conference at Bedminster — with members of his golf club serving as a cheering section in the background — Trump said, “No, not at all. No. You always get sued.” The next day, Trump taunted the Democrats, saying that if they filed suit to stop his unilateral actions it would be a political loser for them because they’d be the ones taking money away from people who need it.

Indeed, Trump spent the entire weekend framing his actions as necessary because the Democrats had allegedly held up the relief package — even though the House had passed a pandemic relief bill three months earlier and the delay had been due to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) refusing to schedule hearings and a vote on the House bill. The way these things are supposed to work when one house of Congress passes an important piece of legislation is that the other house either adopts it as is, votes it down, adopts it with amendments or comes up with a substitute bill of their own. If either of the last two happens, the two houses are supposed to appoint a conference committee to bridge the gap and create a compromise version. But, again and again, Reichsmarschall McConnell has aided and abetted Führer Trump by announcing that the Senate won’t even debate a House bill he doesn’t like. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced him as the “Grim Reaper” for refusing to schedule Senate hearings on House bills and therefore letting them die, McConnell actually embraced the term and boasted that that was indeed what he was doing. Since the Democrats regained control of the House in the 2018 election, Trump and McConnell have played this double game: ignoring the bills House Democrats have actually passed and then accusing them of doing nothing.

Trump did it again with his latest actions on SARS-CoV-2, presenting himself as an orange-haired Santa Claus bringing Christmas back to Whoville after Democratic Grinches allegedly snatched it away. “If Democrats continue to hold this critical relief hostage I will act under my authority as president to get Americans the relief they need,” Trump said when he announced his executive order and memoranda. But, as has been apparent in the week since I wrote the above, even more than usual Trump’s executive order and memoranda are all bark and no bite.

The extended unemployment benefits depend on the states acting to authorize their share of the cost — and given the bath cash-strapped states have taken because SARS-CoV-2 has decimated their tax receipts, they’re hardly likely to be able to do that. Even California, where politicians had at least briefly considered trying to step in with their own emergency aid if the feds faltered, has pulled back. On August 9, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that his state simply doesn’t have the money to pay the matching funds Trump is demanding (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-10/trump-jobless-benefit-plan-wont-work-in-california-newsom-says). “The state does not have an identified resource of $700 million per week that we haven’t already obliged,” Newsom said. “There is no money sitting in the piggy bank.”

What’s more, with his usual indifference to the details of actually administering anything, Trump’s memorandum announcing the replacement unemployment insurance plan didn’t include any details about how states could apply for the aid or qualify their workers for it. As a result, millions of Americans face uncertainty about whether they can put food on their tables, pay their bills or even cover their rents without facing eviction — and both houses of the U.S. Congress, and both major parties, compounded this insult and injury to the American people by brazenly and unashamedly going on their “traditional” August recess instead of staying in Washington, D.C. and doing their jobs!!!!!

An Ideological Battle

The ongoing conflicts between Democrats and Republicans over pandemic stimulus — and almost everything else government does — reflect a deep ideological divide. The Democrats have retreated extensively from their large-scale social agendas of the 1930’s and 1960’s, but they still believe in the concept that it is an obligation of government to spend at least some money helping lower-income people, whatever their race or national origin. The Republicans don’t.

Instead, they believe in a philosophy devised by mid-20th century author Ayn Rand, who drew on the work of two Viennese economists named Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek. Rand called her philosophy “Objectivism” but today it’s usually known as Libertarianism. Libertarianism arose as an extreme response to the vicious and exploitative dictatorships socialist revolutionaries set up in the Soviet Union, China and virtually everywhere else they seized power. Rand herself was forced to flee the Soviet Union, and her experience of the early days of Soviet Communism colored her world-view all her life.

The essence of Libertarianism is that the rich are physically, intellectually and morally superior human beings, and that just the fact that they are rich proves their superiority. Like the 19th century “Social Darwinists,” who believed that human evolution was still happening and the rich were evolving into a higher life form, Libertarians believe that all human progress comes from a handful of superior beings who need to be allowed to do whatever they want.

Therefore, they oppose all government regulations on business because they see such regulations as stifling the human spirit of the superior rich. They oppose laws to protect the environment and also laws to protect the rights of women and people of color — though they think racism and sexism are self-defeating because they deny the equal rights of superior rich people who happen to be women or people of color. Libertarians not only believe in a totally lassiez-faire economy, they think that any government restrictions on the right of businesspeople to do whatever they want will inevitably lead to Communist-style tyranny. (Friedrich A. Hayek wrote a best-selling book called The Road to Serfdom, published in 1948, that made precisely that argument.)

Libertarians also oppose any attempt by government to tax the rich in order to benefit the not-so-rich. They regard programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as essentially enslaving the rich and confiscating their money to serve their physical and social inferiors. Ayn Rand said as much when she was asked what she would do about people with disabilities, and whether society as a whole had an obligation to help them. She replied, “Misfortune does not justify slave labor,” and added that in her view it was the responsibility of the family members of people with disabilities, and charities to which the rich could contribute voluntarily if they wanted to, to help them.

Rand expressed her philosophy in two political novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which are essentially to Libertarianism what The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are to socialism. The heroes of these books are capitalist super-people who are constantly being driven out of business and having their money taken away from them by the craven liberal collectivists who run things, only to demonstrate their innate superiority by becoming rich again and delivering long speeches at the ends of her novels expressing Rand’s point of view. Incidentally, Rand’s heroes are also rapists: whenever Rand wrote about sex it was about a strong, powerful woman being sexually assaulted and ultimately dominated by an even stronger, more powerful man — and the fact that this was the only kind of sex she wrote about suggests it was a particular fantasy of hers.

Donald Trump didn’t run for President as a Libertarian — he ran as a European-style Right-wing nationalist who vowed to protect Social Security and other aspects of the welfare state (at least the ones that benefit white people) — but he’s governed as a Libertarian because Libertarianism feeds the two things most important to Trump: his bank balance and his ego. Not only does Libertarianism generate public policies that will make Donald Trump richer — like the awful 2017 tax cut that was essentially a giveaway to wealthy individuals and corporations — but it tells him that the mere fact that he’s rich means he’s physically, intellectually, morally and sexually superior to the common run of humanity.

Libertarians in the Republican Party know that they can’t get rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the rest of the tattered remnants of America’s social safety net overnight. That’s why for the last several decades — often in alliance with corporate-friendly Democrats — they’ve been nibbling away at it. A number of Republican Congressmembers with Libertarian ideologies — including Mark Meadows, whom Trump pulled out of the House of Representatives to be his current chief of staff — reluctantly acknowledged the need for massive government spending in March and April to respond to the early days of the pandemic, but now they’re reverting to form and putting their foot down on any more of the kind of spending they literally consider immoral.

The ideological differences between the Republican and Democratic parties were readily visible in their competing proposals for the fourth SARS-CoV-2 relief bill. As reported by Chris Megerian, Anna Phillips and Sara Wire in the August 9 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-08/trump-executive-orders-bypassing-congress-coronavirus-relief), the total cost of the Democrats’ relief package would be $3.4 trillion. The Republican alternative — which, unlike the Democrats’ bill, has neither been passed or even formally debated by either house of Congress — calls for $1 trillion.

The Democrats called for renewing the full $600 per week in supplemental unemployment benefits; the Republicans wanted to cut it to $200. The Democrats wanted $75 billion to pay for testing and treatment for COVID-19; the Republicans wanted $15 billion. Democrats proposed $915 billion for aid to state and local governments; Republicans offered only $150 billion. Trump specifically ridiculed the Democrats’ interest in helping state and local governments, and Meadows said that the Democrats’ insistence on keeping the unemployment benefit at $600 and helping local governments were the deal-breakers. “Both of those are still where they were two weeks ago,” Meadows said August 7.

The Republicans offered $105 billion for schools to help meet the demands of starting the school year under pandemic conditions; according to House Speaker Pelosi, the Democrats wanted at least $200 billion more for schools. In perhaps the most shocking gap between the two sides, the Democrats wanted $67 billion to help ordinary Americans with food, water and utility expenses. The Republicans proposed just $250,000 for food aid to the entire country.

In a desperate attempt to get a deal done before the original SARS-CoV-2 programs expanded at the end of July, the Democrats cut $1 trillion from their relief request — mostly by shortening the length of time the aid would be paid rather than dropping actual programs. The Republicans refused, and Mitch McConnell justified his refusal by saying there were at least 20 Republican Senators who wouldn’t even support the $1 trillion that was the party’s official request.

The Republicans are in a bind of their own making — vote for massive aid to ordinary Americans through programs they don’t believe in and ultimately want to see eliminated, or risk political suicide. Donald Trump, with his expansive view of Presidential powers — he’s on record as saying, “There’s this little thing [in the Constitution] called Article II that says I can do whatever I want” — has stepped in to advance his pursuit of dictatorial powers and also to get the Republicans out of their bind and blame the Democrats for Congress’s failure to act.

A Very Unstable Genius

Even after Trump’s spectacular come-from-behind victory in the 2016 Presidential election — capping a lifetime of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat again and again and again, as businessman, politician and President — for some reason it’s still fashionable in liberal, progressive and Left circles to write Donald Trump as a buffoon. (It’s the same mistake liberal, progressive and Leftist Germans made about Adolf Hitler in the 1920’s and early 1930’s.) Too often Trump is portrayed as an incompetent buffoon, a figure to be ridiculed rather than feared.

In fact, Trump has been a very effective President in fulfilling the long-term mission of the Republican Party: to discredit the very idea of collective action through government; to destroy what’s left of America’s social safety net; to eliminate all laws protecting workers, consumers or the environment; to freeze current racial and gender inequities into law permanently; and, above all, to make the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. ever more unequal while undermining and ultimately eliminating the ability of less well-to-do Americans to do anything about it. In 1974, political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau published an opinion piece in The New Republic called “The Decline of Democratic Government,” in which he argued that there will always be limits on democracy because “there will always be issues on which the ruling classes will not allow themselves to be outvoted.” And I would argue that the big issue on which today’s ruling classes will not allow themselves to be outvoted is precisely the redistribution of wealth and income upward.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to mass movements for socialism, communism and anarchism, at least some members of the world’s ruling classes decided they’d better make some compromises on the distribution of income to avoid getting overthrown by revolutionary movements. That’s how we got Social Security, unemployment insurance and (in virtually all Western republics except the U.S.) guaranteed health care. But starting in the early 1970’s, the corporate elites of the U.S. in general and the world’s advanced capitalist countries in particular decided to stop playing Mr. Nice Guy.

That trend accelerated after 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended, international communism evaporated almost overnight and the capitalist elites no longer felt threatened by the spectre of revolution. Indeed, most of the countries that still call themselves “communist,” like China and Viet Nam, have essentially turned themselves into giant sweatshops, offering the world’s capitalists an ultra-low-wage labor force and using the dictatorial structures that once supported communism to keep their workers in line. Libertarian ideology, with its belief that taxing the rich to help the non-rich is actually immoral, accelerates, justifies and gives an intellectual excuse for the trend in capitalist countries that are nominal “democracies” to declare certain liberal redistributive policies off limits.

This has left the voters of these countries — especially the overwhelming majority of them who find that every year it gets harder and harder for them to make ends meet — in a quandary. In Europe the biggest political losers have been the old-line social democratic parties, who have hemorrhaged voters either to Right-wing nationalist groups or to Green parties and other more radical Leftists. In country after country — the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines — voters have elected Trump-style pseudo-populists who have been able to channel their rage into political movements which talk a good game of protecting individuals against “The Establishment” while delivering policies which only accelerate the redistribution of wealth and income to the ruling classes.

Indeed, one of the most depressing political facts of our era is that the three countries which were most instrumental in defeating the original fascists in World War II — the United States, Great Britain and Russia — are now all governed by neo-fascists. And what’s even worse, no country that has elected a Right-wing pseudo-populist government (with the possible exception of Italy after the fall of Silvio Berlusconi) has yet gone back even to the level of a relatively safe bourgeois “democracy,” much less returned to a liberal or progressive welfare state that doesn’t scapegoat women or ethnic minorities.

Donald Trump has been brilliantly and devastatingly effective at the main goals of his Presidency. He has successfully discouraged immigration to the U.S. and thereby at least slowed, if not reversed, the disappearance of America’s “white” ethnic majority. With the aid of Reichsmarschall Mitch McConnell, Trump has packed not only the U.S. Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary with Right-wing ideologues, so that even if a liberal Democratic regime takes power in the White House and Congress, much of what it tries to do will be thrown out by the courts as unconstitutional. Trump has directly caused irreparable and irreversible damage to the U.S.’s (and the world’s) ability to fight, or even to survive, human-caused climate change. And through the landmark Republican tax bill of 2017, as well as his determination to eliminate the Social Security payroll tax, he’s eliminated the ability of any future government to protect, much less extend, the welfare state by getting rid of government’s ability to pay for it. He has also deliberately stoked the fires of racial hatred in the U.S. (much the way Adolf Hitler did in Germany) and he’s sent unmarked paramilitary forces to fire so-called “less lethal” weapons at peaceful demonstrators and bystanders in cities like Portland, Oregon.

For Trump the concept of a “loyal opposition” simply does not exist; you either are with America’s Führer or you are against him — and while in the first Trump term all he’s been able to do is fire rubber bullets at protesters and insult journalists, in the second Trump term he’ll be able to have his paramilitary squads fire live bullets at demonstrators and order journalists killed. Not only has Trump argued that he could kill someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, he’s had his lawyers say in court that he could kill someone and the police would have no authority to stop him. And he made his intentions towards the media and his representatives crystal clear when he began one White House media briefing by saying he’d been on the phone that day with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman — two leaders who ordered the murder of journalists critical of them.

Trump Is Forever

“[A]lways there will be the increasing intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. … And remember that it is forever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon.” — O’Brien to Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984

And don’t maintain any illusion that the regime of Donald Trump as President of the United States will end on November 3, 2020 or January 20, 2021. When Trump said this year’s election would be the most blatantly rigged and corrupt one in American history, he was right in exactly the opposite way from what he seemed to mean. On the surface, he was saying that the wide use of mail-in ballots would provide opportunities for voter fraud and ensure his defeat. In reality, Trump was promising that he and his Republican acolytes would do everything they could to rig this year’s election for him.

For at least the last two decades — and probably longer than that — the Republican Party has been waging war against electoral democracy. In state after state, as soon as they’ve taken over state government, Republicans have passed laws lengthening the time you have to be registered before you can vote. They’ve eliminated same-day registration and early voting opportunities. They’ve systematically closed down polling places in regions dominated by low-income people and people of color to make sure people not likely to vote Republican won’t be able to vote at all.

In this year’s primary in Kentucky, the Republican-controlled state and county governments set up just one polling place for Louisville — a city of 600,000 people. In other states Republicans have systematically thrown hundreds of thousands of people off voting rolls to make sure they can’t lose. Trump has announced that the 2020 U.S. Census, originally scheduled to last until October 31, will wrap up a month early, on September 30 — thereby giving the Census Bureau less time to reach poor people, people of color and other hard-to-reach populations. The intent is obvious: if fewer Democratic-leaning people in big states are counted, smaller states will have more representation in Congress and in the Electoral College, and the nation’s politics as a whole will be more Republican. Even if Democrats keep their House of Representatives majority in the 2020 election, they will almost certainly lose it again in 2022, the first which will be held in districts reapportioned under Trump’s rigged and corrupt census.

Trump’s biggest weapon in making sure the Democrats cannot unseat him in 2020 is Louis DeJoy, whom he put in charge of the United States Postal Service in May 2020. DeJoy, who not only had no prior experience in the Postal Service but has a direct conflict of interest because he’s a major investor in one of the Postal Service’s biggest private competitors, United Parcel Service (UPS), as well as Amazon.com, took over and launched the familiar pattern of Gleichschaltung (a word coined by Adolf Hitler to describe getting non-political civil servants out of the German government and replacing them with fanatical Nazis) other Trump appointees have used.

eJoy’s first action on taking over the Postal Service was to eliminate overtime for postal workers — thereby immediately causing delays not only in political mail but all mail, including prescription shipments many senior citizens rely on for life-saving medications. After a number of high-ranking postal officials resigned in protest of his changes, he got rid of 23 who were left by “reassigning” them out of administrative positions.

According to officials of the American Postal Workers’ Union and other post office employees, DeJoy has directed postal workers to treat political mail like any other sort of junk mail. He’s also raised the postage for mail-ballot applications from the 20¢ bulk mail rate to the 55¢ for an individual first-class mailpiece. Under DeJoy’s watch, over 40 large mail sorting machines have been removed from postal centers so it will be impossible for the Postal Service to sort and send either mail ballot applications or the completed ballots themselves.

DeJoy’s administration also ordered the wholesale removal of mailboxes from the streets, particularly in remote rural areas of Washington and Montana, to make it harder for people to mail ballots (or anything else). Only a couple of media exposés and the strong stand taken by Montana’s senior U.S. Senator, Democrat Jon Tester, stopped this purge of mailboxes from going nationwide. Then, after taking all these steps to slow down mail in general and political mail in particular, DeJoy warned 47 of the 51 jurisdictions that vote for President of the United States (the states and the District of Columbia) that they couldn’t trust the Postal Service to deliver ballots by the deadlines the states had set.

President Trump has not only fully supported DeJoy’s campaign to destroy the U.S. Postal Service from within, he’s been totally honest (for a change) about what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. On August 13, Trump made two public statements — first to the Fox and Friends news show and then in a White House briefing — that he was blocking Democratic proposals for emergency aid to the Postal Service precisely to stop mail-in voting. “They want $3.5 billion for the mail-in votes. Universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said. “But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

Trump’s jihad against the U.S. Postal Service and his constant attacks on the whole idea of mail-in voting as “corrupt” (such a blatant lie that when he said it on Twitter, the platform deleted his tweets for the first time) is just part of his overall campaign to discredit the 2020 election even before it takes place. In 2016, asked during a debate with Hillary Clinton whether he would accept the results, he said, “If I win” — an obvious threat that he wouldn’t have accepted the results if he’d lost. Even though he won in the Electoral College, he didn’t accept his popular-vote defeat; instead he claimed, without evidence, that “millions” of undocumented immigrants had cast votes for Clinton.

Donald Trump’s determination to win this year’s election, no matter what the cost to America’s future as a republic (or as a nation), is obvious in all sorts of places. He has his pliant Attorney General, William Barr, investigating the actions of former officials in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, leading to lot of fears among Democrats that one of Trump’s “October surprises” may be indictments of major Obama officials — perhaps even the near-certain Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, himself. Already he’s known to have approached Ukraine, China and Russia for help with the 2020 campaign — particularly dirt on Biden’s son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine and China.

Another potential “October surprise” Trump might pull is a premature and dangerous release of an alleged vaccine to SARS-CoV-2. Trump’s good buddy, idol and role model, Vladimir Putin, has already done that in Russia, releasing a vaccine to the Russian people (one quite possibly based on American vaccine research Russian military intelligence literally stole through computer hacking) even before scientists have finished the mass testing to make sure it’s safe and effective.

I wouldn’t put it past Trump to do a similar early vaccine release in the U.S. — the U.S. government has already made a contract with Maderna, one of the companies developing and testing a vaccine, to buy 108 million doses even though the normal approval process has barely begun. Trump could well announce a vaccine in October, millions of pandemic-weary Americans would get the shots … and then, if the vaccine either kills people itself or doesn’t protect them from getting COVID-19, the disease SARS-CoV-2 causes, Trump won’t care. For him it will have served its purpose: getting re-elected.

And even if all his attempts either to rig the election outright or affect its outcome with some last-minute B.S. fail, Trump can simply declare the election invalid and refuse to abide by its results. Trump has repeatedly said he won’t consider the election fair unless the outcome is known by election night. If by midnight on November 3 Trump is leading in enough states to give him an Electoral College majority, he will insist that that should be the result that holds. If mail-ballot votes keep coming in after that and swing the electoral majority to Biden, Trump will claim the Democrats manufactured those votes to steal the election from him.

And even if Trump is behind in the count on election night, he’ll still have the ability to argue that, because of the wide use of mail-in ballots in Democratic-leaning states (as opposed to Florida, whose mail-in voting system Trump said was O.K. because it’s run by Republicans and Trump himself votes by mail there), the results were fraudulent. Then the U.S. might face a scenario we’ve seen before in other countries: two candidates both claiming to be the rightfully elected President … and appealing to different factions in the U.S. military to support their claim and keep the other guy out of the White House.

Indeed, a TV interviewer recently asked Joe Biden what he would do if he won the election and Trump refused to leave office. Biden said he was sure the U.S. military would honor their pledge to protect and defend the Constitution, and would make sure that come Inauguration Day 2021 he would be in the White House and Trump wouldn’t. Others aren’t so sure. In an August 13 post to a Web site called Just Security (https://www.justsecurity.org/72008/i-resigned-from-u-s-government-after-my-own-leaders-began-to-act-like-the-autocrats-i-analyzed/), former Defense Intelligence Agency senior analyst Kyle Murphy said that after 10 years he had left the government because Trump was acting just like the dictators in other countries about whom it had been his job to warn us.

According to Murphy, the last straw for him was when the two top-ranking officials over the U.S. military — Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — joined President Trump on his June 1 walk of shame to a Washington, D.C. church for a photo-op after government forces had cleared peaceful protesters from Trump’s path with tear gas and rubber bullets. “I lost faith in the courage of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to refuse unlawful orders from the President,” Murphy wrote. “They effectively labeled me and other Americans expressing our views in a peaceful assembly as enemies. They authorized troops to use overwhelming force and set a dangerous precedent by enabling the president to ignore state and local officials’ objections and deploy federal forces in response to popular protests.” When, as part of his job, Murphy was detailed to the National Security Council and briefed Trump on international issues, “I was appalled by the ways he actively undermined the democratic principles we have long aspired to model and to advance globally,” he recalled. “Each day, Trump’s approach looks more like the autocrats I warned about as an analyst. I am alarmed by the decision to send federal forces to Portland and additional cities, over local objections, as well as the abusive approach of those forces to protesters in operations well beyond their normal jurisdiction. … Set against the backdrop of the dereliction and callous disregard for the more than 160,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19, I fear the president and his allies may choose further escalation in an attempt to avoid the personal consequences of defeat in November.”

Another author, Amherst University professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought Lawrence Douglas, is so worried about the prospect that Trump might not peacefully relinquish the Presidency if he loses that he’s even written a book about it: Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. In a short summary of his arguments published as an op-ed in the August 12 Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-12/trump-election-fraud-mail-ballots-defeat-electoral-crisis, Douglas wrote, “From his powerful platform in the White House, Trump can be counted on to work tirelessly to ensure the count of mail-in ballots is plagued by delays, questions and confusion, deploying teams of lawyers to numerous states to challenge the vote in any way possible. He can also rely on Russia bombarding social media with fake news designed to undercut confidence in the states’ counts. The situation is tailor-made for a president who thrives on chaos and who is prepared to indulge any conspiracy theory that advances his political interests.”

Douglas says that in order for the Democratic Party to dislodge Trump from the Presidency, they will not only have to win the election but win it by such a landslide margin there won’t be any doubt even in Trump’s mind that the American people want him out. “[I]f Trump were to lose decisively, he would have no choice but to submit to defeat,” he wrote. “In submitting without conceding, Trump could certainly make mischief. He could, for example, encourage his supporters to take to the streets, triggering counter-protests met with ugly displays of federal force. But losing big would make it difficult for Trump to engage in more aggressive acts of constitutional defiance, such as trying to enlist Republican state legislatures to certify him as the winner in their states.”

But in order for that to happen, Douglas concedes, Biden’s victory over Trump would have to be so overwhelming it would have to be clear on November 3 that Trump has been voted out of the Presidency. And with Trump’s support among the electorate hanging steady at 40 to 45 percent of the vote in all the polls — even the ones most suggestive of a Biden victory — the best Biden and the Democrats can hope for is to squeak through to a narrow win rather than an overwhelming one.

So it’s quite likely that Donald Trump will get a second term as President whether a majority of the American people want him to have one or not. And once he’s freed of the burden of having to go through another election, all limits on Trump’s dictatorial powers will now end. Instead of shooting rubber bullets at peaceful protesters, Trump — like Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukaschenko — will have his camo-clad minions use real ones. Instead of merely insulting and walking out on hostile journalists, Trump will have them arrested or even killed.

Donald Trump’s entire Presidency has been a series of bold, assertive actions aimed at breaking down all the laws and norms that have historically sustained America’s democracy (to the extent we ever had one). He has turned much of government, including the Department of Justice, into instruments for his personal vendettas. He has imposed a regime in which workers and consumers have no right capitalists are obliged to respect; in which people of color, especially from Latin American countries that supply most of the so-called “illegal” immigrants, aren’t even considered true Americans; and in which a small but willful cabal of white men will be able to hold power indefinitely even as whites become an ever-smaller proportion of American population. To achieve his racist, sexist, classist dystopia, Trump is willing to do anything, including sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans to COVID-19 (and millions more in the pandemics sure to follow as his policies relentlessly destroy the environment). Americans who once looked at other countries and wondered, “How do democracies die?,” are now getting an up-close-and-personal look at the process.