Trump’s Apocalypse

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

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

The most remarkable thing about the dueling political “conventions” held the last two weeks in August — the Democrats from August 17-20 and the Republicans from August 24-27 — is how apocalyptic they both were. If you listened to the Democrats, you heard that Donald Trump is a monster whose second term, if he gets one, will destroy American democracy and make the U.S. over into a quasi-fascist dictatorship. People of color will be slaughtered willy-nilly by law enforcement, armed paramilitary squads will patrol America’s cities and take people into custody at random, women will lose control over their bodies, and equal protection, due process and freedom of the press will end up on the scrap heap of American history. If you listened to the Republicans, Donald Trump is a savior, the only leader who can keep hordes of bloodthirsty socialists, anarchists and newly released criminals from overrunning the streets and murdering large numbers of people. The Republicans accused the Democrats of wanting to bring about an American dystopia that would make The Hunger Games look like Disneyland, and would force us all under big-state control that would run our private lives (except our sex lives, which Republicans believe should be under big-state control) and destroy America’s economy.

The Republicans held far more of their convention in traditional venues — big spaces filled with crowds, mostly of people closer than six feet apart and not wearing masks — than the Democrats. Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination for President in a small auditorium with a backdrop of American flags and only a few bored-looking note-takers in attendance. Donald Trump accepted his nomination before a crowd of 1,500 enthusiastic Republican faithful on the White House lawn — capping a week in which virtually all the big events were held on federal government property. Politicians running for re-election generally have enough of a sense of morality, ethics and law to keep their governing separate from their campaigning. Not Donald Trump. Like a royal family, he regards the property of the U.S. government as his own, to do with as he sees fit. He requisitioned the Mellon Center — a federal property that happens to be just a block away from a D.C. hotel Trump owns — for most of the convention’s speeches. He had himself and vice-president Mike Pence speak from the White House lawn, with fireworks after Trump’s big speech August 27 spelling out “TRUMP 2020” over what news commentators atavistically called “the people’s house.”

It’s not the people’s house, according to Donald Trump. It’s his house. Trump has already made it clear that he has no intention of leaving it even if America’s voters tell him to on November 3, 2020. He has pre-emptively denounced the election as “rigged” and particularly targeted the use of mail-in ballots, which he says without evidence are inherently fraudulent. In fact, Trump is so scared of mail-in ballots he installed one of his biggest donors and fundraisers, Louis DeJoy, to sabotage the entire United States Postal Service so people can’t get mail ballots in on time to be counted. The fact that this is also causing economic havoc and threatening people’s lives — a lot of older people rely on the mail to deliver medications — doesn’t bother Donald Trump.

All the horrors of Donald Trump and Trump’s America were on full view during his convention. Despite the parade of African-Americans practically shuffling on stage and saying, “Yassuh, boss” to Trump, the convention was overwhelmingly white. Two of the most prominent “ordinary people” on stage (actually in their living room) on Monday night were Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St. Louis couple who brandished items from their extensive gun collection at Black Lives Matter protesters who were peacefully walking past their house — and became Right-wing heroes for doing so. The McCloskeys, who are facing felony prosecution for threatening other people’s lives, said that if Biden and the Democrats were elected they would “end suburbia.” The Democrats put the roll call that formally nominated Joe Biden on national TV and let America see the dazzling rainbow of Americans — African-Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans — who are part of their coalition. The Republicans held their roll call behind closed doors in the arena in Charlotte, North Carolina where they had originally planned to stage the whole convention, and when they finally showed clips of it on TV about the only non-whites announcing their states’ and territories’ votes for Trump were from places like Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands where they’d have had a hard time finding white people to do it.

And the message throughout the convention was Us vs. Them, Good Americans vs. Bad Americans, people who belong here vs. people who don’t. It’s true that Trump’s us-vs.-them portrayal of Americans is nothing new for the Republican Party. It goes back at least as far as the end of World War II, when the U.S. “party line” towards the Soviet Union abruptly changed from Our Wartime Allies to Our Bitter Enemies. Republican politicians seized on the threat of Communism not only to regain power after losing five Presidential elections in a row from 1932 to 1948 (four of them to the same person, Franklin D. Roosevelt) but to discredit their liberal enemies by linking all Democrats to the Communists.

Either Democrats were actively in league with the Red enemy or they were “soft” on it, Republicans said. Either way, the only way to keep America safe from Communism was by electing Republicans — and getting rid of the regulations and controls that Democrats had put in place during the Great Depression to stop the business abuses that had led to the economic collapse. Anti-Communism brought into being the Libertarian ideology that has slowly but surely become orthodoxy in the Republican party — the idea that Social Security, Medicare and other programs that tax the rich to help the not-so-rich are immoral; that businesses should be allowed to do whatever they want regardless of what that does to workers, consumers or the environment; and that the only alternatives are pure lassiez-faire capitalism or Communist tyranny.

The “Real Americans”

In 1970 political scientist Samuel Lubell published a book called The Hidden Crisis in American Politics. According to Lubell, the hidden crisis in American politics was that Richard Nixon had become the first President in U.S. history deliberately to divide the American people for purely political gain. Previous Presidents, Lubell argued, had either sought to unite Americans and bring them together around a common cause; or when they had divided them, had done so for an idealistic purpose: Abraham Lincoln taking on the Southern slave power to stop slavery’s expansion, or Franklin Roosevelt reforming the economy to end the Great Depression and prevent another one.

Nixon won the Presidency in the first place as a result of the torment and turmoil of the 1960’s. The decade had begun hopefully, with strong but nonviolent activism among African-Americans demanding first-class citizenship and legal and economic equality. Democratic President John F. Kennedy proclaimed that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and seemed to symbolize a new, fresh American spirit where we could go to the moon and do other things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Though he was killed in November 1963, his successor, the far savvier Lyndon Johnson, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, holding out the promise that America’s 350-year debt to its Black citizens was finally at least starting to be repaid.

Then it all unraveled. African-Americans didn’t think the changes were happening fast enough and rejected the leadership of civil-rights icons like Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis. Their new heroes — Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver — said that America was such a violence-prone nation that the only language the whites in charge would ever understand was the power of the gun. Meanwhile, President Johnson — a progressive on domestic issues but a hard-line anti-Communist hawk on foreign ones — got the U.S. involved in an unwinnable war in Viet Nam in which up to 500,000 U.S. servicemembers were fighting at one time — and ultimately 60,000 died.

Under the stresses of the 1960’s — the civil-rights struggle, the Viet Nam war, the assassinations, the rise of the hippie counter-culture and its mockery of the values of hard work and self-sacrifice older Americans believed had built this country — American politics flipped on its head. The Democrats abandoned their historic mantle of the party of American racism — slavery, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan — and the Republicans eagerly took it up. The so-called “Party of Lincoln” (which actually dumped Lincoln — he ran for re-election in 1864 on a “National Union” ticket after the Republicans refused to renominate him) became the party of the old Confederacy: George W. Bush carried all 11 former Confederate states (South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee) in both 2000 and 2004, and in 2016 Trump carried them all except Virginia.

In 1964 President Johnson won an historic landslide against a far-Right Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, with 61 percent of the nationwide vote to Goldwater’s 39 percent. Goldwater won only six states, but five of them were Southern — the beginning of the transformation of the South from “solid Democrat” to “solid Republican.” In 1968, Richard Nixon and Right-wing independent candidate George Wallace between them won 57 percent of the popular vote to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. Because Wallace got 14 percent of the vote and therefore the major parties’ nominees appeared to have come close to a tie, a lot of analysts missed the point of the election: the “New Deal coalition” that had enabled the Democrats to win seven of the nine Presidential elections between 1932 and 1964 had come to a sudden end, and the U.S. now had a Right-wing political majority cemented by white Americans’ racism and hatred of the counter-culture.

That Right-wing majority has continued to hold to this day, though moderate Democrats have still been able to win Presidential elections occasionally. The key task of a Democratic nominee since 1968 has been to win enough votes in the South to put those states in play. Of the three Democrats who’ve actually won the Presidency since 1968, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did that by being white Southerners themselves and Barack Obama did it by being Black, and thereby mobilizing enough of the Black vote while the 1965 Voting Rights Act was still in full effect to carry some Southern states despite huge white opposition. (This analysis is one reason I thought that for sheer electability, regardless of his political position within the party, the candidate with the best chance of beating President Trump in 2020 was Hillary Clinton’s running mate, white Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia — and why I was disappointed that he was one of the few national Democrats who didn’t run.)

Based on a coalition that seems internally inconsistent — radical Libertarians who want a “small government” that leaves business and the economy, and evangelical Christians who want a “big government” that directly polices people’s decisions about the most intimate aspects of their lives — but has shown remarkable staying power since Ronald Reagan brought evangelical voters into the GOP in 1980, the modern-day Republican Party has built much of its appeal on the idea that there really are “two Americas,” but only one counts as “real Americans.” “Real Americans” are career-minded people who work hard, sacrifice, don’t complain about economic or racial discrimination, go to church, get married, have kids and don’t have sex for any reason other than to have kids. Most of the Republicans’ “real Americans” are white, though they’ll admit people of color into those ranks as long as they lift themselves up by their bootstraps and don’t complain either about economic inequities or racial discrimination.

In 2008, when Sarah Palin was running for vice-president on John McCain’s Republican ticket, she made speech after speech extolling the virtues of “real Americans” — and commentators started noticing that the list of people she considered “real Americans” seemed to get smaller every time she spoke. Like much of the evil within the Republican Party, the divide-and-conquer rhetoric Lubell had warned about in 1970 — their tendency to divide the country and service only their base, declaring the rest of the country as beyond the pale of “real American”-ness — has only got worse with Donald Trump. As with so much of the Republican message — its racism, sexism, active hatred of the environment and worship of businesspeople and “The Market” — Trump has said bluntly, forcefully and openly what previous Republicans said only in coded “dog whistle” language.

Trump’s acceptance speech on August 27 — like the remarks of virtually everyone else who spoke at the Republican convention — was full of us-vs.-them rhetoric portraying the Democrats as monsters and Trump as the anointed hero who alone can save “real Americans” from them. “If the Democrat Party wants to stand with anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag-burners, that is up to them, but I, as your President, will not be a part of it,” he said. “The Republican Party will remain the voice of the patriotic heroes who keep America Safe.

“Last year, over 1,000 African-Americans were murdered as result of violent crime in just four Democrat-run cities,” Trump continued. “The top 10 most dangerous cities in the country are run by Democrats, and have been for decades. Thousands more African-Americans are victims of violent crime in these communities. Joe Biden and the left ignore these American Victims. I NEVER WILL. If the Radical Left takes power, they will apply their disastrous policies to every city, town, and suburb in America. Just imagine if the so-called peaceful demonstrators in the streets were in charge of every lever of power in the U.S. Government.”

(In case you’re wondering why the above quotes from Trump’s speech read like one of his tweets, only longer — complete with eccentric capitalizations and hysterical ALL-CAPS thundering — it’s because I’m quoting from the official transcript the Trump campaign and the Republican Party sent to the media in advance. You can read it for yourself at https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/28/politics/donald-trump-speech-transcript/index.html.)

The Mutability of the Past

“Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and is in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”
— George Orwell, 1984

During the past five years — the duration, so far, of the Age of Trump in American politics — I’ve frequently recommended George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 as the book you most need to read to understand Trump, Trumpism and how they have laid the groundwork for America’s transition from bourgeois democracy to all-out dictatorship. I first realized this when I read an article in the July 25, 2016 New Yorker in which Jane Mayer interviewed Tony Schwartz, the ghost-writer who actually wrote Trump’s best-selling business memoir The Art of the Deal. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true,” Schwartz told Mayer.

I immediately recognized the philosophy behind that quote as something Orwell called doublethink: “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and believing both of them.” Orwell explained that the officials of his all-powerful dictatorship, the “Inner Party,” used doublethink “to tell deliberate lies while completely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality while all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” A lot of people have tried to describe Trump’s cavalier attitude towards the truth and willingness to lie shamelessly and with apparent sincerity even about things on which the facts are well known — but no one has done so as incisively as George Orwell in a book published nearly 70 years before the Trump presidency.

The 2020 Republican convention was a virtuoso exercise in doublethink and what Orwell called “the mutability of the past” — the ability of an authoritarian regime to rewrite the past in whatever form suits their needs at the moment. In the Trumpworld, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is history. (One speaker, former Reagan, Bush and Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow, referred to it in the past tense even though it’s still killing thousands of Americans every day.) Police shootings of unarmed African-Americans either aren’t happening at all or are defensible responses to a community that has to be policed with a firm hand.

Hurricane Laura, which in the real world is cutting a devastating swath through western Louisiana and eastern Texas (and, with a cruel irony, seemed to go out of its way to target Lake Charles, an inland community to which many New Orleanians fled after Hurricane Katrina in 2005), is just another nasty little storm. I particularly felt bad for Kim Reynolds and Joni Ernst — Governor and U.S. Senator, respectively, from Iowa — who described the devastating wind event that swept through their state this year and the flooding that overtopped their levees the year before, and while I felt terrible for the Iowans who were devastated by these catastrophes, I also yelled at the TV, “Can you say … climate change?”

But the very suggestion that human activity might be changing the climate and making catastrophic weather events worse is anathema at a Republican convention, especially in the Trump era. Reynolds and Ernst didn’t mention climate change as a possible cause of the vicious weather devastating their state because they were practicing another Orwellian mind discipline, crimestop: “the faculty of stopping short, as if by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” Since Big Brother Trump hath decreed that the whole idea of human-caused climate change is a hoax dreamed up by the government of China to destroy the American economy (even while Trump, doubleplusgood doublethinker that he is, also sees China as the number one foreign exploiter of the American economy they’re seeking to destroy), no politician from Trump’s party can acknowledge it even when the evidence is right in front of their noses in the catastrophes that are ruining their constituents’ lives.

The Republican convention portrayed the Trump years as one of uninterrupted economic triumph during which the stock market soared to new heights (ironically, Trump is making the same mistake George W. Bush and Barack Obama did: trying to “sell” voters into keeping their parties in office by citing the stock market when it has little or nothing to do with the actual American economy), unemployment — especially among women and people of color — fell to new lows, rich individuals and corporations responded to the sweeping 2017 tax cuts by reinvesting in the economy and creating new jobs (actually they bought back their own stock or found other ways just to keep the money), and America was on its way back to greatness when that pesky little virus from China came over and screwed up everything. But don’t worry: we’ve already vanquished the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic and soon we will be able to, as Mike Pence rather awkwardly ended his convention speech, “make America great again … again.”

It’s true that Orwell’s Inner Party had one huge power Trump and the Republicans don’t. The Inner Party had an elaborate infrastructure by which they could physically seize all records telling a story of the past different from the one they wanted the people to believe at that moment, and fabricate new records in accordance with the Party’s newest mutated version of the past. (One irony of the technological advances since Orwell’s time is that, as more past records are stored digitally as computer files instead of on paper, those wholesale rewrites of the past have become considerably easier than they would have been then.) Trump still faces a more-or-less free press that, when he makes a particularly outrageous claim — like having had more spectators at his inaugural than any other President — news outlets could show photos of the meager crowds at Trump’s 2017 inaugural compared to the throngs at Obama’s in 2009 and thus expose Trump’s lie.

But as Trump advances his dictatorial agenda in a second term — assuming he wins one, either fairly or by simply refusing to leave office and getting the U.S. military to back him — we can expect more direct attacks on the freedom of the press. One macabre press briefing Trump gave at the White House about a month ago started with Trump’s boast that that very morning he had been on the phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Almost nobody noticed it, but I got the message loud and clear: Trump was saying to the reporters who regularly cover him, including the ones he thinks work for news outlets out to “get him,” “My good buddies are leaders who have journalists killed.”

If Donald Trump is elected to a second term as President — and, despite the polls showing Biden leading him both nationally and in most of the so-called “swing states,” I strongly suspect he will be, both because he and his Republican allies in state governments are rigging the election on his behalf and because the polls consistently underestimate his level of support — all the gloves will come off. Those 10 “Democrat cities” will be subjected to long, drawn-out occupations by paramilitary forces the way Portland was earlier this year. “Peaceful protest” will become a thing of the past, as the streets of America’s cities are patrolled by unmarked, unnamed Federal troops who, instead of shooting rubber bullets, will be equipped by Presidential fiat with real ones.

Donald Trump has never liked democracy. He’s also never liked people of color; again and again he’s made it clear that he doesn’t consider the children of non-white immigrants to be “real Americans.” Under a second Trump term, police killings of African-Americans and other people of color will rise to levels we haven’t envisioned in our wildest nightmares. Despite his pro forma pledge at the end of his August 27 speech to “protect Medicare and Social Security,” he has already promised to end the federal payroll tax — the financial basis for both those programs — and he’s setting up the political conditions to put an end to all entitlement programs the way Republicans in general, and Libertarian Republicans in particular, have long dreamed.

From the two greatest influences in shaping Donald Trump’s character — his father, Fred Trump, and his corrupt legal advisor Roy Cohn — Trump learned that compassion and empathy are signs of weakness. As Tony Schwartz told Jane Mayer in his 2016 New Yorker interview, “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’ — recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular.” Trump’s vision of the future, like that of Orwell’s Inner Party and O’Brien, its spokesperson in the novel, is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Whether it’s separating children of immigrants from their families and putting them in cages, or telling police officers not to be careful about banging suspects’ heads as they arrest them and put them in cars, Trump is not only cruel himself, he advocates and likes to see cruelty in others because he equates it with the values he’s been taught to revere: strength, toughness, manliness. (And yet this is also a man who got a doctor to declare him unfit for military duty so he wouldn’t have to show any real courage in combat in Viet Nam.) As Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote August 3, 2020 (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-08-03/pandemic-trump-cruelty-covid19-coronavirus), “In his statements and the actions of federal agencies under his control, as well as the positions held by his Republican congressional caucus, the strategy is clear: Use the [SARS-CoV-2] pandemic to make America a crueler place. … He has exploited the pandemic to divide the American public by turning state and local efforts to stem the contagion into partisan purity tests. His pronouncements about such fundamental policies as mask-wearing and social distancing have been consistently contradictory. When the facts contradict Trump’s claims, he lies about them or attacks the truth-tellers, even when they’re members of his own team.” (Doublethink again!)

And, right after Orwell had Party spokesperson O’Brien say that the future was “a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” he had him add, “And remember that it is forever.” I’m convinced Trump expects his rule literally to last forever. Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump In the White House documented that he’s grooming his daughter Ivanka to succeed him in 2024 — unless he can get the U.S. Constitution amended to repeal the 22nd Amendment and stay in office himself. (In one convention session he responded to chants of “Four More Years” from the crowd by saying, “Let’s make them really crazy: ’12 More Years!’” His audience faithfully went along with him.) I think Trump’s long-term plan — to the extent that he ever “plans” anything — is that there will never be another American President not named Trump.

Quite a number of other countries have fallen for Right-wing populist appeals similar to Trump’s — Russia, Hungary, Poland, the United Kingdom (particularly depressing because it means the three countries most instrumental in defeating the original fascists have now been taken over by neo-fascists), Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, Brazil — and with the possible exception of Italy, which finally got rid of Silvio Berlusconi, none of them have yet reverted to normal bourgeois democracies. Unless Donald Trump is defeated for re-election on November 3, 2020 — and defeated by so overwhelming a margin in both the popular and the electoral votes it will be clear even to him and his most credulous supporters that he’s lost — the U.S. is almost certain to go down the path of authoritarianism and decadence on which Trump has set us.

The Democrats’ Appeal — "Elect Joe Biden. Hels a Nice Guy”

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

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

“Elect Joe Biden President. He’s a nice guy.” That, in essence, was the message of the recently concluded Democratic National “Convention” August 17-20. I’m using the word “convention” in quotes because instead of occurring inside a big arena, the “convention” took place in isolated spaces — gyms, classrooms, homes, outdoor crossroads, forests and a Rhode Island beach where two of the delegates showed off their official state food, calamari — blended together electronically into a patchwork quilt we’ve become all too familiar with as the way virtually all TV news shows are broadcast these days.

Of course, this wasn’t a choice the Democratic National Committee made voluntarily. Like so much of how we live now, including how we work (or don’t work), spend our leisure time and consume entertainment, the 2020 Democratic National “Convention”’s virtual format was thrust on us by the Viral Dictator. A submicroscopic bundle of nucleic acid, proteins and a lipid coat has subjugated the entire human race with its demands — “Isolate yourselves from each other, or else I’ll spread and kill you all” — and, with a few exceptions (including President Trump), most Americans have more or less willingly acceded to the demands of SARS-CoV-2. (That, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, is the name of the virus causing the current pandemic; COVID-19 is the name of the disease it causes.)

In one respect, the “virtualization” of the Democratic “convention” this year was a good thing. It eliminated the last bit of pretense left that political conventions are news events, existing independently of the TV coverage they receive. Overall, the importance of political conventions has long since receded as the marathon primary campaign has taken over the process of actually deciding who the major-party Presidential candidates will be. The last time the Democrats held a convention at which the outcome was genuinely in doubt when the convention opened was 1972; the last time the Republicans did was 1976, and both the nominees from those conventions lost.

In 1972 it was considered shocking that Richard Nixon’s campaign had actually drafted a script for how each night of their convention should go. The BBC received a leaked copy and scandalized the world by publishing an excerpt from it. Today Presidential candidates are often judged by how well their conventions proceed according to script. If anything goes wrong, many voters will conclude, “If he can’t even run a convention, how does he expect to be able to run the country?”

Even the last bit of genuine suspense that remained at least through the 1980’s — the identity of the vice-presidential candidate — is long gone. Today a major-party Presidential candidate who didn’t announce his (or, in just one case, her) vice-presidential pick well in advance of the convention would be considered irresponsible. Former vice-president Joe Biden was actually criticized for not announcing his running mate, California Senator Kamala Harris, until a week before his convention was supposed to start.

So it’s probably a good thing that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic forced the Democratic Party (and, likely, the Republican Party as well — though we won’t know for sure until the Republican convention follows the lead of the Democrats and goes entirely virtual or it contains some of those big, transcendent public events President Trump loves so much) to eliminate any pretense that it was anything other than a TV show, a four-night infomercial for the party, its candidates and its causes. Indeed, I suspect this is how U.S. political “conventions” will be handled from now on: instead of mega-gatherings in arenas, they will be smaller, more intimate, not only shown on TV but produced for it.

Some of the speakers at the 2020 Democratic “Convention” benefited from its virtual nature. Joe Biden himself may have been the biggest beneficiary; without the need to appoear before a large audience, where he’s made some of his most embarrassing gaffes (like announcing his run for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina when he went there to campaign for the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, or mistaking his wife for his sister at his big rally in Los Angeles), he seemed visibly more comfortable speaking to a camera in an empty room. So did Michelle Obama, even though I thought her speech, though good, was nowhere near as triumphant a piece of historic oratory as the MS-NBC commentators said.

Though Michelle Obama’s speech was way too brown — and I mean that literally: her brown skin, her brown outfit and her brown room blended into a piece of almost sepulchral murk — she was clearly more comfortable speaking from her home than she would have been on the floor of a traditional convention. On the other hand, her husband seemed nervous without the support of the crowd. Forced into an attack mode that’s not congenial for him — Barack Obama is and always has been stronger at evoking the better angels of our nature than calling out America’s darkness — he stopped at every applause line and heard nothing but silence in return. Though almost totally different from Donald Trump in every other respect, Obama has one thing in common with him: they both need the energy from a crowd, the bigger the better, to come alive when they speak.

Like Me — and Vote for Me!

The Democratic “Convention” seemed designed to communicate two messages to prospective voters. One was the extensive showcasing of people of color, especially in the state-by-state roll call that actually nominated Joe Biden President. There were Black people, Latino/a people (upon my honor I will never use that ghastly, ugly, hateful example of linguistic political correctness run totally amok, “Latinx”!), a surprising number of Native Americans as well as Asian-Americans, Pacific Islander-Americans and Queer (another horrible piece of linguistic political correctness I will never use is “LGBTQ+” or whatever crazy set of initials it’s expanded to these days) Americans. “The Republicans are the party of white Americans; we’re the party of all Americans,” the Democrats seemed to be saying with their parade of Americans of color.

The other key selling point of the Democratic “Convention” was to present Joe Biden as a normal human being. We were told over and over again that Biden feels “empathy,” that he knows what pain and suffering are and he can identify with those who feel a deep and profound sense of loss. We heard so much about the two most tragic things that have happened to Biden personally — the deaths of his first wife and their infant daughter in a car crash in late 1972, after Biden had won an election for U.S. Senate from Delaware but before he had taken office; and the death of his 46-year-old son Beau from cancer in 2015 — at times the “convention” seemed like a story conference for the Hallmark Channel.

The organizers of the “convention” didn’t directly compare Biden’s compassion and empathy with Donald Trump’s conspicuous — and proud — lack of them. They didn’t have to. Every time Joe and Jill Biden talked about the loss of “our son” Beau — and it was telling that Jill said “our son” even though she wasn’t Beau’s biological mother — a reasonably informed viewer couldn’t help but compare the way the Bidens reacted to Beau’s death versus the way Donald Trump reacted to the death of his brother Fred Trump, Jr. in 1981, which was essentially to dismiss him as a weakling his family and the world were both better off rid of.

The Democrats know they have a problem with Joe Biden. He’s old — at 78 he’d be the oldest person ever sworn in as U.S. President if he wins the election (which makes the qualifications of running mate Kamala Harris to take over as President even more significant than usual for a vice-presidential pick) — and he’s prone to public gaffes that have led some people (including me) to wonder if he’s in the early stages of age-related dementia. He’s a quintessential part of the Washington establishment Trump railed against in his 2016 campaign.

Indeed, he’s so much the Establishment candidate that when he was asked a tough question by a voter at a CNN town-hall show in March — doesn’t the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic show that the U.S. needs to replace its profit-driven health care system with Medicare for all? — Biden hemmed and hawed, danced around the question and returned to his pre-pandemic position of offering “Medicare for All with COVID-19” plus a “public option” under the Affordable Care Act and expansion of access to private insurance. Of course, he couldn’t take any other position because one reason Biden and not Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee is a lot of people with a major stake in the current system pulled strings to make sure the U.S. was spared the “horror” of actually guaranteeing health care to all its citizens as a matter of right.

The biggest problem the Democrats have with Biden is that he’s boring. Ironically, that’s also his biggest asset: Biden promises a respite from Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride. Like Warren Harding in 1920, who ran to put his party back in the White House by promising a “return to normalcy” after the chaos of World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s presidency (he actually meant “return to normality,” but “normalcy” stuck so well it’s become part of American English and Biden himself has said it), Biden has run a campaign of such blandness his campaign slogan might as well be “Make America Boring Again.” That was already his approach before the pandemic, but SARS-CoV-2 has thrown Americans’ hopes for physical and economic well-being into such disarray, a lot of voters may well pick Biden simply in the hope that the pandemic is one more piece of Trump chaos Biden can bore into oblivion.

So the Democrats went all out for the tear ducts during the 2020 convention. They told story after story of Joe Biden giving out his personal cell-phone number to people in physical or emotional pain and spending a half-hour to an hour on the phone with them. They told the story of how Biden’s father came home one day and told his family that times were going to get a lot tougher for them because he had just lost his job — yet another contrast with Trump, the spoiled rich son of a rich man who’s never for a day in his life had to worry about where his next meal would come from, the Democrats could make without spelling it out. We heard the words “empathy” and “compassion” used so often to describe Biden that sometimes we got the impression they were about to show a video of him walking on water.

The whole point of the Democratic “convention” was to sell Joe Biden to the American people as a decent, normal human being. They didn’t have to mention Donald Trump’s name — about the only context in which they did was to call him temperamentally unfit for the office of President — but the unspoken contrast came through: “Our guy cares. Their guy doesn’t. Our guy has a heart. Their guy doesn’t. Our guy has a soul. Their guy doesn’t.”

Trump’s niece Mary, who also has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, has confirmed in her tell-all book and the interviews she’s given to promote it that Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, raised his kids literally to be psychopaths. He taught them that empathy and compassion are vices, not virtues, and the qualities they should aspire to are strength, ruthlessness, cruelty and greed. According to Mary Trump, her father, Fred Jr., got read out of the family, fell into alcoholism and died at 42 because he had normal human instincts for which his father, and later his brothers, routinely and relentlessly punished him.

We really always knew that about Donald Trump. The thuggish braggadocio and the sheer meanness of his personality have been on public display since his bizarre emergence as a trash celebrity in the New York tabloids in the 1970’s. As early as 1987, when Trump’s alleged “autobiography” The Art of the Deal was published, the book’s real author, Tony Schwartz, realized it. In an interview with Jane Mayer in the July 25, 2016 issue of The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all), Schwartz said, ““More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

Trump’s capacity for telling himself that what is saying is true, sort of true, or ought to be true was given a more economical name by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Orwell called it doublethink. and described it as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” He added that by using doublethink, the ruling elite of his dystopia could “use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that comes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.”

We’ve seen Trump use doublethink again and again — as a businessman, as a TV star, as a candidate, as a President. He said he had the largest crowds ever at his 2017 inaugural ceremony, and continued to say that even after TV stations showed side-by-side photos of his inauguration with Obama’s in 2009 and Trump’s were visibly much smaller. Trump dismantled the offices Obama and his predecessors to warn us about viruses which might start pandemics, and then said “nobody could have seen this coming” when a pandemic actually occurred. Over and over again he’s asserted that only he can possibly solve the problems of America — and then whine, when America has real existential problems, that he takes no responsibility and certainly no blame.

The only advantage the rulers in 1984 had over Trump is that, as absolute dictators, they were able to maintain an infrastructure that physically destroyed any records of what the rulers said the past had been and substituted new, forged ones in line with what the ruling party was now saying the past had always been. (Ironically, given how much we’ve come to rely on computers to store our most basic information — and how easily computers can be hacked — this has become far more conceivable and possible, even likely, than it was in Orwell’s time.) No doubt Trump wishes he had that power — that he could make all those pesky bits of evidence that contradict his lies — but he does have the other side of the power Orwell attributed to his ruling “Inner Party.”

Trump has control over the memories of his supporters. For the hard-core 40 to 45 percent of the American electorate who constitute his base, he has them so brainwashed, hypnotized or just plain convinced of the rectitude of everything he does he has no real fear of losing them. And he doesn’t have to add that many more voters to be assured of victory. Indeed, from day one of the Trump administration he and Republican leaders have decided that the way to re-elect him is not by adding voters to his base, but quite the opposite: by subtracting voters from the other side’s base. Voter suppression is not just something Republican Congressmembers, Senators, state legislators and political appointees (including Louis DeJoy, Trump’s hatchet man to destroy the U.S. Postal Service so people can’t vote by mail against him) are practicing: it has become basic to their political strategy and, indeed, to their political survival as demographic trends in the U.S. produce fewer people likely to be Republicans and more likely to be Democrats.

Given that Biden and the Democrats are up against a strong and powerful Trump base that’s almost enough to win an election on its own — especially if, as I suspect, Trump has what I call the “reverse Bradley factor” going for him (i.e., he’ll always do 5 percent better than the polls say he will because 5 percent of poll respondents are really for Trump but say they aren’t because they don’t want the poll takers to think they’re racists) — “Vote for me: I’m the nice one” seems like a weak reed on which to hang the Democrats’ hope of getting this psycho out of the White House.

Another ominous sign for the Democrats is the enthusiasm gap: two-thirds of the people who tell pollsters they’re going to vote for Biden say they’re doing so only to get rid of Trump. Only one-third of Biden’s supporters in the polls say they’re genuinely enthusiastic about seeing Biden become President. The figures for Trump voters are exactly the opposite: two-thirds of his poll supporters are genuinely excited about continuing the Trump presidency. Only one-third of Trump supporters say they’re voting for him to keep Biden and the Democrats out of the White House.

On the eve of the Republican convention, as I’m writing these words, the big open question is how will the Republicans frame their counter to the Democrats’ nice-guy appeal. News stories I’ve seen suggest that a lot of Republicans want to hold a traditional incumbent-running-for-re-election convention, emphasizing the bright side of Trump’s record. That’s going to be a problem given that the biggest thing the Republicans had going for them this year — an economy that at least looked strong on paper — has collapsed under the lash of SARS-CoV-2 and an uncertain (to say the least!) policy response to it. But it’s still a safe, viable strategy for the Republicans to argue that they were doing just fine running the economy until the virus hit and they’ll be the right party to restore prosperity once the pandemic passes.

The problem is that’s not the campaign Trump wants to run. The campaign Trump wants to run is to present Biden’s election as an apocalypse for America. Biden, says Trump, is at best an ineffectual dolt who will let the radical-Left elements of his party take over, destroy the “free market,” institute socialism and turn America into Venezuela. Trump wants to win re-election with his own set of heart-rending stories — of innocent young women and men literally being torn to bits in the streets by weapon-wielding thugs turned loose by Democratic policies of “defunding the police” (which Biden doesn’t support, by the way) and of Trump and the kinds of paramilitary forces he sent into the streets of Portland, Oregon to quell Black Lives Matter protests as the only barrier between America and anarchy.

The irony is that both of America’s major parties are presenting the 2020 election in apocalyptic terms. The Democrats are portraying Trump — with quite a lot of evidence to back them up — as a would-be Führer, an authoritarian leader who doesn’t believe in democracy and who, if re-elected, will establish one-man rule in the U.S. that will last indefinitely. The Republicans are portraying Biden as at best a weakling and at worst a tool of those dark, satanic forces out to destroy the United States and the security and well-being of its people just for the hell of it. And with the election being presented as an apocalyptic vision on both sides, “Vote for Biden — he’s a nice guy” just doesn’t seem like a strong enough appeal to cut it.

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.