Trump fired Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense, because he refused to allow Trump to use the military to suppress domestic protests.
Now the top layer of Pentagon officials is stepping down and will be replaced by Trump loyalists.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/politics/pentagon-policy-official-resigns/index.html
Our allies are worried. We should be too.
Is Trump planning a military coup?
John Young is a journalist transplanted from Texas to Colorado. He wrote this brilliant column which lucidly explains why so many people were dancing in the streets on Saturday after Biden’s victory was announced.
It begins like this. Open the link to read the dazzling ending.
This is not fake news.
Donald Trump does not run the country.
You say he never did. You say the Constitution does. Ah, but he was prepared to show you differently.
When he was impeached, Republicans in the U.S. Senate told him he could. All but one of them barely flexed an eyebrow over his illegal act of extorting a struggling nation to help him torpedo a campaign rival — that rival who just became president-elect.
After those proceedings, Trump knew he could get away with anything.
Oh, yes, Barack Obama was right: The fate of democracy itself was at stake in this election. Democracy won.
This just in: Vladimir Putin has no more sway over U.S. foreign policy.
Today, like Trump, Vlad paces his quarters, steaming at what our voters have done. Vlad would never let this happen in his election.
Russia invested so much in destabilizing this nation. The good works of the 1,000-plus-employee Internet Research Agency paid off in 2016. Now? Nyet.
So much invested in making Americans disbelieve in their system.
Freedom. Many a Trump supporter has sent that word ringing through hills and valleys. But what does that word represent to them? For too many, it represents the freedom to stomp around in camo, an AK slung over the shoulder.
Freedom from fear? Don’t change the subject. The camo crowd couldn’t care less if you are a fearful person of color, or an immigrant, or if you are gay, or lesbian or transgender and fear for your rights.
GOP support wasn’t necessarily about freedom anyway. Look at the Republican Party platform. Basically it says, “What Trump says.”
Now he’s bound for civilian life and the life of a criminal defendant. What does his party do now?
Back to the Russians’ designs to mess with American voters’ minds, particularly people of color. Trump gloated over the lower-than-expected Black turnout in 2016, rightly pointing out that a no-vote by them was a vote for him.
As his presidency seeped away it was mostly Black votes that provided the drip, drip, drip that took him down, in Detroit, in Milwaukee, in Philly, in Pittsburgh, in Atlanta, in Savannah.
If ever an American election had a fitting coda, it was provided there in those communities.
Trump had trashed voting by mail. We in Colorado who have been doing this for years knew he spewed bilge. Now voters in many more states fully appreciate the process.
In the end it was mail-in votes — drip, drip, drip — that caused the waters to swell around and snuff a Trump dictatorship.
Read on. The ending is the best!
The Boston Globe wrote about what Trump might do next. He could graciously concede his loss, but that doesn’t look likely. He could try to undermine the legitimacy of the election, by tweeting that it was rife with fraud, as he has done on Twitter and his public statements.
“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” Trump said in a statement that was issued while the president was reportedly out playing golf. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”
He could try to overturn the election results by another method:
Ian Bassin, who worked in the White House counsel’s office during the Obama administration and now serves as executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit group Protect Democracy, worries more about Trump’s legacy.
“While I think the president poses an immediate danger to the functioning of the federal government … I’m actually more concerned about the threats Trump, and especially Trumpism, will pose to our country in coming years,” he said.
Democracy can survive smaller anti-democratic movements, he said, but when they grow to represent large swaths of the population, there are grave risks.
“He has unleashed a toxic political virus on the nation — a mix of white supremacy and authoritarianism — that is not going to be so easy to contain, even if he leaves office,” Bassin said. “So while Congress, courts, and responsible executive branch officials will have to protect our institutions from any Trump-led assaults during a potential lame-duck period, the rest of us have our work cut out for us.”
But there may be more pressing concerns, especially if Trump leans on Republican legislatures in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia to dismiss the results and submit a slate of electors to Congress who favor him, as some right-wing commentators have been suggesting.
Such a move may be unlikely, but it’s allowed by the Constitution, which designates that states appoint electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the 19th century, the popular vote in each state determined the slate of electors. But as recently as 2000, after the deadlocked election in Florida, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that states “can take back the power to appoint electors.
William John Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which specializes in presidential scholarship, said the size of Biden’s lead would make that approach more difficult, given that it would require multiple states to take the unprecedented step of overturning the will of voters.
“Every state that Biden wins will reduce the possibility of something crazy happening,” he said.
While Trump has lost the popular vote decisively — by more than 4 million votes, so far — some 70 million Americans voted for him, or nearly 48 percent of the electorate. His ultimate fate in the Electoral College, however, won’t be clear until the tight races in several swing states are certified.
Antholis hoped the margin would be great enough for other elected Republicans to recognize that the election was lost and persuade Trump to do so as well.
“Trump’s decision-making sometimes appears mercurial, but he does talk to a lot of people, and the messages those people provide to him, I think, will determine the fate of the country,” he said.
No matter what he hears, Trump is facing legal peril if he leaves office and loses his immunity from prosecution as a sitting president.
Paul Waldman, a regular columnist for the Washington Post, lays out a nightmare scenario in which Senate Majority Leader McConnell stifles Biden’s presidency.
It now looks likely that on Jan. 20 of next year, Joe Biden will become president of the United States. And after the inaugural balls are over that evening, he will take off his tuxedo, put on a scratchy jumpsuit and check into a prison cell whose keys are held by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
For months, we’ve been contemplating a world in which Biden wins the White House and Democrats narrowly take control of the Senate. We asked ourselves if they should get rid of the filibuster (yes, they should) or grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico (also yes).
But we didn’t spend nearly enough time contemplating what it now looks like will be the reality: a Democratic president and a Republican Senate.
We’ve seen this before, most recently in the last two years of Barack Obama’s second term. But this will be far, far worse than it was then. We’re about to witness something unprecedented in American history.
In 2014, McConnell became majority leader after Obama had already achieved most of his major legislative goals, including passing the Affordable Care Act. But now he has a chance to sabotage a Democratic president right from the start. Just as important, he knows that no matter how far he goes, the Republican Party is likely to pay only a small political price. What they get in return will be worth every penny and more.
As of now, Democrats lost one Senate seat and gained two, giving them 48. While it’s theoretically possible for them to get to 50 given the races where votes are still being counted, it looks extremely unlikely. Which means McConnell will remain as majority leader.
What does that mean? For starters, you can take all those meticulously prepared policy plans Biden and his team devised during the campaign and toss them in the trash. There will be no expansion of health coverage, no aggressive legislation to address climate change, no move toward universal child care, no increase in the minimum wage, no new Voting Rights Act and no infrastructure spending. None of it.
Nor will there be a new stimulus bill to help the economy recover from the pandemic, since McConnell knows that Biden will be blamed if the economy continues to struggle. At most — and even this is no guarantee — McConnell may allow continuing resolutions that keep the government open at its current funding levels. There will be no other significant legislation as long as Republicans retain control.
That’s just the beginning. McConnell now clearly believes that conservative domination of the courts is his most lasting legacy. Between now and January, during Trump’s lame duck period, McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) will run a conveyor belt to confirm judges to every last open seat at every level.
And then the confirmation process will simply shut down. Forget about filling a Supreme Court vacancy if one occurs; McConnell won’t permit Biden to fill any judicial vacancy. Not one.
“Oh, come on,” you might be saying. “He’d never go that far.” You don’t think so? Just wait.
We’re not done. The president gets to fill about 4,000 positions throughout the executive branch, and a remarkable 1,200 of those require confirmation by the Senate. What if McConnell and the Republicans just decided to confirm none of Biden’s appointments? No secretary of the Treasury, no EPA administrator, no assistant secretary of the Interior for Land and Minerals Management — none of them. We’ve already got all those bureaucrats, Republicans will say, why do we need to keep adding more?
Or at the very least, they’ll tell Biden: You can have a secretary of State if you really want one. But we get to tell you who it can and can’t be. First rule: It has to be a Republican. Take it or leave it.
Such a comprehensive stonewall would be unprecedented in American history. But McConnell has shown not just a willingness but an eagerness to violate any norm or rule if it serves his party’s purposes and he thinks he can get away with it. He’ll come up with some ludicrous justification (“No president whose election was decided when it was 52 degrees in Washington in a year ending in zero has ever had his Cabinet confirmed!”), then every Republican will dutifully repeat it, and eventually Democrats will stop complaining, because what are you gonna do?
Biden’s presidency would then limp along pathetically until the midterm elections in 2022, when there would be at least a glimmer of hope. More Republican Senate seats will be up that year; I count six that could be vulnerable, especially in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But midterm elections usually favor the opposition party. Are Democratic voters going to turn out in droves to help a president who has been unable to deliver on any of his promises?
Of course, this all depends on every Republican senator going along with McConnell’s plan for the Mother of All Stonewalls. Which they will. They’ve shown again and again that they don’t care what norms are violated — if they can do it, they will do it. Just ask Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Then in four years, Republicans will say, “Look what a failure President Biden has been! Democrats can’t get anything done!”
I wish I could say that the voters will rise up in outrage and cast them out. But right now it’s hard to feel optimistic.
W.H. Auden speaks to us, about his time, about our time:
W. H. Auden – 1907-1973
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
After the 2000 election, which George W. Bush won by a few hundred contested votes in Florida, I was appointed to the National Commission on Federal election Reform. It was completely bipartisan. The co-chairs were former President Gerald Ford and former President Jimmy Carter. It’s report was released in August 2001.
The overriding goals of the commission were to ensure that elections were free and fair, that every citizen had the right to vote without hindrance, that every vote was counted, and that the results were accurately and fully reported.
Today, it is worth your time to review the recommendations of the Commission.
Amomg other things, the Commission recommended that all properly filed absentee ballots should be counted if they were postmarked no later than Election Day, even if they were counted after the election.
Today, our society is witnessing efforts to suppress the vote. There ar3 states like Texas that limited the number of drop boxes for mail-in ballots to only one per county, meaning that the more than four million people in Harris County (Houston), a sprawling district, would have only one place to register their ballot. People casting early votes acros the country have had to wait in lines for hours.
These shameful tactics are encouraged by Republicans across the nation,to help their unpopular president. Shameful.
We know that Trump’s lackeys will do whatever they can to suppress the vote.
Vote as if your life depends on it. It does.
Vote as if the future of our democracy depends on it. It does.
Oppose those who tacitly support the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy.
Oppose those who think the Confederate flag is “our heritage.” It is not.
Vote for Biden and Harris.
Vote for anyone challenging Trump’s enablers in the Senate.
Everyone should vote, and every vote should be counted.
If you want to build a better future, vote.
Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale and author of the best-selling On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, explained in Commonweal why this is not a normal election.
Please read the entire article, of which the following is an excerpt:
In normal times, we might regard any vote as ethical. To participate in an election is to dignify oneself as a citizen with a voice, and to express with others the interests and values that guide the future of our land. But these are not normal times.
This is clear from the perspective of the candidates. During a normal campaign, both candidates take for granted that they will walk free after the election. One will be in the Oval Office; the other will go home. This year is different. One candidate, Donald Trump, knows that, should he not remain in power, he will descend into poverty, go to prison, or both. He can hold the ongoing criminal investigations at bay as long as he is president, but not thereafter. Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars to his creditors and has no visible means to pay them back. As president, he can expect his creditors to wait; as a private citizen, he cannot.
If someone can maintain wealth and freedom only by holding onto power, that person will fight to hold onto power. Behind the ideologies and the propaganda, this is the core history of tyranny: government becomes the bodyguard of a gangster. Modern authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin have much to say about why they must remain in power, but the real issue is that they wish to die wealthy and in their own beds rather than poor and in prison. In authoritarian countries, the anxiety of the tyrant can be allayed by a promise not to prosecute the leader and his family, and to leave their bank accounts in peace. Because the rule of law still (more or less) prevails in the United States, no one can offer Trump such a deal. He is therefore in a fight for his life; from his point of view, he needs to spend the rest of it in the White House. His predicament might not be obvious to Americans, but people in authoritarian countries see it right away.
It is also unusual, in an American presidential campaign, for one of the candidates to admit defeat. Trump has a fine political mind, and he can read polls and the national mood as well as anyone. For months now, he has been signaling that he cannot beat Joe Biden in an election. When he tried to summon the armed forces to aid him in June, it was the gesture of a man who needed unusual forms of help. When he tweeted in July that elections should be delayed, he revealed that he did not think he could win them. Undermining the United States Postal Service, asking his supporters to vote twice, and saying that he will not accept the results: all of these are ways of saying that he expects to lose. His campaign has ignored swing voters, and the Republican National Convention made no attempt to reach the undecided. In the first presidential debate, Trump tried, as he has done for months, to delegitimize the election as such.The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way.
If we take Trump at his word and begin with the premise that he cannot win the election, then his actions make sense. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way. We don’t even really have to guess about this, since Trump has spelled it out himself: he will declare victory regardless of what happens, expect state governments to act contrary to vote counts, claim fraud from postal ballots, court chaos from white nationalists (and perhaps the Department of Homeland Security), and expect the Supreme Court to install him. In general, the idea behind these scenarios is to create as much chaos as possible, and then fall back upon personal ruthlessness and an artificial state of emergency to stay in power. If Trump creates a constitutional crisis while his supporters commit acts of violence, the Supreme Court might be intimidated.
In this transition from democracy to authoritarianism, otherwise known as a coup d’état, the actual number of people who vote for Trump matters less than it would in an ordinary election. In this scenario, it matters more how angry they are, and how willing some of them are to endorse extraordinary actions by Trump, or to take such actions themselves. Because he is treating election day as the occasion for a coup, Trump has good reason not to soften his message to reach more voters. In doing so he would risk losing some of the emotion he needs when he tries to stay in power by non-democratic means. He only has to stay within about ten points of Joe Biden to avoid the demoralization that arises when even core supporters realize they have been deceived by their leader and overwhelmed by their fellow citizens at the polls.
It is unusual for a plan for a coup d’état to be broadcast so clearly. Yet there is a political logic here, one with deep moral implications. By telling Americans in advance that he intends to stay in power regardless of the vote count, Trump is implicating his supporters in the action as it unfolds. He is giving them notice that they are siding with someone who intends to work hard to see that votes are not counted. He is making them understand that they are participants in the unravelling of American democracy. They might not want to face this reality squarely, which would be a normal reaction. This is a lesson of modern tyranny: authoritarianism need not be a conscious project of those embraced by it. They need only sleepwalk through the roles assigned to them. When democracy lies in the dust, they will find rationalizations for what they have done, and will support the authoritarian regime that follows, because they are already involved. No argument from emotions or interests can stop that process. The degradation is ethical, and so the question is about ethics.
What, then, is the moral meaning of a vote for Donald Trump on November 3?
Keep reading to learn the answer.
Jesse Jackson wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that Black Americans will not fall for Trump’s absurd claims about the great things he claims to have done for them.
He wrote:
If a lie is repeated often enough, the truth may never catch up. Donald Trump understands this better than anyone, as he showers Americans with lies — often the same ones repeated over and over — knowing that more voters will hear him than the fact-checkers.
One of his favorite howlers is his oft-repeated claim that “I’ve done more for African Americans than anybody, except for the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.”
No one should fall for the con.
For example, Trump doesn’t come close to Harry Truman who desegregated the U.S. military, an act of simple justice that took immense courage. He’s done nothing as important as Dwight Eisenhower who dispatched troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to overcome resistance to school integration. He can’t hold a candle to Lyndon Johnson, who, working with Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, passed the Civil Rights Bill ending segregation in public facilities, the Voting Rights Act enforcing the right to vote, and the War on Poverty that reduced poverty to levels still not matched.
But comparing Trump to presidents who actually made things better is to fall into his trap, for Trump hasn’t done things for African Americans, he has done things to them.
He’s embraced the Republican strategy of race-bait politics, only he’s replaced their dog whistles with a bullhorn. He celebrated the neo-Nazis and other extremists marching against civil rights protesters in Charlottesville. He’s scorned African countries and Haiti as “s…-holes,” suggesting the only immigrants he wanted were whites from countries like Norway.
He sowed racial fears, painting the largely nonviolent Black Lives Matter demonstrators as “thugs,” and the demonstrations as “riots.” He’s tried to rouse support from suburbanites by charging that Biden’s support for affordable housing would “destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.” He’s labeled cities with large minority populations like New York City as “anarchist jurisdictions” that should be stripped of federal support…
Trump’s Small Business Administration stiffed African Americans in dispensing loans through the Pay Protection Plan. More than 9 of 10 Black-owned small businesses that applied for loans were denied. That led directly to over 40% of Black-owned businesses shutting down in the pandemic.
Trump measures the economy’s success not by the health of the people, but by the health of the stock market, but while 61% of whites participate in the stock market (although for most the holdings are meager), only one-third of blacks own stocks. Nearly one-half of Black women report that they are unable to pay for necessities like food and housing, even though most work. Over half have less than $200 in savings. Trump doesn’t help. He did nothing to raise the minimum wage and has been actively hostile to unions that help workers bargain a fair wage.
Essential workers are disproportionately African American. Blacks are disproportionately in low-wage jobs, often without employer-based health care. The pandemic has killed Black people at double the rate of Whites. African Americans have suffered the most from Trump’s mismanagement. Blacks have been more likely to be denied health care, and less likely to have paid sick days.
And Trump has basically been AWOL as the Republican Senate blocked action on a relief plan as unemployment insurance was running out, and states and cities were facing massive cuts in services and jobs — disproportionately held by people of color — in the wake of the pandemic-caused fiscal crisis.
Trump touts the modest criminal justice reforms that he signed off on that will help reduce mass incarceration a bit, but he has actively undermined equal justice under the law. He encouraged police to rough up those that they arrest. He defended vigilantes shooting at those protesting the murder of George Floyd. He terminated the Obama Justice Department’s police department investigations and consent decrees that were reforming police practices. He boasts of arming police forces with military weaponry. He even terminated racial-sensitivity training in the federal government, mostly as a grandstand appeal to his base of angry White men. He’s appointed the most federal Appeals Court judges since Jimmy Carter; not one of them is Black.
Trump not only has done nothing to revive the Voting Right Act, gutted by the right-wing gang of five on the Supreme Court, he and his party have actively worked to suppress Black voting — passing ID requirements, shutting down polling places, purging voter lists, making registration harder, limiting early voting, undermining vote by mail, gerrymandering districts and more — all designed with laser focus to reduce the Black vote.
In short, Trump has left African Americans in the deepest hole with the shortest rope. Not surprisingly, most won’t fall for Trump’s big con. African Americans — and particularly African-American women — will vote overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. The base for Trump and Republicans will continue to be those not repelled by his racially divisive rhetoric and policies.
Periodically, however, it is useful to remind people that night is not day, that hate is not love. When Lincoln freed the slaves, they joined the Union armies in large numbers and helped save the Republic. Trump can’t be mentioned in the same breath as Lincoln, and African Americans aren’t about to save him.
Please consider signing this Democracy Declaration, which is a simple affirmation of our belief in democracy, the rule of law, and the right to vote and have every vote counted.
I signed. I hope you will too.
This editorial was published yesterday.
Donald Trump’s presidency has been a horror show that is ending with a pandemic that is out of control, an economic recession and deepening political polarisation. Mr Trump is the author of this disastrous denouement. He is also the political leader least equipped to deal with it. Democracy in the United States has been damaged by Mr Trump’s first term. It may not survive four more years.
If the Guardian had a vote, it would be cast to elect Joe Biden as president next Tuesday. Mr Biden has what it takes to lead the United States. Mr Trump does not. Mr Biden cares about his nation’s history, its people, its constitutional principles and its place in the world. Mr Trump does not. Mr Biden wants to unite a divided country. Mr Trump stokes an anger that is wearing it down.
The Republican presidential nominee is not, and has never been, a fit and proper person for the presidency. He has been accused of rape. He displays a brazen disregard for legal norms. In office, he has propagated lies and ignorance. It is astonishing that his financial interests appear to sway his outlook on the national interest. His government is cruel and mean. It effectively sanctioned the kidnapping and orphaning of migrant children by detaining them and deporting their parents. He has vilified whistleblowers and venerated war criminals.
Mr Trump trades in racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Telling the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence, to “stand back and stand by” was, in the words of Mr Biden, “a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn”. From the Muslim ban to building a wall on the Mexican border, the president is grounding his base in white supremacy. With an agenda of corporate deregulation and tax giveaways for the rich, Mr Trump is filling the swamp, not draining it.
A narcissist, Mr Trump seems incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Coronavirus has exposed a devastating lack of presidential empathy for those who have died and the families they left behind. Every day reveals the growing gap between the level of competence required to be president and Mr Trump’s ability. He is protected from the truth by cronies whose mob-like fealty to their boss has seen six former aides sentenced to prison. A post-shame politician, Mr Trump outrageously commuted the sentence of one of his favoured lackeys this summer. The idea that there is one rule for wealthy elites and another for the ordinary voter damages trust in the American system. Mr Trump couldn’t care less.
Like other aspiring autocrats, Mr Trump seeks to delegitimise his opposition as “enemies of the people” to mobilise his base. In 2016, the institutions that should have acted as a check on Mr Trump’s rise to power failed to stop him. This time there has been some pushback over a Trump disinformation campaign about Mr Biden’s son. It is an indictment of the Trump age that social media companies acted before politicians in the face of a clear and present danger to democracy.
Mr Biden has his flaws, but he understands what they are and how to temper them. Seen as too centrist in the Democratic primaries, his election platform has borrowed ideas from the progressive wing of his party and incorporated a “green new deal” and free college for the middle class. Mr Biden should not retreat into his comfort zone. The failures of capitalism have been thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic. If elected, he will raise taxes on richer Americans and spend more on public services. This is the right and fair thing to do when a thin sliver of America has almost half the country’s wealth.
It’s not just Americans for whom Mr Biden is a better bet. The world could breathe easier with Mr Trump gone. The threat from Pyongyang and Tehran has grown thanks to President Trump. A new face in the White House would restore America’s historic alliances and present a tougher test to the authoritarians in Moscow and Beijing than the fawning Mr Trump. On climate change, Mr Biden would return the United States to the Paris agreement and give the world a fighting chance to keep global temperatures in check. With a President Biden there would be a glimmer of hope that the US would return as a guarantor of a rules-based international order.
Perhaps no country has so much to lose from Mr Biden’s victory as Britain. It has the misfortune of being led by Boris Johnson, whom Democrats bracket with Mr Trump as another rule-breaking populist. Mr Biden, a Catholic proud of his Irish roots, has already warned the Johnson government that it must not jeopardise the Good Friday agreement in its Brexit negotiations. Having left the EU, the UK can no longer be America’s bridge across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, Britain has a prime minister who led the country out of Europe just when an incoming President Biden would be looking to partner with it.
Whether Mr Trump is defeated or not next week, Americans will have to learn to live with Trumpism for years to come. The first impeached president to run for re-election, Mr Trump avoided being the first to be removed from office because the Republican party has lost its moral compass. The party of Abraham Lincoln has become subsumed by the politics of grievance and entitlement. The GOP turns a blind eye to Mr Trump’s transgressions in return for preserving the privileged status of white Christian America.
The most obvious sign of this Faustian pact is the Senate’s confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the US supreme court — Mr Trump’s third justice. Conservatives now have a 6-3 advantage in the highest court in the land. Compliant judges are key to retaining the status quo when Republicans face a shrinking electoral base. The Republican strategy is twofold: first is voter suppression; if that fails, Mr Trump appears ready to reject the result. He has spent years conditioning his supporters, especially those armed to the hilt, to mistrust elections and to see fraud where it doesn’t exist.
We have been here before. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million ballots. The election turned on a handful of votes needed to capture the electoral vote in Florida. But the votes that counted were not found in the Sunshine State. They were cast by the five supreme court justices named by Republican presidents who gave the election to George W Bush.
In the 2018 midterms, a coalition of millions marched into polling booths to disavow the president. It is heartening that more than 60 million people have cast their ballot in early voting at a time when the president is doing much to call US democracy into question amid baseless claims of a “rigged election”. Americans are busily embracing their democratic right, and a record turnout in this election may show that voters, worried about whether democracy would endure, strove to save it. Anything other than a vote for Mr Biden is a vote to unleash a supercharged Trumpism. All pretence of civility would be dropped. The divides of race, class and sex would become even wider. Mr Trump is a symptom of America’s decline. Finding a solution to this problem begins with a vote for Mr Biden.
