Trump and the November 6th Election

By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News

01 November 18

 

s former Labor secretary Robert Reich wrote last month on Reader Supported News, “All three branches of government are now under control of one party, and that party is under the control of Donald J. Trump.” That is why USA Today concluded that its just-completed poll with Suffolk University about the national midterm elections of November 6th was “all about the man who’s not on the ballot.”

The federal voting will be for Congressional candidates. USA Today’s poll last week indicated that more than half of those polled will be thinking about President Trump when they’re voting. They should be. With the Republican officials in Congress sheepishly obeying Trump’s threatening orders how to vote, citizens who vote to put Republicans in Congress November 6th will be siding for Trump as the president for at least the next two years. If the Republicans keep control of both chambers of Congress in the election, that will strengthen the prospect that the United States under Trump will further strengthen dictatorship and weaken democracy and social justice here and around the world.

Trump has failed to order and require his executive agencies to punish Russia for their Dictator Putin secretly and illegally interfering in our 2016 presidential election and thereby helping elect Trump president. Trump has sided against the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies’ condemnations of that interference, instead agreeing with Putin’s denial they did it. The Democratic majority member of the House Intelligence Committee wants an investigation into whether Putin has secret power over our president.

Running for president, Trump exploited the Democratic Party’s slowly worsening neglect of working Americans’ causes and needs during the past 40 years by promising again and again to champion “the left-out and forgotten Americans.” Instead, although he has been the most powerful person on earth for the last 22 months, he has said and done literally nothing to help raise the morally criminal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and has weakened both the job safety of working people and the unions of millions of federal workers.

Trump damned the U.S. war on Iraq and promised to end it. Instead, he has enlarged it, making the longest war in U.S. history two years longer. He has impulsively and illegally bombed Syria with 59 missiles; without authority from Congress he has continued our arming and refueling in the air Saudi Arabia’s airplanes bombing Yemen, and he has withdrawn us from the historic six-nation agreement with Iran delaying its nuclear arsenal ten or so years.

A lifelong self-promoter, Trump as a candidate promised again and again to “drain the swamp” of the bribes and corporate dominations in Washington. Instead, he has kept his finances totally secret and his companies under his total personal ownership, actively profiting for himself in impeachable violations of the Constitution. The swamp of Washington corruption has been worsened shamelessly in his cabinet of major CEOs of corporations and banks. He has shown himself to be our most corrupting president since the late 19th Century.

Sworn to uphold the Constitution, including of course freedom of the press, Trump again and again has condemned the free press (in late October as “The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People.”)

In his most insistent policy program he uses cruel prejudice and even hate of foreigners – Hispanics, Muslims, asylum seekers who, fleeing hells in their countries, he now illegally refuses entry into ours. He has even torn apart families blocked at the border, with the government left unable to later return frightened children to their parents. On October 29th he messaged to the caravan coming up in Mexico, “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” The other side on this, to quote the poem on the Statue of Liberty, is “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”

Worst of all, though, so far, Donald J. Trump is the only American president we have ever had who beyond any denial or doubt on the subject is a conscious, dishonest, continuous, vicious, libelous, and pathological liar. We conclude alas after 22 months of closely listening to, reading, and watching him that this is who he is and we will not change him.

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The most important reason why voters should be voting against Trump’s supine Republican supporters in the Congress, in my opinion, is his high danger to us and the rest of the human race because he is the one and only person in our country who now has total control over the use of our arsenal of nuclear weapons, in addition, of course, to his command of the rest of our most powerfully lethal military in the history of the world.

Just one of our Hbombs can kill everyone in any city anywhere on earth. Trump is an emotional egomaniac and reacts infuriatedly, revengefully, and often viciously when insulted or criticized or when he sees himself as being “a loser” in public opinion. He has called people he is slamming “deranged,” and some of his critics say he is deranged, too. He just called billionaire Tom Steyer, who has raised almost six million signatures on a petition to impeach him, “a crazed and stumbling lunatic.” How the terribly damaging opinion that someone is mentally ill is posed matters. “Is he mentally ill?” seems a question for psychologists or psychiatrists. “Is he stable?” an informed and intelligent lay person is likelier to feel entitled to decide about as a citizen. “Is he impulsive?” many would just answer “yes.” But concerning whether Donald Trump himself should be the sole user-in-chief of our most massively murderous arsenal in history, I believe every voter should try to answer the question mentally before voting. A national election can endanger our whole human race. The world may depend on who wins it.

In the 1980s, when Trump was a notorious figure in New York City, he told reporters, as I reported fully in Reader Supported News in 2016, that he wanted to become the leading U.S. negotiator in charge of making a deal with Communist Russia to team us up together as the world’s two dominating nuclear-weapons nations and to have that over everybody, especially the smaller nuclear-weapons nations. Perhaps that was the background in his mind in 2016 as he welcomed the news that Putin and disguised Russians were interfering in his presidential campaign with Hillary Clinton and, on international TV, he excitedly called on them, if they had them or could, to make her 30,000 missing emails public.

He has brooded publicly about nuclear weapons many times, recently publicly. He expresses horror about their effects; often now he says he wants to be unpredictable what he might do concerning them. More of the facts are saliently relevant.

Trump ambiguously threatened small nuclear-nation North Korea with U.S. attack if he caused the West to defend ourselves from his nuclear weapons. Addressing the United Nations and thus the world, he threatened Dictator Kim Jong-un that he would “totally destroy North Korea,” a nation of 25 million persons. Surely this horrible threat made before the human race implied, at least, that the president of the United States might use our nuclear weapons against North Korea. Maybe he was bluffing, and maybe not. A nuclear war between them and us could kill maybe ten million people, as Trump himself has said.

Trump has said in passing that he would not make first use of nuclear weapons, but this coming ad lib from a chronic liar is not reassuring. He might start a war, a nuclear war, without the Constitution’s required decision by Congress. When in anger he had us bomb Syria, he did so without authority from Congress. And Congress has never declared war on Yemen, but Trump has continued authorization of our arming Saudi Arabia and our planes’ actions re-fueling its planes in the air as Crown Prince bin Salman bombs and bombs the country. Thus our U.S. under Trump with no OK from Congress nor thus from us, the people, joins Saudi Arabia in killing many thousands of people, eight million of them now said to be consequentially in danger of starvation, leading the UN to call Yemen the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

Having withdrawn the U.S. from the six-nation treaty with Iran that is delaying the Iranians’ obtaining nuclear weapons for an expected total of 10 or so years, Trump and his current officials have been building verbally what appears to be a case for the U.S. attacking that country. After the famous warmonger John Bolton wrote an essay published in the Wall Street Journal describing and defending as legal a pre-emptive military first-attack on North Korea, Trump called Bolton to his side in the White House to be his new national military adviser.

Another major reason to think “Trump” as one votes in this election is what he is doing to the Supreme Court. A five-or-more majority of its nine members, voting together on their “judicial review,” can and do change or destroy laws formally made the laws of the land by Congress. The Supreme Court majority therefore governs the United States more finally than the 535 members of Congress themselves. Most lawyers characteristically contend the court rulings that justices are making are not political and are only to uphold the Constitution, but as facts by now have made obviously clear, their decisions depend deeply and can be decisively decided on and by their personal political convictions.

As a candidate, Trump made a political agreement with two private right-wing organizations to favor selecting his nominees to the Supreme Court from the two organizations’ prepared lists of right-wing attorneys. Late in Obama’s term as president, the Republican Senate had refused for 14 months even to have a hearing on President Obama’s nominee to replace a justice who had died. Elected, Trump was therefore able to nominate from the list or lists for the thus unfilled vacancy a right-winger, who was approved. Then Justice Kennedy quit, and Trump nominated another listed right-winger, Brett Kavanaugh, to replace him. Withholding 90% of Kavanaugh’s official legal papers when he worked for the second President Bush, Trump and his GOP senators have just forced through Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the Senate in lightning time by a one-vote margin. Speedily also nominating many other federal judges who are getting confirmed, presumably from the court-packing lists, Trump is stacking the now totally politicized Supreme Court with a right-wing Republican majority for probably at least the next 30 or 40 years. The president has said he wants that Republican majority to continue forever.

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Also performing as the dictator he often demonstrates he wants to be, Trump, alone among the leaders of the 193 nations whose representatives had adopted the Paris agreement to try to cooperate internationally to minimize world-threatening climate change, announced he is withdrawing the United States from the agreement because he doesn’t believe climate change justifies it. Obviously he did that to politically pay off the coal, oil, and gas industries. This vividly illustrates what he means by his central slogan, “America First”: Screw the world. He was inattentive, or perhaps silently angry, when this month the United Nations scientific panel on climate change – 91 scientists from 40 countries – warned that without radical steps there is grave danger by as soon as 2040, two decades and two years from now, of ocean-covered coastlines threatening 50 million people and of worsened world poverty and drought. The Democrats are in the minority in Congress. The Republican majorities in Congress have supinely accepted Trump’s historic pollution of the swamp he said he’d drain.

After promising the people health insurance for everyone, Trump, although apparently ignorantly, twice bullied his GOP yes-voters in the House into nearly repealing the Democrats’ Obamacare, which would have thereby repealed health care for tens of millions of citizens and simultaneously cancelled the Democrats’ prohibition against insurance companies denying health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.

Almost unbelievably, a mere year or so later Trump and his leaders are now quite predictably lying with shameless arrogance that if they win November 6th they won’t continue to try to kill the Democrats’ health law. Much worse, as The New York Times’ Paul Krugman reported this month, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, broached trying again to repeal Obamacare and “called for… ‘cuts in Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.’” McConnell, Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren declared, thus “gave the game away. If Republicans keep control of Congress, they want to pay for their tax breaks for billionaires and giant corporations” with their slashes to come on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and they will again try to take health care away from “tens of millions of Americans.”

It would take a book to specify and correctly describe the content and consequences of Trump’s deliberate deregulatory, pro-billionaire, and pro-giant-corporation uses of his great power for himself and his convenient allies and against workers, women, Hispanics, blacks, Muslims, and all poor people white and minority during his first 22 months as the most powerful person in the world. We all know – including the Republicans among us – that they and their party at both state and federal levels are determined to block as many poor whites, blacks, and Hispanics from voting as they can by transparently again turning election rules into barriers for poor people. You might just brush your mind lightly again over Trump’s and the very rich peoples’ fantastic deficit-swelling cut of the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent; his other anti-worker and anti-union executive-order assaults on federal regulations that protect the rights and pocketbooks of ordinary Americans and our actual interests abroad (let’s let his emptyings-out of just the Department of State and Richard Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency stand for all this); his attacks on NATO and Germany’s Merkel and his support of emerging European pro-fascist countries like Hungary; his authoritarian values dramatized by his admirations of dictators Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Erdogan of Turkey, bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and even the mass-murderous Duterte of the Philippines. Oh, yes, he keeps looking for ways to politically blackmail his Republican victims in Congress to pay for his thousand-or-so mile southern border wall…. His no-taking-back thematic anti-democracy damnations of the Democrats now as “evil” and “an angry mob” suggest again that he seeks under himself an American dictatorship and he wants the Republicans to establish a permanent one….

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Usually in the midterm elections Republicans vote Republican, Democrats Democratic, and independents independently. This time though, as I reported, USA Today observed a few days ago that its just-completed poll conducted with Suffolk University about the midterms is “all about the man who’s not on the ballot.” A majority of those just polled there said Donald Trump will have “a lot” of influence on their Congressional voting.

This makes practical sense. The outcomes between the two parties will decide, for example, whether the Democrats have won back the House, and then a majority will turn to considering whether to impeach Trump. But if the Republicans win or Trump can claim they did, especially if they retain their House majority, the future of the United States and the world, so complexly reacting to Trump’s egocentric and would-be dictatorial presidency, accordingly will be very different.

“All politics is local,” the cliché goes, and of course a Republican Congressional incumbent or candidate may merit the support of any voter; but it is also dramatically true in these midterms that Trump is the main and most important issue, and he has attacked, insulted and alienated our allies even as he celebrates the world’s major dictators. For whatever flattering or lying reasons he says he now “loves” Kim Jong-un. He also celebrates when his fans and a Republican congressman physically beat up one of his hecklers, a reporter, and urges them loudly to keep doing it. He seeks to inspire his narrow Congressional majority to follow our flag as he waves it and declares that the United States will put his dictations of our national interests ahead of and above the interests of the human race and all other nations.

Some close to Trump have said he didn’t expect to win even the GOP nomination and certainly not the Presidency. If he has an understandable overall intention as president now, one can’t guess it well from what he says, he lies so much. It may be though, let’s guess anyway, he may intend to gut and close (in order to get campaign money from big business) the U.S. government agencies devoted to advancing the common good; stack the Supreme Court right-wing majority for, say, a century; cripple public respect for the FBI and intelligence agencies if they don’t obey his orders to protect and glorify him; subordinate unto himself the independence of the military, the Treasury, and all the “independent” agencies; at last make his deal with Russia (and ultimately perhaps China) to dominate the world with our nuclear weapons; and/or wage the wars he wants our troops and weapons to fight and die in on his orders whether Congress declares them as the Constitution requires or not.

Advocating that this nation abandon internationalism and put his dogmatic views of our interests ahead of the entire human race, Trump has disgraced the United States and Americans before the world. By now, Congress – the Republicans and as importantly the overcautious and too self-protecting Democrats – should have turned very sharply against him. They haven’t, largely one hopes from their selfish fears that he will damn them with his power as president if they don’t obey him or they lack courage or fear losing votes if they really take him on.

The Republican majority in both chambers flatter him or are silent, and in the naked reality, they have joined him in his own me-first betrayals of our American democracy. There are of course many, many millions of decent and honest Republicans. Incredibly, however – who among us ever expected such a stunning collapse of our country? – a vote this time against Trump’s totally cowed Republican Party in Congress is a vote for the restoration of a fair, good, and honest democracy in our country. In my hope and expectation, like the majority’s in our country, decency and democracy will win.

If the Democrats win back the House, obviously Trump’s impeachment there, which a poll in August showed Americans then favored narrowly 49 to 46 percent, becomes a serious possibility. If he is impeached, whether two-thirds of the Senate would eject him from the White House might well depend on whether the Mueller investigations, if they are permitted to emerge, do or do not justify a political consensus that Trump and his presidential campaign abetted, “colluded,” and conspired with Putin in his internationally treacherous interference with the 2016 election, which they are now caught doing again. Whether Trump’s complicity in this the last time and his scandalous inaction on it as president would be “treason” or not, his initial strategy chief Steve Bannon was quoted in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury charging that Trump’s world-seen endorsement of Putin’s lie was. If Mueller’s data proves Trump and his team guilty of conspiracy with the Russians, in my opinion that will end the legitimacy of his presidency.

So this election is about the future of democracy, maybe both here and abroad, and of our humanity itself. Except for Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s first ones, our country may never have had a more important election than our next one a few days from now.

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Ronnie Dugger won the 2011 George Polk career award in journalism. He founded The Texas Observer, has written biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, a book on Hiroshima and one on universities, many articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper's, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and other publications, and is now writing a book on new thinking about nuclear war. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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