Editor’s note: This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer who lives in North Calais.
On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump provided the nation with an exhausting, 90-minute barrage, outlining the damage electing him to a second term would do. In the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, the president’s unhinged bluster prompted the former vice president to say: “Shut up, man,” repeating what viewers were already shouting at their screens, politely dropping John Goodman’s expletive from “The Big Lebowski.” But against all odds, a frightening clarity emerged from the fog Trump emitted to obscure his multiple failures and plans to subvert the election.
Time after time, Trump’s effort to rattle Biden failed, instead revealing his own overtures to the white supremacist movement, far right conspiracy theorists, and his expectation that his hand-picked Supreme Court will decide the election. Provided an opportunity to disavow racist, far right militias, Trump refused. Rather than standing down, he suggested they “Stand back and stand by,” the new rallying cry for “Proud Boys,” further comforted by the president’s referencing racial sensitivity trainings as “teaching to hate America.”
More importantly, the president gave away the game, raging over “the ballots,” spinning the profound falsehood of mail-in voter fraud, and the importance of his three SCOTUS appointments. Voters seldom get more than a snippet of Trump in video clips, political ads or laudatory comments on Fox News. Digesting his unfiltered rhetoric the full hour and a half was daunting but ultimately more informative than he and certainly his Republican allies intended. Enticing fringe militia groups into the open while conflating the “rigged election” needing oversight and something’s “bad in Philadelphia” sets the stage for confrontation and possible catastrophe.
While he peddles irresponsible and dangerous nonsense to undermine confidence in the electoral process — even suggesting he won’t step down if he loses — a number of prominent Republicans themselves have been setting the stage for a constitutional crisis. As Mike Pence spoke to Lou Dobbs last week, their precise language was striking in anticipation of Trump’s self-generated, pre-election “controversy”: that is essentially whether or not he’ll relinquish control if he loses. Using the exact words of other Republican stalwarts like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, the VP assured a peaceful transfer of power, a hallmark of democracy, after “a free and fair” election, sounding very much like the consistent GOP messaging on Sunday morning talk shows when they all show up bearing the same mantra.
But anyone who takes comfort in assurances from either McConnell or Graham needs to carefully parse the meaning of “free and fair” well before breathing a sigh of relief, since such a phrase is easily re-imagined according to need.
It’s certainly no stretch to imagine Trump claiming prematurely that he’s won before the ballots are counted and the Senate leadership raging that the election was not “fair” and in need of litigation, or even popular resistance. Republicans have been playing this long con for years and their efforts are coming to fruition in a number of ways, none of which bode well for democracy. While the makeup of the Supreme Court is vitally important, and at least in the president’s mind, could be the difference between victory or defeat, it also may be a only small part of the problem.
When Trump mockingly thanked Barack Obama for leaving him over 100 lower court vacancies to fill, he failed to mention Senate Republicans were in control for the last two years of the previous administration and McConnell, as majority leader, blocked or delayed almost all of Obama’s judicial appointments while fast-tracking those of Trump. We can easily imagine every single losing Republican falling back on the president’s toxic sabotage, claiming irregularities, demanding recounts and refusing to concede, throwing the country into the kind of chaos that gives Trump oxygen.
The biggest casualty in the last four years has been reality. As inured as we have become to Trump’s incessant lying, there were positive aspects of Tuesday’s debacle in Cleveland such as repeatedly illustrating the consequences of his dishonesty while providing the clearest evidence yet that he knows full well he cannot win this election without cheating. Covid-19 has killed over 200,000 Americans as the president consistently lied about the seriousness of the pandemic, underestimating the risks and scoffing at CDC guidelines for mitigating the crisis.
A pathological liar is defined as “compulsive or habitual lying” over items big and small but also indicates “little care for others” and a tendency to manipulate. Either serious or trivial, Donald Trump will lie about anything. Last weekend he whined to a crowd in Pennsylvania that the “fake news” failed to acknowledge his TWO Nobel Peace Prizes — “It’s disgraceful, They’re so bad.” A monumental journalistic oversight if true, which of course it wasn’t.
Sunday brought the Times bomb, exposing decades of lying about taxes, his purported wealth, successful businesses and self-cultivated, “Art of the Deal” mythology. POTUS generally paid less in taxes than the fry dude who prepares his buckets of KFC; first daughter Ivanka collected over $700,000 in “consulting fees”; and he only entered the 2016 campaign to elevate his brand, never expecting to win.
Trump’s strident duplicity, second nature to him, but totally unfathomable to most others, is why he gets away with it. He’s obviously a very damaged, emotionally sick man but in a way that generates no empathy — he’s the child that knocks over the chess board when he’s losing. Takes his ball and goes home in the middle of the game. He’s the bully who picks on the smallest kid. Dealing with his crazy makes everyone else even crazier. Remember how you felt watching him on Tuesday night trample moderator Chris Wallace’s effort to restore order.
That’s what he’s been doing to America for the last four years and if given the opportunity, he’ll do worse the next four.
