Donald Trump cannot be harmed by F-bombs, garlic or the sign of the cross. He is untouched by memes, cartoons and expressions of moral outrage. And yet he is triply disqualified from ever being president again.
The first step in running him out of town is getting more votes, accomplished by both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden. The crucial next step is to get those votes in the states whose electoral votes are assigned to the winner of the most competitive states. The first goal does not determine the outcome but the second one does. We are asking the left side of the Internet to see this, appreciate it, and take action to make it real.
The Republican party, long ago captured by the extreme right, has invented a completely new phase in election victory, the need to prevail in a new post-election phase in which the losers fail to concede to the winners, using lies, repetition, worthless lawsuits, open theft of election materials, vengeful personal attacks on innocent poll workers, attempts to intimidate government officials and, lest we forget, more repetition.
Trump’s performance in office is the second disqualifying factor.
It is crucial to note that Trump’s base are not voters at all, they are the Republican Party’s clients in industry. Trump’s “base” is not his core voters who cannot be moved by Trump’s illegality and venality. His true base is among the nation’s self-serving rich, the billionaires with even more money and power to return Trump to office than the Russians, not too busy murdering Ukrainians to mask their actions on Trump’s behalf. The very rich, super rich, extraordinarily rich and more-money-than-God factions did not even have to work to corrupt Trump but found him already entirely compromised. The only thing unusual about Trump’s proposed deal with the kings of the petroleum companies — I’ll completely liberate you from regulations and give you massive tax cuts in return for a billion dollars — was said openly and plainly.
Trump’s willful mishandling of COVID caused the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Trump focused on the damage being done to his re-election chances — proposing bleach, hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine (and Fox’s promotion of azithromycin — rather than on the implemention of public health measures. No other advanced industrial democracies suffered more because they worked to minimize the transmission of the virus using scientifically-sound methods.
And if policy failures were not enough there remains the utter venality and malfeasance of the insurrection on January 6th. Yet he is the nominee of the Republican party, once a beacon of liberty and now embracing fascist tactics to secure through lying what the American people failed to award them at the ballot box.
Democracy self-corrects, America finally does the right thing, as Churchill said, after first exhausting all other possibilities. Ask Europe. The Yanks show up at the end to help out, after some years of self-delusion in the 20th century’s teens and again in the 30s.
Still, with time we do figure out our way forward. If Trump is removed from the scene the country will surely recover.