A clear and present danger.
Those five words best summarize the threats posed to our fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, and the foundation of our democracy now that a convicted felon who faces a litany of other criminal charges was successful in pulling the wool over the electorate’s eyes on November 5.
There is no way to sugarcoat the dangers we face, which will only widen the political divide in a country riven with social fissures, economic disparities, and racial strife.
The threats are real and they are jarring, and have the potential to upend political and social order as we know it, laying waste to a magnificently created system of government that has stood the test of time for more than two-and-a-half centuries.
And that’s just for starters, as we have yet to mention the chaos that a second Donald Trump presidency could ignite on the world stage. There, he has made a habit of dignifying the dictatorial handiwork of such tyrants as Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
He has made it abundantly clear that someday he hopes to walk in their autocratic shoes, throwing constitutional caution to the wind as he exacts a pound of flesh on anyone who has crossed him during his business and political career. His history of glorifying political violence and his special affinity for autocrats who use it as a matter of course should have shaken voters to their core on November 5.
But before we look more closely at the fallout from the presidential race of 2024, let’s revisit the 2016 campaign when we got our first real look at Trump’s distorted view of reality. In fact, his presidential chances should have ended the moment he disparaged former Republican presidential nominee John McCain, labeling the then U.S. Senator from Arizona “a loser” for being a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War.
In reality, McCain was the ultimate war hero, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who flew more than 20 combat missions against North Vietnam before he was shot down in October 1967, spending 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war. McCain, who served in the Senate from 1987 until the time of his death in 2018, refused a North Vietnamese offer of an early release in 1968, principally because it would have come at the expense of other American prisoners who had been held in captivity longer.
Trump, by comparison, received five deferments during the height of the Vietnam War, four while he was a college student and the fifth because of a medical waiver supposedly granted because he suffered from a “bone spur.” In short, he was anything but a war hero.
While on the campaign trail, Trump also opted to take the low road by criticizing a pair of Gold Star parents who spoke at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 2016, belittling them for having the audacity to challenge his flippant remarks about Senator McCain and other fallen veterans.
In March 2016 when a man was roughed up while protesting at a Trump rally, the Republican candidate said such attacks were “very, very appropriate” and the kind of action “we need a little bit more of.” Several months later, he urged his supporters to “knock the crap” out of opponents and he would pay their legal bills if necessary. In the same vein, Trump openly mocked a newspaper reporter who suffers from a congenital disability, employing various distorted facial and hand expressions in a grotesque imitation of the journalist.
Such callousness reached a new level when Trump was caught on tape in the infamous “Access Hollywood” episode in which he made a series of lewd comments in 2005 about seducing a married woman. The comments, which were aired just days before a presidential debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, sparked outrage across partisan lines – for a campaign minute. Or until Trump elected to make the story about Clinton’s husband, the former President whose well documented marital infidelities suddenly became national news again.
Amazingly, Trump narrowly won the Electoral College tally in the 2016 presidential race, despite losing the popular vote by almost 2.9 million votes, according to certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Despite losing the popular vote by a 48.2 to 46.1 percent margin, Trump to this day maintains that he won because the election was rigged in Clinton’s favor.
Once in office, Trump did his best to undo every policy of two-term President Barack Obama, particularly the widely celebrated Affordable Care Act that made health care coverage a reality for millions of disenfranchised Americans.
He also quickly flouted democratic norms, refusing to release his tax returns or to divest from his business interests while in office. Instead, he gave the keys to the White House inner sanctum to party loyalists and to family members, dispensing with anti-nepotism laws by appointing his daughter and son-in-law to high profile jobs despite their glaring lack of diplomatic experience or professional credentials.
Eventually, his excesses caught up with him, resulting in two impeachments, one for trying to coerce Ukraine into opening a criminal investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and the other for attempting to subvert his 2020 election loss by stoking the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The attempted insurrection will forever be a stain on American history, resulting in nearly 1,500 people being charged in connection with the riot, a third of whom have been convicted and sentenced to jail. Their ringleader, the man in line to be president once again, also has been charged in the case, but he has deftly played the delay game, hoping that he can avoid legal accountability by possibly pardoning himself once he returns to the White House.
As Liz Cheney, vice chair of the congressional panel that investigated the events surrounding the January 6 riot, said during the televised hearings: “The sacred obligation to defend this peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president – except one.” To those who continue to enable him, Cheney added: “Tonight I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
It was a profound statement that has fallen on deaf ears in Republican circles, where the January 6 narrative is now shaped in terms of a “peaceful protest” carried out by an “engaged” – not enraged – group of “patriots.” Now that Trump has somehow defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, he has promised to grant pardons to every defendant entangled in the Capitol riot, rewarding them for their acts of lawlessness that imperiled lives and the future of our democracy.
Those January 6 pardons to people like the Proud Boys will be just the start of his 2025 revenge tour, which figures to target an ever-growing list of those who have tried to hold him accountable for his misdeeds. That will be Job No. 1 in a new Trump White House, setting aside such mundane matters as climate change, gun control, the immigration crisis, reproductive rights, and the wars raging in Ukraine and Israel.
Next on his presidential agenda will be to build the Trump brand even further, utilizing the trappings of his executive office to hawk specially inscribed Bibles, gold-colored sneakers, and bottles of perfume and cologne. Perhaps he will even try to turn certain National Parks into upscale golf resorts, plans that might spark a third impeachment attempt.
If all this sounds like pure poppycock, then you better get in line for a reality check, as Trump has proclaimed that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day One,” a day that he can mete out a perverted sense of divine justice against his foes.
With all that in mind, we can only pray that the second-term plans being drafted by Trump and his allies to upend the norms of government never take root, sparing us the chaos and calamity that his return trip to the Oval Office could bring.
Those five words best summarize the threats posed to our fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, and the foundation of our democracy now that a convicted felon who faces a litany of other criminal charges was successful in pulling the wool over the electorate’s eyes on November 5.
There is no way to sugarcoat the dangers we face, which will only widen the political divide in a country riven with social fissures, economic disparities, and racial strife.
The threats are real and they are jarring, and have the potential to upend political and social order as we know it, laying waste to a magnificently created system of government that has stood the test of time for more than two-and-a-half centuries.
And that’s just for starters, as we have yet to mention the chaos that a second Donald Trump presidency could ignite on the world stage. There, he has made a habit of dignifying the dictatorial handiwork of such tyrants as Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
He has made it abundantly clear that someday he hopes to walk in their autocratic shoes, throwing constitutional caution to the wind as he exacts a pound of flesh on anyone who has crossed him during his business and political career. His history of glorifying political violence and his special affinity for autocrats who use it as a matter of course should have shaken voters to their core on November 5.
But before we look more closely at the fallout from the presidential race of 2024, let’s revisit the 2016 campaign when we got our first real look at Trump’s distorted view of reality. In fact, his presidential chances should have ended the moment he disparaged former Republican presidential nominee John McCain, labeling the then U.S. Senator from Arizona “a loser” for being a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War.
In reality, McCain was the ultimate war hero, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who flew more than 20 combat missions against North Vietnam before he was shot down in October 1967, spending 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war. McCain, who served in the Senate from 1987 until the time of his death in 2018, refused a North Vietnamese offer of an early release in 1968, principally because it would have come at the expense of other American prisoners who had been held in captivity longer.
Trump, by comparison, received five deferments during the height of the Vietnam War, four while he was a college student and the fifth because of a medical waiver supposedly granted because he suffered from a “bone spur.” In short, he was anything but a war hero.
While on the campaign trail, Trump also opted to take the low road by criticizing a pair of Gold Star parents who spoke at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 2016, belittling them for having the audacity to challenge his flippant remarks about Senator McCain and other fallen veterans.
In March 2016 when a man was roughed up while protesting at a Trump rally, the Republican candidate said such attacks were “very, very appropriate” and the kind of action “we need a little bit more of.” Several months later, he urged his supporters to “knock the crap” out of opponents and he would pay their legal bills if necessary. In the same vein, Trump openly mocked a newspaper reporter who suffers from a congenital disability, employing various distorted facial and hand expressions in a grotesque imitation of the journalist.
Such callousness reached a new level when Trump was caught on tape in the infamous “Access Hollywood” episode in which he made a series of lewd comments in 2005 about seducing a married woman. The comments, which were aired just days before a presidential debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, sparked outrage across partisan lines – for a campaign minute. Or until Trump elected to make the story about Clinton’s husband, the former President whose well documented marital infidelities suddenly became national news again.
Amazingly, Trump narrowly won the Electoral College tally in the 2016 presidential race, despite losing the popular vote by almost 2.9 million votes, according to certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Despite losing the popular vote by a 48.2 to 46.1 percent margin, Trump to this day maintains that he won because the election was rigged in Clinton’s favor.
Once in office, Trump did his best to undo every policy of two-term President Barack Obama, particularly the widely celebrated Affordable Care Act that made health care coverage a reality for millions of disenfranchised Americans.
He also quickly flouted democratic norms, refusing to release his tax returns or to divest from his business interests while in office. Instead, he gave the keys to the White House inner sanctum to party loyalists and to family members, dispensing with anti-nepotism laws by appointing his daughter and son-in-law to high profile jobs despite their glaring lack of diplomatic experience or professional credentials.
Eventually, his excesses caught up with him, resulting in two impeachments, one for trying to coerce Ukraine into opening a criminal investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and the other for attempting to subvert his 2020 election loss by stoking the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The attempted insurrection will forever be a stain on American history, resulting in nearly 1,500 people being charged in connection with the riot, a third of whom have been convicted and sentenced to jail. Their ringleader, the man in line to be president once again, also has been charged in the case, but he has deftly played the delay game, hoping that he can avoid legal accountability by possibly pardoning himself once he returns to the White House.
As Liz Cheney, vice chair of the congressional panel that investigated the events surrounding the January 6 riot, said during the televised hearings: “The sacred obligation to defend this peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president – except one.” To those who continue to enable him, Cheney added: “Tonight I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
It was a profound statement that has fallen on deaf ears in Republican circles, where the January 6 narrative is now shaped in terms of a “peaceful protest” carried out by an “engaged” – not enraged – group of “patriots.” Now that Trump has somehow defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, he has promised to grant pardons to every defendant entangled in the Capitol riot, rewarding them for their acts of lawlessness that imperiled lives and the future of our democracy.
Those January 6 pardons to people like the Proud Boys will be just the start of his 2025 revenge tour, which figures to target an ever-growing list of those who have tried to hold him accountable for his misdeeds. That will be Job No. 1 in a new Trump White House, setting aside such mundane matters as climate change, gun control, the immigration crisis, reproductive rights, and the wars raging in Ukraine and Israel.
Next on his presidential agenda will be to build the Trump brand even further, utilizing the trappings of his executive office to hawk specially inscribed Bibles, gold-colored sneakers, and bottles of perfume and cologne. Perhaps he will even try to turn certain National Parks into upscale golf resorts, plans that might spark a third impeachment attempt.
If all this sounds like pure poppycock, then you better get in line for a reality check, as Trump has proclaimed that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day One,” a day that he can mete out a perverted sense of divine justice against his foes.
With all that in mind, we can only pray that the second-term plans being drafted by Trump and his allies to upend the norms of government never take root, sparing us the chaos and calamity that his return trip to the Oval Office could bring.
