Hold On to Your Democracy

Every day is a new shock or an aftershock from a day before. The center of our attention now has to lie with voting.

The big threat today is Trump's attack on the US Postal Service. Recent decisions by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a huge Trump donor, have slowed down deliveries, leading to a backlog. Alarm bells are going off, alerting us to the threat that Trump may be undermining mail-in voting in an attempt to skew election results. During a pandemic, no less.

There's a context for this fear. Trump is doing everything he can to undermine the legitimacy of the election.

A little over a week ago Donald Trump started the shenanigans by threatening not to honor the election results "if" he loses. Asked by Congress, Attorney General William Barr offered no assurances to the contrary--he'll leave office "if the results are clear"--and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held Trump's back as well. 

Then Trump tweeted the suggestion that we might postpone the election due to the coronavirus. Some commentators maintain we shouldn't be anxious, since the Constitution doesn't allow Trump to make that call. I'm not so sure. Congressional Republicans generally haven't stood up to Trump on such matters, and his action could undermine the election's credibility. Remarkably, Steven Calabrisi, co-founder of the Federalist Society, spoke out to declare Trump's tweet both fascistic and impeachable. Those were his words. 

We need to be vigilant about voting. The White House is laughing about it. Today Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany condemned the Hong Kong government for delaying their election. One day after Trump threatened our own election.

Making things worse, the DHS indicates foreign enemies could "mislead" the public based on unproven claims of voter fraud--like those promoted by Trump and Barr. (Just seen on CNN.)

On the horizon: Vanity Fair has a big story on the vanishing of Jared Kushner's big push to promote a national testing plan. The big stink: the White House decided the pandemic was a blue state problem. According to one source, 

The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.

We already knew Trump was letting blue state folks die because he said out loud that he wouldn't fulfill requests from blue state governors. Maybe some die-hard Trumpsters won't care, but most Americans won't stand for a government that chooses who lives and dies according to voting patterns. 

We'll see. The CDC says we're gonna lose 30,000 more Americans in the next 3 weeks.