Trump Sharply Escalates his Anti-Democratic Rhetoric, Presenting an Existential Threat to Democracy
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
By: Logan Phillips
Date: October 19th
Donald Trump has been put back on his heels by a stunning decline in the polls over the course of the last four weeks. In a free and fair election, there is a genuine possibility that Donald Trump could be on the receiving end of a devastating landslide, reminiscent of Herbert Hoover’s loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression.
Under normal conditions, Democrats could be forgiven for feeling confident. However, these are not normal conditions, and the President has sharply escalated his anti-democratic comments in the last few weeks, rising to a fever pitch just a few days ago when he called on his very own predecessor, President Barack Obama, to be arrested.
This is right from the autocratic playbook and is a completely unacceptable and outrageous threat from a sitting President of the United States. It’s in the context of other deeply unsettling comments, including claiming that Biden cannot even legally run for the Presidency.
Presidential Forecast
Predicts the result of the election. Updated with new polls, run 50,000 times a day.
The forecast has Donald Trump at his lowest chance of winning the election, down to just under 10%. However, I didn't build it to assess the likelihood of assaults on our democracy to succeed. A close victory may not be accepted by the President of the United States, and at that point, we are off to the races, heading full speed ahead towards a constitutional crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1870s. Some democracies make it out of these moments. Others wilt at the root and fall into autocracy.
In fact, in the past four weeks alone, the President has twice refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the election. “We’ll have to see what happens,” Trump responded. “I’ve been complaining very much about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster…Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful… actually there won’t be a transfer, it will then be a continuation.”
For the second time, Trump refusal to accept a peaceful transition of power, while spreading disinformation about the democratic process.
After months of falsely attacking mail-in ballots as fraudulent, Donald Trump has effectively scared away many Republicans from absentee voting. Consequently, Democrats could win the election in a landslide but still lose the Presidential election if all absentee ballots were disqualified.
There are no indications that such an extreme measure is feasible, but his threats to throw out the ballots remain a blaring warning of the danger of this moment. The President and his legal team are conducting a full-frontal assault on absentee voting that is being fought out in the courts in almost every competitive state across the nation. In Pennsylvania, Trump just won a legal victory that could disqualify 100,000 votes, twice as many as his 2016 margin of victory in the state.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the President of the United States might not accept the results of the election if he loses. We can hope that Trump is only trying to find a face-saving excuse to blunt the embarrassment of a loss, but we would be foolish to take this for granted and play Russian roulette with our democratic process.
The far greater danger is that Donald Trump tries to outright prevent a peaceful transition of power, forcing a standoff between the institutions of American government, the American people, and the Presidency itself. The only way to ensure the transition is safe is to ensure that the margin on election day is as large as possible. That will deter potential allies from supporting the President’s bogus claims by making it crystal clear that it is not in their self-interest to commit political suicide and go along with the President’s anti-democratic power grabs.
The hard truth is that Democracy doesn’t propel itself in a perpetual loop. It’s sustained, especially in times of adversity, by high levels of civic engagement. The only people that can fully and firmly protect our democratic process are the American people themselves. If Americans turn out in massive margins and reject his overtures towards autocracy, he will be forced out of office. If he refuses to accept the results and people come out into the streets in droves to peacefully protest, he will be forced out of office.
For now, the single most important thing you can do as a citizen is to make a plan to vote, to demand that every single person you know votes, and to volunteer and get out the vote. Join a phone bank or a text bank. Volunteer. Send a campaign donation. Go to Joe Biden’s website, right here, and find a way to get engaged: https://joebiden.com/take-action.
We are the great beneficiaries of a system of government that had been fought for by generations that risked everything for freedom. Our very foundation as a nation was the result of a scrappy group of dreamers declaring independence against the world’s most powerful empire. They believed that if they could somehow find a way to victory, they could form a democratic republic that could sustain itself.
We persevered when millions of Americans fought and died to secure victory against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, oppressive regimes whose strength and brutal ideologies presented an existential threat to liberty on every corner of this globe.
Dr. King speaks at the March on Washington in 1965. Photo credit: Rowland Scherman, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
We became a full democracy when hundreds of thousands of black Americans risked their very lives, marching in the streets to demand an end to centuries of broken promises and the oppression of Jim Crow.
No one ever handed the American people our democracy. We fought for it. We died for it. We sacrificed for it. We won hard-fought triumphs over the forces of autocracy, sexism, and racism, against threats both foreign and domestic.
President Trump has made it clear that he will do anything to hold onto power, even if it means ripping apart our Democracy at the seams, even if it means destroying the sacrifices made by past generations. We must not allow that to happen.
Once again, I’m calling on you to vote. However, this year, voting alone is not nearly enough. Do everything in your power to ensure your friends and family members vote. Sign up to volunteer and encourage voters to go to the polls.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve never done it before, this is the perfect year to start. When the stakes are this high, volunteering isn't just an activity for the highly politically engaged – it's our moral responsibility and duty as citizens to save our democracy. You can sign up to volunteer here: https://joebiden.com/take-action/
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