Weekend at Trumpie's

    

     No, don't get too excited. That's not Trump finally choking on his 10,000+ lies but him mocking the chill in Washington, Michigan at today's Nazi hate rally.

     So you can tell he wants to be there, too.

     This, obviously, is the last weekend of the election. The day after tomorrow, if the Republican Party allows us to instead of making machine Democrats clear their throats and waggle their gnarled fingers at them in deep disapproval, we will vote for a president and thousands of down ballot races from senators and Congressmen down to governors and other state and local officials.

     Now, every general election comes with the usual hyperbole and this year we're hearing it's a battle "for the soul of the nation." But this isn't the usual overwrought quadrennial election year rhetoric. This election truly is for the soul of our nation. The Biden campaign adopted it as a second motto and for good reason.

    It's not because the soul of our nation is merely at stake. It's already sickened as surely as over 9,000,000 of my fellow Americans have been sickened, 230,000 of them fatally, by the coronavirus that Trump never had any stomach for battling.

     Because it hit our shores in an election year and Trump's running for office, for Pete's sake.

     The most frightening thing in 2020 aside from the coronavirus, in a year that seems to have been scripted by David Lynch in a fever dream brought on by a bad acid flashback, was before this virus visited us and was given a warm, loving home in America thanks to our "president" and his tens of millions of mouth-breathing followers, Trump stood a better than even chance of winning until this summer/fall. 

     It was brought up by Trump himself during a recent rally, perhaps Erie, Pennsylvania, when he said he was about to coast to a second term until the virus hit and then he "had to get back to work."

     Yet, while his countless hundreds of failures in confronting and battling the pandemic is horrifying enough and may even be criminally actionable after he leaves office, Trump had been installed in the Oval Office for exactly three years to the day when the first confirmed case of coronavirus hit the United States. One would think those first three years would, in a sane world, be automatic grounds for getting voted out of office.

     By January this year, Trump had already been impeached by the House on two counts, becoming only the fifth chief executive to be impeached. That was, of course, for his clumsy attempt to withhold $391,000,000 in Congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine to fend off Russian aggression in the east in exchange for a phony investigation into Joe Biden, who, by the time of that July 25. 2019 phone call, wasn't even close to being the nominee. Then there was the subsequent, obligatory Republican coverup.

     How about the ruinous tax cut from January 2018 which, after signing it, Trump bragged to his well-heeled fatcat buddies at Mar-a-Lago, made "you all... a lot richer." For the rest of us, our taxes will continue to steadily rise until 2027, according to Joseph Stiglitz.

     There's the blatant disrespect toward our troops who had made the ultimate sacrifice to whom Trump had refused the (dubious) honor of visiting at graveside in France at the one and only 100th anniversary of the Armistice because he thought they were "suckers and losers" and because he feared his perfect hair would get wet in the drizzle.

     Then there was his nasty comments behind the backs of evangelicals and even his own base that he called "disgusting".

     We have not been sliding over the edge of the cliff into fascism- Trump has been putting his considerable weight behind it and is actively pushing us toward the precipice. It'd been said as far back as the 2016 campaign that Trump loves chaos, as long as it doesn't upset his carefully-calibrated plans for continued self-enrichment.

     But chaos and disorder are antithetical to not just a democracy but to all forms of government that need the orderly apparatus of a working bureaucracy, the enforcement of sensible laws, the levers and mechanisms of governance upon which a sophisticated industrial nation depends to effect logical and pre-planned results geared toward the public welfare.

     Donald Trump hates all order if it threatens to constrain him and only trots out the word when he bellows about "law and order", a fetish of Republicans since Nixon, when the people, the true power in this country, threaten to hold him accountable. That's because Trump never once thought of himself as a public servant since sleazing into the White House on January 20, 2017 any more than  he had when he was busy robbing city and federal governments, contractors, employees and even his investors blind while running the Trump Organization.

     And look where we are now. His politics of white grievance have turned our nation into a writhing nest of hatred in which amateur Bund operatives such as the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters are openly boasting about intimidating voters on Election Day. Just last night outside McAllen, Texas, the "Trump train" nearly ran a Biden campaign bus off the freeway and had done so on Fredo's orders, essentially turning a routine trip on a campaign bus into the final scene of The Road Warrior.

     People, we're supposed to be better than this. I used to think we were better than this until four years ago. And if we're not, then there is absolutely no excuse why we can't be better. Not a "Be Best" in a vapid Melania sense but in an actual sense. We've essentially orphaned 545 children and don't give a shit where their parents are. Trump had the White House office of Science and Technology to declare him the winner of the battle against coronavirus that he never had the guts to tackle.

     And his very super spreader events show he doesn't give a shit about his voters, either, as long as they vote for him right before they drop dead.

     So this Tuesday, vote as if your life depended upon it. Because this time around, it easily could.