Everyone is talking about Trump. Apart from the general disbelief that he got in in the first place, there’s now a lot of people, some within the US government and judiciary, speaking out against the gruesome possibility of another Trump presidency. And this with a man who has 91 criminal indictments in four jurisdictions, many relating to January 6 riots. While the American far right rejoice with every Trump crazy utterance his opponents look on in horror.
West Virginian Democratic senator Joe Manchin is one such doomsayer: “I think if Donald Trump is elected, he will destroy democracy in America,” reported The Guardian newspaper this month.
"You can’t say that you’re going to take the most powerful office in the world and use it for vengeful purposes. You can’t have this visceral hatred spewing out every time you give a speech, denigrating Americans: the only good American is the one that likes and supports you; the only fair election is the one you win; laws pertain to everybody but you; and January 6 was a walk-in-the-park visit to their favourite place, the United States Capitol. This is crazy stuff.”
Retired federal judge Micheal Luttig has also expressed his trepidation: “I am more worried for America today than I was on January 6,” he told The Guardian newspaper this month. “For all the reasons that we know, his election would be catastrophic for America’s democracy.
He did what he did on January 6. He’s continued to maintain for three years that the election was stolen from him. He’s done that with now complete and total support of the Republican Party. All that he has done beginning with January 6 has corrupted American democracy and corrupted American elections and laid waste to Americans’ faith and confidence in their democracy to the extent that today millions and millions and millions of Americans no longer have faith and confidence in their elections.
He’s the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in 2024 and indeed many people believe he will be the next president.”
Then there’s American author Fran Lebowitz well known for her sardonic social commentary on American life was interviewed last month on salon.com and of course the subject of Trump arose. She said she was shocked when Trump won in 2016: “One of the things that bothers me is that people outside of New York think he’s a New Yorker, no one in New York thinks he’s a New Yorker.
No one in New York thought he was a real estate developer! Can you imagine a level of moral squalor so profound that real estate developers look down on you?”
Micheal Cohen's book Disloyal says it all
From the October 2023 New York Times Siena Poll Trump is now leading for the Republican nomination ahead of Biden in five out of six battleground states. After all that’s been reported about Trump’s behaviour in recent years, it’s hard to understand how he could be still even be considered for US president. His popularity with the far right is unfathomable. To better understand this, it’s well worth reading Michael Cohen's memoir "Disloyal". Trump’s former attorney and personal advisor explains with much humility his relationship with Trump.
There are plenty of examples throughout the book of Trump’s homophobic, sexist, racist, lying and cheating bully-boy tactics that permeated his presidency. Cohen saw it all, and it’s no surprise Trump did his best to stop the memoir from being published.
On December 12, 2018 Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and campaign finance violations. All described in much detail in his book.
JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor of Jewish descent who helped drive the construction of the state’s Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Chicago, has also spoken out against Trump. “I repeat it wherever I go, that Donald Trump is dangerous for our democracy.
He’s dangerous for specific minority groups in the US. And I think that for those of us who have a platform to call it out it is a requirement,” as the Guardian newspaper reported last week. “I’m deeply concerned about the rise of hate. I worry about it on our college campuses. We’ve seen protests, and I think it’s everybody’s right to express themselves. What I don’t want is protests and counter-protests encountering each other and that turning into violence.”
At a rally in New Hampshire recently, Trump ramped up his scaremongering rhetoric when referring to his unfounded claim that fraud cost him the 2020 election saying he was going to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.
Referring to Trump’s comments, Joe Biden while at a fundraiser in San Francisco soon after attacked Donald Trump, saying Trump's comments echoed language heard in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. “In just the last few days, Trump has said if he returns to office he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the ‘vermin … in America’… it echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the 30s. It isn’t even the first time. Trump also recently talked about, ‘The blood of America is being poisoned’ … Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”
When your opponents start referring to your comments as reminiscent of Nazi Germany, then you have a problem. The American far right who support you also have a problem.
The more he ramps up the venom, the more his audience cheers. Asking someone to be objective about the person they want to represent them in the highest office in the land is a big ask, and Trump clearly knows this. Whatever the ending, it’s not going to be pretty.
