I've Never Said Any Election Would Be The Most Important; This Is The One
I don’t understand why the producers at Fox and Friends didn’t get him a white towel to put down on the white couch so he could still sit on it without worries of staining it but without seeming to say to the whole viewing audience, ‘he’s incontinent from the Adderall addiction and we don’t want our couch ruined when his diapers leak.’ We’ll never know but it may have been purposeful sabotage.
Just hours later, Trump was kicking off a rally in Latrobe, in southwest Pennsylvania, babbling salaciously about Arnold Palmer’s penis size— and for 12 minutes. Palmer was born in tiny Latrobe in 1912. The population is 98.8% white, perfect for a Trump rally. And Palmer wasn’t the only famous person from there. The town’s rabbi was once Jackie Mason who later became a comedian whose schtick Trump uses as part of his own standup routine. Latrobe is in Westmoreland County which, much like the Solid South, migrated from all Democratic to all Republican (although most Latrobe voters backed Josh Shapiro against MAGA lunatic Doug Mastriano in 2022). All 3 star senators and all 6 state Reps are Republicans. Only 37% of the voters are registered as Dems. In 2020 Trump swept the county 63.5% to 35.2%. Like I said, a good place for a MAGA rally. [Palmer, though, spat in Trump's face from the grave yesterday.]
Trump’s rallies, once fiery comedy routines, have become classes in how someone’s mental health deteriorates in real time lately. I suppose the spectacle is meant to distract voters from the nature of Trump’s policy agenda (Project 2025). According to the polls, it’s working and the horse race is all tied up. Meanwhile, though, in the state next door, the biggest newspaper, the Star-Ledger wanted to make sure no one was unclear about who they had just endorsed: Harris Over Trump, By A Mile. The editors began routinely enough: “Voters have countless reasons to reject Donald Trump on policy and principle alone, such as his vow to repeal Obamacare and order mass deportations, his fondness for dictators and tax cuts for billionaires, his 34 felony convictions, his promise to deploy military force against protesters, his climate nihilism, his appalling pandemic management, his role in abolishing reproductive rights, and his attempt to overthrow the government by violence— to name a few.”
And then they got down into why independents and even Republicans should eschew Trump and vote for Kamala. “[T]he most powerful indictment comes from those who have worked with him closely, shell-shocked Republicans who joined his administration and came away horrified after spending years inside the chemical spill of his wretched presidency. They are uniquely qualified to foretell the nightmare scenario that may lie ahead— dozens of them from the highest echelons of the Trump Administration— and they have one warning: The country cannot make another catastrophic mistake by electing Donald Trump in 15 days… His former chief of staff says Trump has ‘nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions and our constitution.’ His former Defense Secretary calls him ‘a threat to democracy as we know it.’ His former Attorney General says he ‘shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.’ His former chairman of the Joint Chiefs calls Trump ‘fascist to the core.’”
They speak with the zeal of panicked prophets and carry the same message: The United States and its people are better than what Trump represents, and we must reject his menacing plot to turn the world’s longest-running democracy into his vanity autocracy. Relatively speaking, there aren’t many of them— most Republicans in government chose to join the cabal of Trump normalizers— but the fact that these two dozen former allies and aides abandoned partisan politics to reach this principled conclusion is historic.
As University of Chicago political scientist William Howell put it:
“Here you have a chorus of voices, all of whom are singing from the same hymnal, which is about Trump being ill-suited to serve as president and representing a distinct threat to democracy,” he told USA Today. “I can’t think of a corollary, certainly in modern American history.”
As he took office in 2017, Trump said he would surround himself with the “best people” to help him run the country. But now the same people warn that history is merely backstory. To wit:
♦ Former chief of staff John Kelly has described Trump as a person who “has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about… A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” Kelly only had three words when he was asked by CNN to contemplate another Trump presidency: “God help us,” he said.
♦ Trump’s first Defense Secretary, James Mattis, said he was “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people— does not even pretend to try.” Mattis viewed the Jan. 6 riot as an effort to “subjugate American democracy by mob rule,” and said Trump’s use of the presidency to “destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”
♦ The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, famously referred to Trump as a “wannabe dictator” at a retirement ceremony in October. He told Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core,” and “the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
♦ Trump’s second Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, told CNN in July that Trump is “not fit for office because he puts himself first, and I think anybody running for office should put the country first. Any elected official needs to meet some basic criteria: They need to be able to put country over self. They need to have a certain level of integrity and principle. They need to be able to bring people together and unite the country. Donald Trump doesn’t meet those marks for me.”
Esper also wrote in his 2022 memoir that during the George Floyd protests, Trump “looked frankly at Gen. Milley and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’”
♦ Former Attorney General William Barr called Trump “a consummate narcissist… (who) will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest. There’s no question about it… He’s like a defiant 9-year-old kid, who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table defying his parents to stop him from doing it.”
♦ Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson— who has referred to Trump as a “moron”— said his understanding of global history is “really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”
♦ John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, said there will be “celebrations in the Kremlin” if Trump is re-elected, because “Putin thinks he is an easy mark” while other foreign leaders regard Trump as “a laughing fool.” Bolton also believes that Trump “wants Americans to treat him like North Koreans treat Kim Jung Un.”
♦ And then there was of Ty Cobb, the White House counsel who defended Trump during the Russian interference probe, warning that another round of MAGA would effectively destroy the nation’s future. “He has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself. In fact, as history well shows from his divisive lies, as well as from his unrestrained contempt for the rule of law and his related crimes, his conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation,” Cobb told the Washington Post.
“Our adversaries and our allies both recognize that even his potential re-election diminishes America on the world stage and ensures continued acceleration of the domestic decline we are currently enduring. If that re-election actually happens, the consequences will extinguish what, if anything, remains of the American Dream.”
…Fifteen days from Election Day, the cliché still holds.
This is the most important ballot Americans will ever cast. It should also be the easiest decision they’ll ever have to make. They only have to follow the advice of those who know Trump best.
Jamie Raskin agrees about it being the most important election of our lifetimes. “Trump,” he wrote last week, “wants to destroy the whole project of democratic self-government. He has no respect for the U.S. Constitution or the outcome of our elections. He has positioned himself and his party outside the constitutional order. He’s waging war on our democratic institutions and the rule of law. And now he wants to recapture the government to use it as an instrument of total self-enrichment, total corruption and total authoritarianism— just what the Founders opposed. Trump is not acting alone. Autocrats are on the march, from Moscow to Mar-a-Lago, kleptocrat-theocrats are attacking freedom, from Saudi Arabia to Lynchburg, and all the bullies are conspiring to destroy our democracy… Whatever our flaws, the Democratic Party is the only party guarding democracy, freedom and progress in America today. We are also the party of reason and common sense.”
A few days ago, Noah Smith wrote that “The partnership of authoritarian states that I’ve been calling the New Axis is very real, and it is making moves. A large number of North Korean soldiers— reports put them at 10,000 to 12,000— have been dispatched to fight on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Chinese companies have now been found manufacturing weapons for Russia’s war effort, adding to Iranian and North Korean supplies. Military ties between China and Russia seem to be increasing, with Russia’s defense minister saying the two countries have ‘a common understanding of what needs to be done.’ Meanwhile, China just carried out its most aggressive and extensive military exercises around Taiwan yet, surrounding the island with what looks to most observers like practice for a blockade or invasion:
“[W]hat’s even scarier,” he wrote, “is that in just a little over two weeks, Donald Trump might be elected President of the U.S. Although it’s not possible to know for certain what the consequences of a second Trump presidency would be, it’s very possible that it would result in the U.S. essentially surrendering its European allies to Russia and its Asian allies to China— thus dramatically weakening America’s own ability to resist those enemies in the future. The free world is teetering on the edge of a knife… In the past few years, the U.S. has finally gotten serious about standing up to the emerging China-led coalition of authoritarian powers. But because of its domestic politics, that nascent resistance is now in danger of collapse.”
If the U.S. abandons resistance to China and Russia, it will go very badly for America’s allies. Europe will probably fracture again, with some states (probably including Germany) falling all over themselves to appease the Russians. Russia will then become a sort of de facto hegemon in Europe. In Asia, China would probably conquer Taiwan, cutting off U.S. semiconductor supplies and establishing Chinese hegemony in East Asia. Japan and South Korea would then be forced to choose between either becoming nuclear powers or becoming de facto satrapies of the new Chinese empire. Essentially, America’s major allies would fall to America’s enemies.
Americans— or, at least, Trump supporters— might yawn at these developments. But if Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and America’s other allies fall, it will dramatically weaken America’s ability to defend itself. Remember that China is four times the size of America, and manufactures well over twice as much. Without its coalition of allies, the U.S. just doesn’t have the size to stand up to China.
And even if they de facto conquered Asia and Europe, China and Russia would not simply ignore America and let it go on its merry way. The specter of a U.S. revival would haunt them. They would therefore do everything they could to weaken America. Obvious steps would include 1) economically strangling America by cutting it off from trading routes and natural resources, and 2) sowing continued internal dissent in America in the hopes of causing it to collapse into a civil war.
Bereft of its coalition of allies, America would be far less able to resist those efforts. Americans would suffer economically even as China and Russia stoked their hatreds and divisions. The worst ideologies of Trump’s first term— alt-right fascism, leftism, radical identitarianism, and so on— would all come back with a vengeance, encouraged by diligent Chinese and Russian online propagandists. Only now they’d also have a bad economy to fuel their anger.
The election of Trump in just over two weeks could thus set in motion a rapid chain of events that results in America very rapidly becoming a much weaker, more vulnerable country. And the consequences for the rest of the free world would be even greater.
It’s a very dangerous time.
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