America has trouble dealing with Trump. As a nation, we’re used to seeing our politicians maintain a certain level of ethical behavior. Even the worst scalawags would at least give lip service to the basic democratic principles. Our traditional approach is exposure. We simply assumed that truth, honesty, and sunlight would force people to improve.
This has left us poorly equipped to deal with Trump, a sociopath with no morals, no scruples, no boundaries, and disdain for the rule of law. Honesty and exposure don’t cause him to stop cheating; perversely, being clearly wrong makes him double down on whatever nonsense he ordered.
And as hard as it can be dealing with Trump, the Republican Party is fully behind him. They’re willing to allow our enemies into the election if they believe it will help keep them in power.
[This is the second article of a series. The first was Dealing With Trump: Before the Election.]Traditional Election Attacks
What are the traditional kinds of interference? Well, there’s the usual crud: voter suppression, attacking election integrity, Gerrymandering, and whatever Republicans can do to damage voting for the non-rich.
Voter Suppression
Southern Democrats were suppressing black voters since Reconstruction, so when the Republican Party absorbed them in the 1960s, the GOP translated Jim Crow into the Southern Strategy. For centuries, Americans have used the criminal justice system to disrupt black and brown communities, and in particular, block black and brown people from voting. The current crop of Republicans has been busy deregistering millions of voters, mostly in minority communities. They’ve been thrown up barrier after barrier to widespread voting: new ID laws, closing polling stations in minority areas, blocking student voting, mandating non-working voting machines, punitive prosecution of minor mistakes, and those are just off the top of my head.
The only good point here is that voter suppression is an old and well-known practice, so there probably won’t be as many surprises.
Gerrymandering
Republicans already translated Gerrymandering into its own field of science. That’s how the GOP can hold strong majorities in so many states where they have less than half the votes.
Like voter suppression, this is not a new issue. Republicans, apparently unrestrained by visions of democracy, built an elaborate system to preserve their unrepresentative power, but parts are already crumbling. The GOP may be able to preserve parts, but it’s unlikely they can expand their power much through new Gerrymandering.
Divide and Conquer
Republicans are masters of wedge issues. They create them to foster chaos and mistrust between Americans so that they can profit from our dysfunction. It works, but it’s a tricky tool. We let reactionary politics manipulate us, creating our inchoate rage, but that madness fades over time. People develop a tolerance; it’s like any addiction that way. Our modern GOP has no problem with that: they just escalate the stakes. They keep our attention! Republicans highlight increasingly trivial differences, shouting down the broad opposition. And they raise the stakes. Each issue isn’t just a difference between reasonable people; they cast it as a moral choice. Anyone who disagrees isn’t just wrong; they’re stupid, apostates, criminals, and (literally) inhuman. Dehumanization in one arena (“Rapists and criminals!”) can serve double-duty by building racist tropes for other wedge issues.
Chaos and Uncertainty
Finally, the GOP sees a benefit in widespread chaos. To that end, Republicans vote to increase pain and suffering wherever they can. Think about any recent disaster, from hurricanes to pandemics, from economic disasters to massive wildfires. And, of course, climate change. Republicans have opposed every mitigation that helps poor people. It’s not just once or twice, that’s their position across the board. Try to help anyone for anything, and you’ll have a Republican in your face shouting an argument of convenience. “Deficits! Debased currency! We’ll become Greece! Greece, I say!!”
The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest chaos generator right now. Anyone care to argue that Republicans are dealing effectively with the worst epidemic in a century? Why, it’s almost as if increasing disease, suffering, homelessness, and poverty will serve them politically. Almost?
New Attacks against Democracy
Trump, most of his staff, and many Republicans in Congress and the Senate use mail-in voting, so Trump’s arguments are already shrill nonsense. We’ve been doing mail-in voting since the Civil War without any problems. But Republicans are still backing Trump. Insanely, Trump announced that mail-in voting is actually OK in Florida. Special dispensation, I guess.
Right.
Republicans have been attacking the US Postal Service (USPS) since I was a kid. So much for respecting the Constitution. But they’ve ramped that up during this administration, deliberately creating a grown mail backlog. At the current rate, the mail should be nearly destroyed by the November election. And the GOP pogrom against the USPS is still in the early stages, so expect that to get worse.
Republicans are starving the election process itself. That’s odd after those same Republicans finally admitted foreign governments are actively interfering in our elections. They quibble, but almost nobody denies (on the record) what all 17 US intelligence agencies report: widespread increasing, international interference in our elections. And yet, despite these well-known, widely reported attacks, Republicans have refused to fund election improvements, even security spending.
I’m not sure how that’s supposed to fit Republican values.
Remember: we’re in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. States, who have to balance their budgets every year, are pouring all their money into caring for sick people. To make that back without more federal support, they’ll have to cut almost everything else down to insanely low levels. They can’t expand election security. Republicans seem unconcerned.
Back in 2016, Trump told us he wouldn’t accept the Presidential vote if he lost. He recently implied he’ll act the same way now. That’s unprecedented, a word we say a lot around Trump. And the Republican Party? Ask them about Trump, and they pretend they didn’t hear him — their boss and the President of the United States — say that on national TV.
Liars.
But that’s just the ordinary stuff. Dealing with Trump is more complicated than that. As the election gets closer, he’ll become increasingly desperate. To deal with that, we need to anticipate a much more extensive range of stupidity and lunacy.
