Letter to the Editor: On this Election Day, “God Help Us”
Graphic via: TNP Staff
The following column is a submitted Letter to the Editor from Zach Donaldson, a senior at Ohio University studying Political Science.
Please note that the views and opinions of this letter do not reflect those of The New Political.
Dear Editor,
Donald Trump is a fascist, the worst president since reconstruction, and the most clear and present danger to American democracy that exists today.
Many may be quick to call that inflammatory, baseless, and overblown. It is to those people that I write this article. I do not type away.
It’s hard to digest why a man so comically incompetent and dangerous has withstood the test of time. Perhaps it's the magnanimous psyche afforded to Trump when he spends hours bumbling about Hannibal Lecter, windmills causing cancer, and Arnold Palmer’s genitals (yes really). Maybe it’s his political immunity in overcoming countless scandals, impeachments, civil liability for sexual abuse, and 34 felony convictions that have exhausted the will to hold him accountable. It could very likely be the unbelievable lack of civic education and the swath of misinformation that has propagated to the public that he is a common man hero – fighting the deep state full of drag queens and pedophilic cabals.
But the facts are the facts. Donald Trump is, has been, and will be the worst of America incarnate. A victory for him in November will cement an irrevocable shift towards autocratic governance, economic collapse, and far-right legal and political dominance that would destroy decades of progress and make it near impossible to undo.
As the final votes are being cast for this country’s 47th commander-in-chief, it is important to remind ourselves what the risks are. What the man who sat in that chair has done before, and what he can and will do if he’s elected again.
First, let’s talk about the former president’s first go around.
Trump 45:
There is a major selling point to every Trump voter. One that seems to be an impenetrable justification for their decision. The economy.
Yes, pre-COVID-19 Donald Trump presided over a great American economy. But to assign total credit to him is to believe that he had a magic lever in the oval office that made employment rates go up. The fact is, American economic success had very little to do with Donald Trump, and his disastrous tax policy skyrocketed the debt crisis and benefitted his wealthy friends more than the middle class.
The most oft-cited legislative victory of Trump’s tenure was his 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a historic overhaul of existing tax code. The bill was a policy Ponzi scheme, portraying a bustling middle class victory. In reality, it offered Households with incomes in the top 1 percent an average tax cut of more than $60,000, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60 percent. Furthermore, the policy was responsible for record-low revenues outside of a recession and added 2 trillion dollars to the national debt.
The truth is, Donald Trump inherited a strong economy from the Obama administration that continued and even underperformed to its expected trends. Furthermore, his trade wars hurt the American consumer, increasing product prices and causing the loss of over 300,000 jobs.
And needless to say, the onset of COVID-19 erased any gains, with the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression and the loss of over 1 million lives. Donald Trump is not responsible for starting the pandemic, but his poor leadership exacerbated it by withdrawing from the World Health Organization, siding with Xi Jinping for information, delaying the use of the Defense Production Act, and repeatedly spreading misinformation that undermined public health guidelines.
As supporters staunchly proclaim their candidate isn’t a bigot it begs the question: did Donald Trump discriminate and target racial, ethnic, and religious minorities? Without question, yes, he did. Within his first three weeks of office, the former President issued an executive order banning travel from six Muslim-majority countries. Guised by supporters as a security measure to halt international terrorism, the policy was a rather unambiguous attempt to stoke hostility and fear towards members of the Islamic faith – and the courts agreed. Both the first and second iterations of the plan were struck down by federal judges until the Conservative Supreme Court narrowly upheld a third, watered-down version – a ruling in which they actively recognized Trump’s history of Islamophobic commentary.
Along with the “Muslim ban” another catchphrase that became synonymous with the Trump Administration was “kids in cages.” Yes, Trump was right in pointing out that the creation of these detainment facilities began under the Obama Administration. There is no defense for that. However, it was Donald Trump who exacerbated the cruelty of this abuse by instituting an intentional separation policy between kids and their families – a practice Trump notoriously defended despite zero evidence of it being an effective deterrence for illegal immigration.
If Trump’s rule by executive order wasn’t enough, it is the restructuring of the Federal Judiciary that will have the most long-lasting legal effects in his assault on American’s rights. In Arkansas State Conference NAACP V. Arkansas Public Policy Panel Trump Judge David Strauss took a lethal bite out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, disabling private parties from filing suits to enforce the law and moves that responsibility to the Department of Justice. Effectively, this means that the power to determine when voting rights violations occur rests in the hands of who is in power and relegates the most basic electoral protections to bureaucrats.
It’s no mystery to anyone that the courts under Trump have been abysmal on women’s rights too. The overturning of Roe V. Wade by Trump’s Supreme Court has systematically eliminated abortion access for over 25 million women, exacerbating infant death rates and undoing 50 years of constitutional protections. However, a decision perhaps overlooked in the death of Roe is Whole Woman’s Health V. Jackson, upholding the law that enabled private citizens to sue abortion providers for a bounty. There were no limits on the number of suits that could be filed, and if interpreted with continuity in other contexts, could allow state governments to neutralize a slew of constitutional rights by opening a litigious private sphere to undermine them.
The details listed above just scratch the surface of the former president’s assault on freedoms and policy failures. There are nonprofits dedicated to tracking the Trump administrations record on assaulting American’s fundamental freedoms any of which I would encourage readers to view. Perhaps the most comprehensive is the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, one which supplies a chronological timeline of his failures.
But there is perhaps no more damning aspect of Trump’s presidency than what distinguishes and transcends him from each and every policy disaster and attack.
What takes Trump to the next level is a god-like belief that he can escape accountability, and a will to commit the most heinous acts for his desires. A New York jury found him liable for sexual abuse which awarded his victim 5 million dollars. He has 34 Felony Convictions for falsifying business records. He was impeached twice, once for soliciting a foreign government to investigate his political rivals and the other time for standing idly by as his supporters stormed the United States Capitol and threatened to hang the sitting Vice President. While short of removal from office thanks to his feckless and loyal cast of congressmen, he garnered the most bipartisan impeachment in United States History for his actions on January 6th.
Perhaps most frightening is this: his Supreme Court has reaffirmed that belief of ultimate power. In their recent decision in Trump V. United States, the court ruled a former U.S. President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority and at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. The Court has undone the very precept of the White House, that a President is not a king above the law and given Trump a license to perpetrate double the damage that his first term caused.
So what might that look like?
Trump 47:
If elected, Donald Trump has publicly proposed and embraced an agenda that will double the damage - resulting in economic failures, international catastrophe, and the stoking of social chaos.
Let’s begin where we did last: the economy. Donald Trump’s claim to fame might be one of his worst points for re-election. Massive tariffs, the deportation of millions of migrant workers, and intervention in the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies would drastically increase the very inflation he’s proposing to attack. These plans are so disastrous, that sixteen Nobel prize-winning economists signed a letter warning about the risks of a second Trump term.
Even if you don’t want to take it from the experts – take it from his own allies. Elon Musk at a telephone town hall noted that voters will have to endure ‘temporary economic hardship’ as a result of his policies and agreed to an X post stating that “there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy... [the] Market will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy.” In other words, Trump is relying on “trust me bro” plans from an Entrepreneur that crashed 80% of Twitter’s revenue instead of the experts.
Threatening to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, Trump proposes a mass deportation of migrants and ending sanctuary cities through the same law that was last used to intern Japanese Americans. These propositions have historically failed too. Citing the former Eisenhower “operation wetback”, Trump is attempting to embrace a policy that Historians say “tore families apart, violated civil rights — and at times, even turned deadly.” The program became too expensive to maintain, caused the death of Mexican immigrants by leaving them in the scorching desert, and even mistakenly rounded up Americans through poor vetting. Of more note, it didn’t work. Of the over 1 million reported Mexican nationals that were deported over 60% were United States Citizens of Mexican descent and given the revolving-door nature of immigration it only served to stoke racial tension – not mitigate the problem.
An issue of concern to many progressives is the war in Gaza, one in which the Biden Administration’s approach and Harris’s plan have been rightly criticized. However, Donald Trump’s rhetoric and proposition would further empower Israel to engage in a complete onslaught of Palestine and destroy the Gaza strip with quick and deadly force. Publicly very complementary of Netanyahu and Israel’s military posturing, Trump has signaled that Israel simply should “do what it needs to do” to end the conflict, contrasting the calls for a ceasefire and relative restraint on the left.
Much like any other demagogue, Trump hopes to bend the education system to his knee and control what Americans are taught. He plans to establish a new teacher certification board that ensures teachers embrace “patriotic values”, give parents the ability to fire teachers and reduce tenure protections, and have his department of education monitor the curriculums of schools to ensure they don’t each “woke ideology”. This, of course, could involve a unilateral move away from accurate teachings of history and inclusive curriculums as we have seen in Florida. No group seems to be a more chosen target of his on the education front than that of Transgender students, with promises to ban gender-affirming care and false claims that schools are forcibly mutilating children’s genitals.
Much like the ails of his previous term, one could fill a novel with the gross misuses of power Trump plans to implement. However, what is of important note is this: it is not just just his fiercest opponents that are sounding the alarm. It’s his former allies: proud, educated, powerful, and intellectual conservatives who have firsthand witnessed the existential threat to democracy their former boss was.
Over 100 former GOP officials have come out to endorse Kamala Harris. Among these include the upper ranks of his cabinet. His former National Security Advisor and Secretary of Defense have called him unfit for office. His top general described him as a “total fascist.” His former chief of staff said he had “nothing but contempt for our Democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
When the people who worked with him the closest and knew him the best publicly and without incentive shoot out warning shots and tell us he is an existential threat to democracy: we should believe him. No man who disparages our military, praises our enemies and insists he “needs Generals like Hitler had” should be within driving distance of the White House.