I write a weekly op/ed that appears in newspapers in my part of Virginia that Trump is virtually sure to carry by a 2:1 margin. (For years, I’ve been sharing these weekly efforts of mine to send messages — usually challenging messages — to the people I live among. I know that many of them impress one as “good people” in the other aspects of their lives, apart from the political.)
I’m hatching a new op/ed to run between now and Election Day with that title, “This Is What Y’All Are Voting For.” (I might change “Y’All” to simply “You.”) My idea is to provide a considerable list of things that Donald Trump has said and done — focusing on the recent — that paint a picture that one would think that any “good person” would find appalling.
(I recognize that the appalling nature and conduct of Donald Trump should be thoroughly apparent to anyone paying the least bit of attention and capable of seeing what’s not the least bit hidden. But I don’t buy the idea that effective truth-telling is completely incapable of having an impact. And, in any event, truth-telling is the only relevant tool I have in my tool-box.)
Here’s a key criterion for what should be on that list: I want all the items in that list to be factual, such that any Trump supporter who is attentive will agree that each item is valid. I’d like to avoid interpretation, and evaluative language, as much as I can— consistent with the goal of conveying the truth in a maximally impactful way on any reader that’s planning to vote for Trump.
Here are a few examples of what my intended readers are voting for:
- A man who has put tariffs at the center of his economic program, consistently declaring that other countries will be paying the tariffs, supplying plenty of money at no cost to us Americans. The entire economics profession, however, knows that in fact the foreign exporters don’t pay a cent, and that the cost is borne by American importers and by the American consumers to whom the cost is passed along.
- A man who has declared that any who criticize the Justices on the Supreme Court (that granted him “presidential immunity” last session) should be jailed. This sweeps away the constitutional right of “Free Speech,” and this same man was himself so critical of the judges overseeing the cases in which he is indicted that those judges needed extra security.
- A man who was asked several times if he wanted Ukraine to win the war against the Russian aggressors, and refused to say (the same man who told a global audience when he was President, standing on the same stage as the Russian Dictator, Putin, that when it came to the question of Russian interference in the election Trump won, Trump believed Putin over the unanimous opinion of 17 intelligence agencies of the United States.
- Has been indicted for felony crimes by several grand juries made up of average American citizens, and has been adjudicated by American courts to have been an insurrectionist, who should be barred from any future office by the 14th amendment. Adjudicated through a jury trial to be a “rapist” (by the common understanding of the term) who sexually assaulted and defamed an innocent woman.
I would like to invite readers here to help me make this list. What would be factually incontrovertible, impactful in its implications for how one should see Trump?
I generally shoot for 880 words in my op/eds. Although I’ve not figured out what I’d want to say after presenting that list. (I do want to craft something that invites them to put the pieces together and draw the right conclusion about what is good and should be supported, and what is the opposite of good and must be defeated.) But in any event I should have at least 700-750 words to paint a vivid picture — that captures well the basic ugliness and destructiveness of the man — through an inventory of revelatory factual images.
What do you think should be on the list (with recency better than in the past, with the moral implications especially stark?
