Recent initiatives by Trump have compelled me to become more involved, above and beyond posts and Tweets. This isn’t easy for me. I’m in my Sixties. I have health and neurological problems that force me to take 27 pills a day. I suffer anxiety attacks. I was reclusive even before COVID-19 social distancing. I’d rather spend my remaining life writing fiction and poetry.
I don’t have a car. That limits my activism as much as all else does.
Yet, I have to deal with it and do something because I’ve come to the conclusion tonight that Trump will try to stay in power even if he has to kill half the country. The only reasons why he’s not doing so is that he’s too unimaginative to think of it, and nobody around him dares bring him up, bless what’s left of their souls. Also, personal Gestapo, used against protesters, isn’t large or organized enough to do anything on nearly that scale.
However, once he has an effective, personally loyal force behind him it’ll take much more than an election or an impeachment to get rid of him. Even if either of those two measures succeed, he won’t go willingly, I can guarantee that. He knows the presidency is his only defense now against prison. As Rachel Maddow pointed out tonight, there’s no retirement plan for dictators. Once you’re in office, you have to stay or you’ll end up in prison or dead. (I curse that DoJ ruling that says you can’t indict or try a sitting president. It pretty much makes reelection a matter of life and death for Trump.)
IMHO, we can’t prevent Trump and his trained reptiles from destroying the Postal Service. We also can’t fix it with measures like collection points or bins. For example, according to Rachel Maddow, in Ohio, the SoS is disallowing the setting up of ballot-collection bins anywhere but at Election Board offices. Court injunctions won’t work when Postmaster General Louis LeJoy is rapidly sabotaging equipment, hauling it away, scrapping it, and hastily removing mailboxes from neighborhoods. Destruction of those assets cannot be reversed by court orders. PG LeJoy is being both quick and thorough. Given Trump’s complete lawlessness, it’s not like he’ll obey a SCOTUS order anyway. He’s already disobeyed at least one of those. What are they going to do? Arrest him? Not while he’s president. Impeach him? We’ve already tried that.
We can’t thwart Trump by clever plans or legal moves, not when he’s desperate enough to destroy the whole Postal Service to save his skin. If we try to do something subtle like setting up collection points, Team Reptile will come up with ways to defeat it, and he has many viable option when he’s in charge of the government, e.g. by the disqualifying any mail-in ballot that isn’t delivered by the USPS, making the excuse that the ballots must have been tampered with. There’s even precedent for that claim from previous elections.
I say we can’t rely on vote-by-mail anymore. We shouldn’t see that as hopeless because Trump is so low in the polls we can defeat him without mail-ins; if we put on our PPE’s and show up at the polling stations on election day. Yes, we’ll be risking our lives to eject this dictator while we still can. Although, more would likely die from a Trump dictatorship and a civil war that’s beginning to look necessary.
For states that only have vote-by-mail, I don’t know what they’ll do. The fact that Trump and his reptile loyalists would kill the Postal Service to save him--and hurt an already buckling economy-- shows that they’ll stop at nothing to keep him in office.
We better make a serious resolution now about getting him out of office--at all cost. Trump’s still weak right now. Crucially, his personal goon squads are still small, aren’t completely assembled, trained, or practiced yet. Given the frightful fact that he has a pool of 3 million Qanon fanatics to draw from (according to MSNBC)--and that’s only one pool--I’d say time isn’t on our side. Once Trump has an effective, numerous, and personally loyal police force, democracy in America is buried, and we likely won’t get it back without paying in blood.
It would be humiliating if he won, by election or by force. Trump is hardly a criminal mastermind. Coming out and admitting he would destroy the Postal Service to hold on to power was monumentally stupid. However, as any crime boss shows, he doesn’t need smarts or subtlety when we’ve given him the most powerful position in the world, one in which enough people will obey him; especially when smarter people are also compelled to plan for him. For lack of intelligence, he can compensate with force and brutality. The fact that he’s a sociopath unburdened by a conscience gives him a lot of options.
He’s being advised by Putin. Therefore, we could expect him to do anything Putin would in the same circumstances, albeit with greater incompetence.
Let’s get him out of power before we can’t. He’s already hurt us for long enough.
