Lincoln Project Republicans laudably and rightly urge the American people to vote Donald Trump and his scheming cronies out of office because of their brazen betrayals of the public trust in consequentially harmful ways.
In a bizarre twist in the Trump Reality TV show, bystanders were recently astonished by Trump antics. Obviously having drunk some of his own delusional Kool Aid, which he has been hawking to the American people, Trump recklessly contracted the miserable contagious coronavirus himself, and became a COVID-Superspreader-in-Chief in the Rose Garden and at mass political rallies, where he is desperately trying to stoke support from his political base.
In an entertaining instance of megalomania on steroids, Trump emerged from spending three days under emergency medical care in Walter Reed hospital and returned to the White House gasping like a fish, then hatched a conniving plan to milk the press attention and potential sympathy for personal political gain. He decided to make a TV appearance looking weak, and to then rip open his dress shirt and reveal a Superman t-shirt beneath.
SUPERMAN !!! This is actually pretty funny. Trump was so cunning, ebullient with grandiosity, and addled by drugs after his time in the hospital that he wanted to don a Superman t-shirt to strut and fret another hour upon the stage. Saner heads prevailed, FOR ONCE, when advisors suggested, perhaps, that the optics might look bad, especially if some sagaciously disloyal critic happened to bring up a sore point — like instead of Trump being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and instead of his actually standing for truth and justice in any way — in reality, by every objective evaluation, he stands for a long and pathological litany of serious wrongs. He stands as a compulsive liar, having told well over 21,000 falsehoods in public alone in his four years in office, and is accelerating the pace of his deceits as the 2020 elections approach. How about justice? He is a stubbornly staunch defender of narrowly concentrated wealth, extreme economic inequities and tragic systemic racial injustices. He stands for worsening uncontrolled pandemic endangerment, unscrupulous public corruption, con man gamesmanship, manipulative demagoguery, and mob boss-like loyalty-demanding authority. He is clearly a flagrant abuser of power, and a charlatan dog-whistling denier that he is, in fact, a champion of white male supremacy who now is welcoming Q-Anon idiocies and even agitating dangerous far- right groups and armed militias.
Trump is also a lifelong cheater, an inveterate bully, an unprincipled divide-to-conquer cruelly inhumane anti-immigrant demagogue, a poisonous promoter of misinformation, a blame-shifting scapegoating vindictive gaslighting master manipulator, a sexist, a racist, a weenie macho pretender, a “bone spurs” military draft evader and a Malignant Narcissist who is sadly deficient in empathy, honor, civility and integrity. And he is an election fraudster, vote suppressor, Post office saboteur and beneficiary of corrupt gerrymandering of congressional districts.
Optics?! He violates laws and the U.S. Constitution, evades paying taxes, cheats on his taxes, pushes multi-trillion-dollar public debt-financed Tax Cuts to enrich himself and the wealthiest 1%, profits from self-dealing and illegal emoluments, defies subpoenas to cover up his wrongdoing, stacks federal courts with hundreds of political partisans, stands resolutely against sensible gun safety measures, and violates the public trust by serving as a twisted Trojan Horse tool for unleashing corporate influence and encouraging the externalizing of costs and giving billionaires determining control over our national policies and priorities in our assaulted democracy.
And for the spoiled frosting on the tainted cake, the Trumpster puts himself and his Party over Country, zealously betraying our allies by treacherously collaborating with foreign autocrats, especially Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recip Erdogan. In this, he wages a crusade against democracy and fair-minded governance in league with grifters, oppressors and leaders wielding opprobrious and murderous abuses of authority against their peoples.
The legitimacy of a government and the moral right to use state power is only justified and lawful when the people over which that political power is exercised freely give their informed consent. A ruling party is unacceptably illegitimate when it cheats on elections, suppresses people’s votes, gerrymanders congressional districts, and stacks courts with conservatives who can see no corrupting influence in allowing ungodly amounts of money to be spent by rich people and conspiring corporate entities to buy dominating influence on government policies and priorities.
Delusion, denial and deceit can be dangerous and deadly, especially in consequential matters like the rationalized failure to protect the public from the poorly controlled spread of the pandemic, and the failure to take responsible actions to prevent the accelerating harms of environmental degradation, and the insidious destabilization of the global climate, and the hubris of failing to protect countless species of life on Earth from eternal extinction.
Tragically, the top priority of profit-prepossessed Big Money interests is to increase the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. A main method of achieving this is by hyper-stimulating the liquidation of Earth’s natural resources and exploiting working people and mortgaging taxpayers to the hilt.
I urge every American to vote for a straight-line Democratic ticket to depose Trump Republicans from their overweening positions of usurped and abused power, for the simple reason that they are not honestly seeking unity and true justice, or promoting the general welfare of the people, or fostering a salubrious domestic tranquility, or offering the expansive blessing of liberty to more Americans, now or in posterity. Instead, Trump Republicans pit their narrow political base against the majority, and try to deceive them by claiming to be concerned for them while championing the interests of billionaires and the overarching power of corporate entities over the best interest of the people. Watch their actions, which broadly belie their devious words, rhetoric and tweeted spin, and you clearly see that they “win” only by dividing people, not by trying to serve and heal and unite.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to free themselves from the despotism of a long train of abuses and usurpations of power, it is the right of the people — it is indeed their duty — to throw off such rule, and to choose new leadership that will provide honorable plans and safeguards for their future safety, security and general welfare. So said the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The top Republican priority of pushing for Tax Cuts is wrongheaded, for it sacrifices the security and quality of life for the vast majority of the people, now and tomorrow, to the goal of maximizing the quantity of money that the rich can get away with amassing through their hubristic power-abusing rigging of our economic and political systems to their outrageously narrow advantages. They succeed at this by using incredibly dirty tricks to illegitimately “manufacture the consent of the governed” through election cheating, lying, corruption by Big Money interests, kowtowing to corporatocratic influence, and using divide-to-conquer tactics that exploit people’s fears and hijack their emotions and take advantage of their tribal affiliation tendencies. They also hyper-focus their priorities on stacking federal courts with political partisans and religious fundamentalists as an additional means for corruptly allowing the rich and corporate CEOs to exert determining influence in elections and lobbying and the gerrymandering of congressional districts and the suppressing of votes by racial minorities, poor people, students, the disabled, former felons and others. A powerful way they accomplish this nefarious influence is through the use of contorted emotion-manipulating propaganda propagated on Fox News and through the “conservative media complex” and by twisted manipulation of public opinion on social media platforms, all of which help them with this master plan for usurping minority power and blatantly abusing it.
Trump endangers people not only by his egomaniacal efforts to dismantle the social safety net but also by failing to take sensible steps to control the spread of COVID-19 that has already killed more than 225,000 people.
In the sorry circumstances of our intentionally actuated House Divided in the USA today, we are in great need of good guidance. I propose doing as Thomas Paine proposed in Common Sense, and seek to see clearly from a higher prospect “in order to discover the line of our duty rightly’, and to thus act responsibly by adopting a sensible Bill of Rights for Future Generations to providentially guide our decision making, priorities and actions.
Throw the bums out of office!
Truly,
Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
www.EarthManifesto.com
c/o SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com