And the Beat Goes On

As the national conversation has considered the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic and spread to a reexamination of the role of police violence and race relations in the United States of America, President Trump and his Administration have come up short in their efforts to effectively deal with some of the most important issues of the day. The President seems stumped by the fact that huge demonstrations have been conducted across the country and the world at large in reaction to police brutally treating George Floyd and other African Americans while in their custody, resulting in the death of Floyd and others while in their custody.

Brutal mistreatment of Floyd and many others, some of whom were innocent of any crime and all of whom did not deserve the extrajudicial execution which they did, in fact, receive at the hands of the police sworn to serve and protect their fellow human beings within their jurisdictions. The demonstrations were initially dealt with rather harshly by police using tear gas, rubber bullets and other riot control techniques more suited to violent demonstrations than the mostly peaceful demonstrations that were conducted in hotbeds of racial tension throughout the nation.

Trump, in his consistently authoritarian messaging, has sought to quell the resistance by calling for city and state governments to use brute force to restore order and civility to their local cities and states by invoking curfews and calling in the National Guard to pacify the populace. He has gone so far as to threaten bringing in active duty armed forces troops should the states fail to subdue the violence on their own. He has even turned to making the White House itself into more of an armed fortress than ever to protect himself and his staff from the angry hordes of marauders at the gates. Looting and other forms of violent and otherwise illegal actions accompanying some of the demonstrations (leaving aside the mere refusal to obey an imposed curfew) have not been definitively proven to be a goal of the vast majority of demonstrators. There is doubt as to whether such conduct is sanctioned by those seeking to express their deep disgust at the conduct that brings them to the point of expressing their civil liberties (remember the First Amendment, anyone?) or merely agents provocateur trying to justify a more violent confrontation as Trump and others of his mindset seem to desire.

Like his severely inadequate response to the pandemic and his calls for opening up the economy prematurely (which has resulted in fresh outbreaks of the disease and a resurgence in areas which were not as badly hit early on by Covid-19), his response to the civil unrest which has come to the forefront in public debate in the last few weeks has seen his poll numbers fall significantly as a result. Former members of his Administration, including his former Chief of Staff, former Secretary of Defense, several retired senior military officers and former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell have been but a few of the high profile people who reacted extremely negatively to the President’s proposal to use the US Military active duty units to crack down on our own civilian population seeking to express and take advantage of their Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties to make themselves heard by THEIR government.

People marching in streets in defense of others who are being mistreated by authorities based upon their  race with no accountability for the people guilty of the mistreatment is not a threat to our national security unless one considers any threat to authoritarian rule to be unacceptable. This is supposed to be a society based on individual civil rights and civil liberties, not a dictatorship complete with secret police and military units whose job it has become to thuggishly ensure that the will of a monarch or dictator is carried out regardless of its impact on the rest of us.

In the mind of Donald Trump, he cannot be defeated in this election by lawful means. He is more than willing to let people die or be prevented from voting against him through any means necessary. Rather than making voting easier by permitting more people to vote by mail, he seeks to allow state and local election officials to manipulate the number of polling places and the complexity of the voting mechanisms to cause long lines to discourage people he doesn’t think will vote for him and other GOP candidates from voting at all. A perfect example of this was the Georgia primary election held earlier this week, where polling places serving urban and predominantly minority voters saw long lines punctuated by faulty new voting machines while more conservative predominantly white suburban voters could stroll in and vote at their leisure without needing hours to stand in line and wait before they could vote.

Voting by mail has caught fire like never before precisely for this reason. Trump’s objections claiming widespread voter fraud using absentee and other vote by mail options is both hypocritical and utter hogwash. He himself votes using that method, and nobody in the country could vote more comfortably in person then the President of the United States of America. Yet the man who wastes more American taxpayer dollars than any of his predecessors going golfing on courses he owns doesn’t have the wherewithal to vote in person? Give us a break. Especially in this day of a pandemic that places us in danger of serious infection at polling places – election volunteers in particular – voting by mail is far safer with no proven dangers of fraud that are graver than voting on hackable machines with no paper trail.

Trump will lose in November. More Americans want him out of office than in it. That was true in 2016 and will be even more so this November. The questions that remain will be can he suppress enough of the vote in key states to win the electoral college despite being opposed by millions of more votes than he is approved by? Will he make some more authoritarian maneuvers to delay or cancel the election? Will he refuse to leave office even if he is soundly defeated for all the world to see? Will his stacking of the courts allow him to remain in office despite all of the above? Do what it takes to make your vote count in November and refuse to be ruled by a self-absorbed megalomaniac for one more minute than he has already achieved.

Further Suggested Readings:

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