I wonder if Republicans are having some of the same buyers remorse that led Democrats to turn on Joe Biden.
Donald Trump, never particularly stable in the best of times, has been absolutely off the rails in the past week or so.
I have to imagine that some handler got in his ear on Friday, July 27, and said, “Sir, we weren’t supposed to say that out loud before the election.”
That was the day the oldest nominee of a major party in the history of our nation effectively said there will be no more elections if he wins this one.
Speaking to a group of conservative Christians at The Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said, “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
You won’t have to vote anymore.
That statement, from a known fan of dictators, a man who has feinted at authoritarianism in the past, is chilling.
His sycophants in right-wing media have tried to clean up the mess. Laura Ingraham gave him an opportunity on her Fox News program, lobbing a bunch of softball questions aimed at helping him backtrack. It didn’t work.
After going off on tangents — because he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed — Trump just reinforced what he said earlier: “You have to vote on Nov. 5. After that you don’t have to worry about voting any more. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it, the country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote any more because, frankly, we will have such love. If you don’t want to vote anymore that’s OK. And I think everybody understood it.”
Yeah, we understood. The candidate who lost and tried to steal an election almost four years ago has a plan to “fix” elections, much the same way his pal, Vladimir Putin, does.
Remember, this is the same guy who told another sympathetic broadcaster, Sean Hannity, that he’ll be a dictator on “Day One.”
Ingraham did succeed in getting Trump to claim he would leave at the end of four years if he wins, but it wasn’t believable. It was a dismissive, “Of course,” followed by the recollection that he left the last time his term ended.
Of course, he left out the part about how he filed and lost multiple lawsuits trying to overturn the 2020 election, how his lawyers participated in a scheme to send fake electors to record fake results and, when all that failed, he sent a mob to the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the formality of counting the votes and certifying the result that ejected him from office.
We should also remember that he calls the jailed insurrectionists who attacked Capitol Police that day and defiled our seat of government “hostages” and has pledged to pardon them if he regains the power to do so.
Perhaps never has a serious candidate for our nation’s highest office been so demonstrably unfit to hold that office. It’s a shame Republican voters didn’t recognize that during the primaries, when they had a chance to nominate someone who would have stood for their values within the framework of the law.
It appeared for a time that little was going to stand in the way of Trump’s dystopian future, but the enthusiasm of Democrats has rebounded remarkably since the withdrawal of President Joe Biden from the race. Biden, good man that he is, just didn’t seem to have the energy for the fight. His heiress-apparent, Kamala Harris, certainly does, and Democrats have rallied to her flag. I expect, when all is said and done, her coalition will include moderate women of both parties, members of minority groups Trump continues to insult, and more — enough to send Trump to his third straight popular vote defeat and back-to-back losses in the electoral college.
It’s telling that Trump got no “bounce” from his party’s national convention. People are tired of him. They’re tired of Biden, too, but Biden isn’t in the race anymore.
It seemed like hyperbole at first when Trump’s opponents said democracy is at stake in this election, but no more. His statements make it clear that democracy is not his goal; personal power is.
Yes, we need to vote on Nov. 5. Hopefully, we’ll be voting long after that.