Dear Conservatives and Right wingers who haven’t succumbed yet to the MAGA cult but are still supporting Donald Trump,
What in the world are you thinking? Have you completely lost your mind?
Donald Trump is easily the most atrocious, most buffoonish, most incompetent, most maniacal, most ignorant, most un-American presidential candidate, by far, in American history. There is no close second.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Trump’s own hand-picked former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking military officer in our nation, says the former (and possibly future, God forbid) commander-in-chief is a “wannabe dictator,” the “most dangerous person to this country,” and a “fascist to the core.”
Trump’s own hand-picked former chief of staff and secretary of Homeland Security, a decorated retired four-star Marine Corps general and Gold Star father, says his former boss is a “fascist” who refers to members of the military who died in service to their country as “suckers” and “losers,” recoils at appearing alongside wounded veterans, and has “nothing but contempt for our Constitution and the rule of law.”
Two of Trump’s own hand-picked former secretaries of Defense, one a retired four-star Marine Corps general and the other a former Army Ranger with 21 years of service, both say the former commander-in-chief is a “threat to democracy” and totally “unfit” to return to the White House.
Trump’s own hand-picked former national security adviser, an ultra-conservative who also served in the Reagan and both Bush administrations, says the former president is “very, very dangerous,” “cares almost exclusively about his own interests” rather than governing, and doesn’t have “any coherent sense” of foreign policy or any policy.
Trump’s own hand-picked former ambassador to the United Nations, who tried to make sure he wouldn’t be president again by running against him, says Trump is “totally unhinged,” is clearly mentally “diminished,” and his candidacy is “like suicide for our country.”
Trump’s own hand-picked former secretary of State, who had been CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world, says the man who wants to lead this country again is a “moron” with a propensity to do illegal things and goes with his gut “rather than relying on facts.”
Trump’s own hand-picked former veep, who, except for one day, gave new meaning to the words fawning and obsequious during those four years, says his boss wanted him to “violate [his] oath to the Constitution” by overturning the 2020 election, said he was “too honest” for not doing so, and that Trump “should never be president” again.
Even Trump’s own hand-picked 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 running mate, a shape-shifting opportunist, has called the man at the top of the GOP ticket, “America’s Hitler.” (This comports perfectly with firsthand accounts from others that Trump has praised Hitler and wished he had generals like Hitler’s).
And, remember, Trump likes to boast how he only hires “the best people.” However, those condemnations are just the tip of the iceberg.
A majority of the most senior officials from Trump’s own administration have warned against him and/or refused to endorse him, along with literally hundreds of other officials from previous Republican administrations. This is completely unprecedented in American history!
But don’t just take their word for it. Take Donald Trump’s.
Here is just a small fraction of the authoritarian rantings we’ve seen and heard come out of his own mouth:
• As president, he should be “immune from” all laws; • He has called for the “termination” of the U.S. Constitution;
• He says the free press is the “enemy of the people” and he would “shut down” those outlets which are critical of him;
• If elected, he will be a “dictator” on his first day in office;
• He thinks autocrats like Putin and others are good, “strong leaders”;
• He says migrants are “poisoning the blood” of our nation and fear-mongers about them terrorizing our towns;
• He claims he “knows more than the generals” and he’s “the only one” who can fix things;
• He would consider using the military against his domestic detractors, whom he refers to as “the enemy from within.”
Rhetoric like that is straight out of Nazi Germany. In fact, one of this country’s foremost experts on fascism, an esteemed historian and award-winning journalist, has recently observed that “Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”
No one who claims to care about this country, its Constitution, and our democracy laid out therein should be okay with any of that. Wake up! Trump is telling us exactly who he is and exactly how he’ll rule!
But Donald Trump is much more than merely a fascist.
Among other things, he’s also a: felon (34 times), defendant (in three other criminal cases), tax cheat, convicted fraudster, scofflaw, lousy businessman, civilly-adjudicated rapist, serial sexual predator, convicted slanderer, con man, grifter, traitor, philanderer, vulgarian, bully, narcissist, pathological liar, racist, and madman.
With a resumé like that, he isn’t fit to be president of the local sewer board, much less President of the United States. He couldn’t get a job at McDonald’s, so why would anyone want him to have the job of leader of the free world?
Because, despite everything else, you like his policies, you say? Especially when it comes to the economy and the border?
Come on, Donald Trump doesn’t have any real policies (other than to enrich himself). He only has lies and lunacy.
When listening to one of his rambling rallies, town halls, or softball interviews, he can’t even articulate anything of substance. Instead, he drones on incessantly about how windmills cause cancer; how injecting disinfectant into our bodies can counteract Covid; how he’s more persecuted than Al Capone; how illegal Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating people’s pets (none of which is true); how wonderful he thinks Hannibal Lecter is; how he will protect women “whether they like it or not”; how great his body looks on the beach; how he and Kim Jong Un exchanged love letters; how he’s the “father of IVF” (despite only recently learning what it is); how it’s hard to decide between being zapped by an electric boat or being eaten by a shark; and, when all else fails, stop speaking and just sway around on stage to music for 39 minutes straight.
No honest, objective, sane person who witnessed antics like that could conclude that Donald Trump is anything other than mentally ill. In fact, his own niece, who is a highly-trained clinical psychologist, says her uncle is a textbook narcissistic sociopath.
And then, of course, there is the tsunami of falsehoods and gaslighting which Trump spews constantly. It isn’t an exaggeration at all to say he lies literally every time he speaks. He will say anything to anybody at any time for any reason if he thinks it will benefit him. He has absolutely no conscience.
His entire campaign is one huge lie. His entire 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 is one huge con.
Did you know he inherited most of his wealth and most of his business ventures were either frauds or flops? Did you know almost all of his claims about the economy when he was president and the economy now are complete bunk?
The fact is Trump’s administration presided over the worst record of job creation–a net loss!‐‐since before World War II, ushered in massive increases in the deficit, gave huge tax cuts to the super rich at the expense of everybody else, and saw one of the largest drops in quarterly GDP ever. Meanwhile, the Biden/Harris administration’s job growth has exceeded all expectations, the stock market has achieved dozens of record highs, wage growth has outpaced inflation, and the consensus among the most influential economic institutions and publications–The Wall Street Journal, the IMF, The Economist, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and others–is that our economy right now is the best in the world and Trump’s tariff nonsense would be an utter disaster for consumers.
It’s also a fact that Trump’s blatantly racist rhetoric about migrants and the border is a pack of lies. Non-citizens are NOT allowed to vote in our elections, countries to our south are NOT emptying their prisons and asylums to send those outcasts here, and undocumented immigrants are NOT taking the jobs and houses of people already here–that’s all demonstrably false. Actually, plenty of data shows that migrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than native-born Americans. (Additionally, contrary to Trump’s hellscape narrative about this country, FBI statistics show that violent crime nationwide is down now from when he was president.) And most economists agree Trump’s mass deportation plan, in addition to being just plain cruel like his previous family separation policy, would crash the economy. Meanwhile, border crossings are actually lower now under Biden/Harris than they were in the last year of Trump’s administration. Besides, Trump proved he doesn’t really care about any of this when he pressured Republicans to kill a very conservative bipartisan border bill which Harris supported and Biden intended to sign.
More than anything else, though, what 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 emphatically disqualify Donald Trump from ever sitting in the Oval Office again is his 2020 election Big Lie, which he continues to spout to this day (and has become the foundation for today‘s Republicans only accepting the results when they win). In response, his own hand-picked former attorney general said Trump’s claims of a stolen election were “bullsh*t,” and his own hand-picked former head of election security said the election was “the most secure” in history.
We all watched with our own eyes and listened with our own ears on January 6, 2021 (and countless times since), as President Trump, in his final act of a months-long illegal scheme, used provable lies to rile up his gullible, armed followers and exhort them to attack our nation’s Capitol in order to disrupt the official Electoral College vote count. They proceeded to break in and ransack our seat of government, battle with and injure more than 140 police officers (including several who later died), and hunt for legislators whom they deemed were insufficiently loyal (to Trump).
Meanwhile, President Trump, safely ensconced in the White House, watched the insurrection he fomented and did nothing to stop for more than three hours, even going so far as to say, “So what” when informed that the angry mob, with a gallows at the ready, was chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
In the aftermath, the now-former Republican Speaker of the House proclaimed Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack which he forcefully called “undemocratic, un-American, and criminal.” Likewise, the top Republican in the Senate condemned Trump for unquestionably being “practically and morally responsible for provoking” the attack. No amount of gaslighting now by the GOP’s presidential nominee and his sycophants about January 6th being a “day of love” can or will ever change the facts of that shameful day. Not even Trump’s unscrupulous promise, if elected, to pardon the duly convicted rioters.
It really is a truism that sane, decent, informed people wouldn’t knowingly support an indecent, lying madman for much of anything, especially President of the United States. And by all metrics of a civilized society, Trump certainly personifies the latter category. That’s why for decades to come historians will be studying how the formerly-Grand Old Party, once again fully behind the former president, abandoned–at the national level, at least–any shred of integrity and devolved into nothing more than a cultish cabal of cowards and lying Trump enablers.
You see, this pivotal election isn’t about partisan politics. Rather, it’s a character test and a test of support for our Constitution and democracy. So far, Donald Trump’s backers are failing those tests.
Thankfully, though, there is still time to make the grade and be on the right side of history.
This article appears in Oct 23 – Nov 5, 2024.
