We have saved some of our best material from August through early October to this area of our website.  We reacted to many of Trump's most egregious language and actions as they occurred.  This is a "President" who doesn't learn and doesn't improve, so his destructive behavior continues; and we will continue to install new commentary on our regular pages as the election nears. 

Trump attempts to smear anyone who sees through his miasma of lies and excuses. His limited mental capacity restricts him to applying labels in making his attacks. Trump could not give a coherent definition of socialism if keeping his tax returns secret depended upon doing so, but he has seized on the notion that calling his opponents “socialists” will work for him. It won’t work on anyone willing to engage in critical thinking, because it has no substance. This is simply more division and diversion. Labels fit into a tweet, and may frighten the timid, but they are not helpful in addressing complex questions about how we should live our lives.
Socialism is not the central issue, or even a major issue, in this election. We must decide whether we the People are in charge, or Donald Trump is. We must develop policies that work, policies that can be implemented to improve our lives. If We the People are in charge of our government, we will devise and adopt policies we think will benefit us, and we will modify them as we see better ways ahead. If Trump seizes control, We the People will get what Trump decides benefits him. Our government by the people and for the people will end. Trump’s record foreshadows disaster. 

In yet another effort to divide and conquer, Trump attempts to portray himself as a proponent of law and order. Irony is lost on him, but We the People know him him for the most lawless president in history, and reject his efforts to divide us. We the People support our law enforcement officers even as we demand that they, too, observe the law.
We the People do not advocate rioting. We the People are not anarchists or flag burners. We are law enforcement officers and we are members of their families. We encounter law enforcement officers in the regular course of our lives, have them as our neighbors and friends, and we value their service to our society. We also insist that our laws are enforced as the law demands. No one is above the law. If we abandon that principle, we abandon America. 

As of October 13, some “get out the vote” organizations are advising voters to drop their ballots off at the site designated by the authorities supervising the election rather than using the U.S.P.S. Whether the Postal Service is ready, willing, and able to get ballots to the designated site in a timely manner is in doubt three weeks before Election Day. That fact is a stark reminder of the corrosive effect Trump has had on the institutions which We the People have relied on for more than two centuries.

Aspiring authoritarians seek to impair trust in government institutions as a means of aggregating power to themselves. Over the course of his presidency, Trump has attacked, criticised and attempted to belittle almost every part of our national government. As an incomplete reminder, consider his distain for our career intelligence officers expressed in the presence of Vladimir Putin, his corruption of the Departments of Justice, Interior, Education, and even Defense. Congress has grievously injured itself by allowing him to render the House of Representatives unable to perform its oversight duties by refusing to provide evidence of his conduct. Inspectors General, tasked with monitoring government actions and reporting evidence of wrongful conduct have been dismissed for doing their job, and compliant stooges left to follow Trump’s direction.

The result is that We the People do not know what our government is doing, in our name, with our money, to our people. Trump’s apologists talk about conservative principles, but embody none. They tolerate Trump’s lies, accept without protest his application of the term Deep State to identify any civil servant with the integrity and courage to oppose him, and see no evil while wading through it waist deep. There is no argument to be made that Trump is good for our country. Yet somehow he has mobilized fear to convince a segment of We the People that the Others — a part of We the People, or caravans of poor people coming in, or the Chinese virus creators (or spreaders) or the Iranians, or NATO allies, or the EU — are the enemy. Nothing much would be accomplished by continuing the litany of absurdity and failure that is Trump, but it does merit reflection of our short memories in the cascade of repeated malfeasance.

We had standards not too long ago. We did not always live up to them; and we failed to realize some altogether. But, we aspired to conduct ourselves, and our government with honesty, integrity and sound judgment. Facts mattered. Science mattered. Compassion mattered. Trump has attempted, with some measure of success, to induce us to abandon those standards. He is fearful of letting us know anything about what he is doing. There can only be one reason: we would not like it. He wants us to accept his definition of winning, which is “Trump gets money, and attention, and maybe even adulation, and nothing else matters.” If we accept that, if we allow Trump to abuse his public trust in this manner, we will have lost our democracy. We the People see the problem. The question is: What are we going to do about it?

Trump is incapable of seeing the irony of his contracting Covid-19, but most of the rest of us recognize it. Indeed, to anyone but a totally self-absorbed narcissist it is the unseen presence looming over events, even as the very fate of our country hangs in the balance. We have too-few common experiences as Americans, but dealing with the pandemic is a major one. It has been said that we are all in the same storm but we are not all in the same boat.  Now we have the common experience of witnessing the consequences of ignoring skill and science and relying on blind luck and superstition.

And, we have shared over the last four years, the consequences of Trump’s abject failure to perform the basic duties of the public trust with which We the People vested him.     Initially we saw his lies and failures as what we expected, but we became increasingly dismayed as the injurious consequences became evident.    Trump’s corruption has eroded confidence in our major institutions, including entire branches of government — all three in fact — as well as departments in the executive branch, including, most tragically, Justice. He has accused the officers at the highest level of command in our military forces of being war mongers, with nothing to support this slur. He claims to have the backing of our service men and women, but offers no evidence to that effect.   Men and women serving our country are not suckers and losers; they hold dear a notion of service and duty to country that Trump will never understand.    Trump is the loser for never having a thought for anyone but himself. He is always angry, and must lead an unpleasant life. Yet, he continually stumbles on ways to make more enemies. He may have created a few more by spreading the virus, and by telling his doctors not to be forthright in discussing his condition and treatment.     Our military is instinctively loyal to the president as commander-in-chief, but when the president’s conduct is unlawful and injures the country, they know that their fundamental loyalty is to the Constitution they swore to uphold, not to the corrupt and stupid resident of the White House.

Trump has lived a life of fraud, and has become a habitual liar to cover up the fraud, and the failures resulting from the frauds.   It has been a spiral downhill for years, a gold plated facade held erect, albeit wobbly, by an ad hoc skeleton of falsehoods and pretence.  Like a loosely connected matchstick scaffold at the end of a line of dominoes, once a domino falls the wrong way, the entire structure will collapse. 

Trump knows this. That is part of the reason he is so afraid of information of his tax return being disclosed.  When he first learned that Robert Mueller had been appointed to conduct an investigation he famously said “I’m f**ked.”   When his panic had passed, he fell back on his tried and true strategy of denying, lying, mischaracterizing, and stonewalling. The self proclaimed law and order president asserted that he was above the law. That being the case, there was no reason to keep a bunch of nosy inspector generals around, and no early reason to comply with any requests for oversight by congress.

 
 Anyone working at high levels in the government is either complicit, disgruntled enough to resign, or removed and replaced by Trump’s stooges.  He has not yet finished removing all the honest and dedicated civil servants from their jobs, but he will if he gets another four years.   He has not yet completely packed our courts with compliant judges, but if he has another four years he will get it done.   We the People would then become the prisoners of our own government, and be ruled by the most ignorant, indolent, and incompetent man ever to hold the high office as president.   There is no historical precedent for the collapse of democracy in a rich and technologically advanced country.   God willing, we won’t set one.