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(Dobbs)
A Preview Of A Second Trump Term "The United States of America is not a vessel
for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
Kamala Harris isn’t perfect. She hasn’t directly answered
some of the questions put to her, she hasn’t fully explained some of the
policies she promises to fight for if she wins on Tuesday. But compared to
Donald Trump, who just flat-out lies almost every time he opens his mouth,
whose angry rhetoric has become increasingly authoritarian and increasingly
threatening to his opponents, and who encourages another insurrection every
time he claims he can only lose if the Democrats cheat, Harris is a rock star. So if you’re still not
committed to one candidate vs the other, here’s a preview of what you’ll get
on a few key so-called “social issues”— and a handful of others— if you come
down on the side of Donald Trump. ON MEDICAL CARE: Although he and his
surrogates threaten to abolish the Affordable Care Act— which protects 45
million Americans including every citizen with pre-existing conditions, a
guarantee we didn’t have before Obamacare came along— the best he can do to
come up with something better is to assure us, as he did in the presidential
debate, that he has the “concept of a plan.” His lackey Mike Johnson, the
Speaker of the House, doesn’t do any better on specifics when he talks about
killing Obamacare: “We got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” But Johnson has given
us an insight about what exactly is wrong with an insurance program that
gives so many Americans protection against medical bankruptcy: “We want to
take a blowtorch to the regulatory state.” In other words, nothing is wrong
with it. It just doesn’t comport with MAGA’s ideological anti-government
bent. However, maybe
abolishing Obamacare isn’t the scariest part of Trump’s plans. Maybe the
scariest is establishing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his health czar. At his Madison Square
Garden rally last week, Trump said, “I’m going to let him go wild on the
medicines.” And RFK Jr himself confirmed it: “President Trump has promised
me… control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its
sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA which,
you know, is key to making America healthy.” This is the guy who
believes chemicals in our water make kids go gay or transgender, the guy who
says the U.S. “put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted
microbes… so we can target people by race,” the guy who once picked up a
roadkill bear and left it in New York’s Central Park, the guy who sawed off
the head of a dead whale and, to the disgust of his daughter, drove it home,
the guy who says a worm ate part of his brain. This is the guy who
repellently compared vaccine mandates during the pandemic to Nazi Germany:
“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could
hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” The director of the
American Public Health Association said, “Nobody would hire him in a health
job in the real world.” Dan Rather put it even better: “Having Kennedy run
our country’s health care is like putting Hannibal Lecter in charge of the
food supply.” But as president,
Trump will let him “go wild on health… go wild on the food… go wild on
medicines.” ON ABORTION: While Kamala Harris has
pledged to fight for and, if she succeeds, to embed in federal law a woman’s
right to control her body— a woman’s right to choose— Donald Trump continues to boast that he’s the guy who
appointed the Justices who killed that right. Trump’s reasoning is that the
right to abortion should be up to each state His standard line is, “At
the end of the day, it’s all about the will of the people.” It sure is, which is
why he wanted Roe v Wade to die. By measure of almost every poll, Roe
conformed with “the will of the people.” Moving it to the states is simply a
handy way to circumvent that. What it has led to is,
fourteen states have abortion bans, with limited exceptions in some only for
medical emergencies or rape and incest. Now, since the Supreme Court’s nullification of Roe v Wade,
there are documented cases of pregnant women dying because, despite life-threatening emergencies,
doctors— under threat of prosecution— were afraid to touch them if the fetus
inside was still alive. The latest report, from Pro Publica, is about a
pregnant teen from Texas named Nevaeh Crain, who went to three different ERs,
“crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs” according to
her mother. But after an obstetrician at the third hospital “insisted on two
ultrasounds to ‘confirm fetal demise’,” her blood pressure plummeted, her
organs began to fail, and she died. That’s what you get
when you leave it to the states. As president, Trump won’t make things any
better. ON GUNS: The lobbying group
Democracy Forward issued a report with this summary: “President Trump hasn’t
just failed to strengthen America’s gun laws in the wake of repeated mass
shootings, he’s systematically gutted existing laws in ways that make kids
and communities less safe.” He purged half a
million records from the federal background check system. He froze a rule
that would have prohibited more dangerous people with severe mental illness
from buying guns. He axed a proposal to require gun makers and dealers to
sell child safety devices alongside the guns they display for their customers . What he didn’t do was make us safer. For all his talk about
protecting the Second Amendment, which wins him the praise of the unbendingly
hardline gun lobby, it came at the cost of protection for the citizens he
represented. According to the research organization The Commonwealth Fund,
“The U.S. has among the highest overall firearm mortality rates, as well as
among the highest firearm mortality rates for children, adolescents, and
women, both globally and among high-income countries.” Maybe even more
alarming, “Nearly all U.S. states have a higher firearm mortality rate than
most other countries.” What that translates
to is this: in Mississippi, they have nearly twice the rate of gun deaths
than Haiti. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama have higher rates than in
cartel-infested Mexico. Suburban New Jersey’s rate of gun deaths is higher
than Mali’s or Nicaragua’s. With his indebtedness
to the gun lobby. if Trump is president again, this won’t change. ON THE ECONOMY: At Madison Square Garden last Sunday, we got a picture of
the economy in a second Trump term, thanks to Elon Musk, who has dubbed
himself the godfather of a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”
His idea of efficiency is to identify “at least $2-trillion in cuts,” which
might sound appealing on the face of it until you learn that this would have to include not just government services that support
food inspections, infrastructure repairs, air safety, housing, and a whole
lot of other functions that define us as a first world nation, but even
possibly spending on the military and social security. How bad would it be
for us? When someone posted on X that such draconian cuts could
cause “severe overreaction in the economy” and cause stock markets to
“tumble,” Musk wrote back, “Sounds about right.” According to Musk, his
program to slash and burn the budget would cause “some temporary hardship.”
That’s easy for one of the world’s richest men to say. ON ELECTIONS:: Trump and his MAGA
movement are using every means they have— sympathetic media, commiserating
clergy who call Harris “the antichrist,” disinformation-based social media,
and of course the words they speak in interviews and at political rallies— to
sow doubt about the reliability of an election that hasn’t even come yet to
its climax. This is Trump’s playbook. Instill the belief that the other side
cheats and then, if you lose, you can blame it on conspiracy and fraud. Meantime, put your
finger on the scales by imposing restrictive rules in the states whose legislatures
you control that make it harder for citizens to exercise their right to vote,
and put plans in place to send fake electors to Washington if your candidate
doesn’t legitimately win the state. We’ve seen it all before
and, if Trump legitimately loses, we’ll see it again.
Four years ago Trump warned that January 6th, the day the electoral votes are
certified, “will be wild.” This time, a Trump ally told fellow travelers at a
Pennsylvania rally, “I have a plan and strategy. And then January 6th is going
to be pretty fun.” ON INTEGRITY: CNN fact checker Daniel Dale wrote about Trump on Friday,
"All presidents lie. Historians say, however, that there has never been a
president who has lied this much, has lied about so many different things, or
made up so many things out of whole cloth.” As I said at the top, Kamala
Harris isn’t perfect. She has not always been accurate about Trump’s record
as president or his plans if he becomes president again. But compared to him,
she has the integrity of a saint Meanwhile, there is no
precedent for the number of one-time Trump loyalists who now have told the
truth about the man they served. His chief of staff
John Kelly called Trump “a person that has nothing but contempt for our
democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” His
secretary of defense Mark Esper said, “He puts himself before country. His
actions are all about him and not about the country. I think he’s unfit for
office.” His FBI director James Comey said, “The most important (core value)
being truth, this president is not able to do that.” His national security
advisor H.R. McMaster said, “His sense of betrayal drove him to abandon his
oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest
obligation.” His chairman of the joint chiefs Mark Milley said that Trump is
“fascist to the core” and is “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Even his long-obsequious vice president Mike Pence said, “The American people
deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the
Constitution.” If these guys don’t
know the real Donald Trump, no one does. They described him the way they did
because they know that if he gets a second term in the White House, he will
be the same, or worse. At her rally last week
at Washington’s Ellipse, Harris issued the same warning. She reminded her
audience that the Americans who pushed off a “petty tyrant” king 250 years
ago didn’t lay down their lives “only to see us cede our fundamental
freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant. The
United States of America,” she said, “is not a vessel for the schemes of
wannabe dictators.” I’ll close with a
description of Donald Trump written by Washington Post columnist Colbert
King, which pretty much nails it. “He is, without question, an ignorant,
undisciplined, ranting bully who exaggerates and lies without shame. He wears
a tough-guy masculinity but is actually a coward who picks on women, demeans
minorities and is thoroughly lacking in human decency.” The thing is, King wrote
that about a month before the election in 2016. Yet every word still applies. If Trump is not, as The Economist put it last week when
they endorsed Harris, “a person (you) would want to do business with, or any
kind of role model for (your) children,” he’s not a person you’d want back in
the White House. That’s why, if you’re
not yet committed to either candidate, she’s the only one who’s good for
America. |