The five dumbest Republican arguments for Trump
Opinion by
Columnist
August 30, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. CDT
None of
Republicans’ commonly deployed arguments for reelecting President Trump are
tethered to reality. The paucity of logic and factual support for their
rationales suggests many on the right, even “respectable” columnists and
elected officials, actually support him for reasons they’re loath to admit,
whether it’s because they share his apocalyptic view of crime encroaching on
the suburbs or are eager to see a country purged of immigrants.
He will
give us law and order: If public safety is the concern, the
unnecessary deaths from covid-19, which might exceed 200,000 by Election
Day, and the anxiety over leaving our homes for fear of joining 6 million
infected Americans surely make Trump’s tenure the most dangerous for ordinary
Americans. Each week, we have been losing twice the number of Americans killed
on Sept. 11.
No
wonder Trump loves to highlight any domestic scene of disorder, mayhem and
looting he can to frighten White Americans, arguing that if law enforcement
“dominates the streets,” we will have public order. This is preposterous. We
cannot go to war with millions of demonstrators. That’s simply impossible, not
to mention morally objectionable. The demands of the protesters, among them
police reform and voting rights legislation are entirely legitimate. But so
long as Trump denies the legitimacy of these concerns and the presence of
systemic racism, we will not have domestic tranquility.
Trump celebrates violence,
encourages police misconduct,
honors Whites indicted for brandishing guns at marchers and tear-gassed peaceful protesters in Lafayette
Square. Senior adviser Kellyanne Conway let on that the
administration believes that the more violence happens in the streets, the better chance Trump has of
being reelected.
Meanwhile,
Trump smears our intelligence community, spinning false conspiracy theories and
adopting Vladimir Putin’s version of the 2016 plot to interfere with our
election. Trump tramples on laws and precedents ranging from the Hatch Act to turning over his tax returns to
the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee upon
request. There is no president in recent memory who has hired and associated
with so many convicted felons. He personally is under investigation by multiple
authorities for potential financial crimes. He is his own crime spree.
He has
vanquished the pandemic: The level of delusion necessary to sustain
the fiction that Trump has handled the pandemic well is unfathomable. We have more deaths due
to the disease than any other country on the planet, many more deaths per capita than many advanced countries and no national
testing-and-tracing program. We remain cloistered at home and children cannot
attend school in person in most places after weeks of shutdowns, largely
because Trumped egged officials into reopening prematurely. He has hawked
dangerous and unproven remedies and pressured government health experts to
weaken or change guidelines to minimize dangers and restrictions on activities.
As he did Thursday night, he gathers large crowds without
masks and social distancing, creating his very own potential
superspreading events.
He has
been great for the economy: Multiple fact-checkers have repeatedly
demonstrated that the economic successes Trump claims were questionable
relative to the economy President Barack Obama built before Trump took office.
This disparity was due in part to tariffs Trump imposed, which amount to a tax
hike for U.S. consumers. If Trump falsely thinks he inherited a rotten economy,
it’s inarguable that he crashed it by attempting to ignore a pandemic. It is
now evident that some jobs lost will not return when — and if — the coronavirus is
vanquished. Hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses have closed. Companies
will not all emerge from bankruptcy. Trump ends his four years with record
unemployment and debt — and without a plan to reduce either.
Joe
Biden is a socialist: Not even the Republicans have the nerve to make that argument.
Instead, they argue that Biden will be tricked or led around by the nose by
forces on the left. This is entirely speculative and ignores Biden’s
decades-long record in office (remember the 1994 crime bill?) and policy
choices during the campaign, among them his opposition to Medicare-for-all.
Moreover, we have yet to see in American politics a situation in which the wing
of a party defeated in the presidential primary magically controls the
executive branch after their rivals from the same party assume office.
Moreover,
if “conservatives” are worried about the expansion of government, then Trump’s
widespread abuse of executive power, meddling in investigations and enforcement
actions to benefit cronies and punish enemies, threats to harm certain
companies (as in his call for a boycott of Goodyear), protectionism
and capitulation to illiberal regimes, as well as the mammoth debt he’s run up,
his indiscriminate use of federal forces against protesters, his misuse of government property and
government employees to serve his personal interests, and
attacks on the courts and free press make Trump the least conservative
president ever (if that word has any meaning anymore).
“Life”:
One can respect those deeply opposed to abortion in evaluating the candidates,
but by the same token, a president who prioritizes the economy over preventing
a pandemic, rips children from the arms of their mothers, refuses to denounce
killings of unarmed Black Americans and willfully declines to protect the lives
of our troops on whose heads Russia
placed bounties is not respectful of human life in any
meaningful sense. Indeed, Trump has turned the party into a vicious death cult
that trivializes the nearly 180,000 deaths caused by covid-19 to date.
When you create superspreader crowds to soothe
your ego, you are endangering human life.
When
one party willfully ignores a pandemic and treats Black lives as expendable, it
loses any moral authority regarding the sanctity of human life. In refusing to
be guided by scientific facts (be it on air and water quality,
climate change or covid-19), Trump puts at risk the health and lives of
millions of people here and around the world. Those who value the essential
worth of every human being should be repulsed by this administration.
