The election next year, I claim in the title of this talk today, is going to be the most important election of our lives. Now, ten years ago I would have been convinced I’d never say that about any election. I have spent a lifetime watching politicians claim that their particular election is the most important since the Civil War or the Ice Age, or whatever.
Well, it may make a difference, for example, whether Ken Massey or Theresa Rich is elected the next mayor of Farmington Hills next month, but it won’t change life as we know it. Nor has the survival of this country and democracy itself clearly depended before on the results of any single presidential election. When Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in a very close presidential election in 1976, the result the morning after the election was something on both sides like University of Michigan and MSU fans felt after Saturday’s game. People were elated or disappointed, but nobody thought it was the end of the world as we knew it.
But now, it could be. And here’s one reason why:
I thought George W. Bush was a pretty poor President of the United States, principally because he led us into an altogether needless war in Iraq, in fact lied us into that war, which killed thousands of Americans and many more Iraqis and devastated that country.
He also got us into a pretty fruitless war in Afghanistan, which went on for twenty years till President Biden had the guts to end it. But we can say this for President Bush. On November 2, 2004, election night, do you know what was on Bush’s desk?
Among other things, a speech conceding defeat to John Kerry and pledging a smooth transition. And if Kerry had carried Ohio that day, Bush would have given that speech to the nation and left office the next January 20th.
It never would have occurred to him, or any other President or candidate for President, to do otherwise.
Until Donald Trump.
Refusing to accept the results of our elections is probably the worst thing the man who was the worst President in the history of this country has done, because it undermines democracy. In fact, it has already seriously undermined people’s faith in democracy and our elections.
This is the third straight election cycles in which Trump he has flagrantly said he would not accept the outcome if he lost, and he continues to stand by the lie – which he knows is a lie –that he really won the 2020 election.
That election was, by comparison with other close elections in our nation’s history, not even that close. Trump lost by seven million votes; in the electoral college, despite all the fuss about him trying to get votes changed in Georgia and Arizona, it wouldn’t have mattered if Trump had reversed the outcomes in those states.
All Biden needed was his victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to win the Electoral College. In Michigan, his margin was more than 150,000 votes. You couldn’t possibly steal that many votes, and in any case, we have remarkably clean and well-run elections in this country.
The ways in which nearly all states cast and count their votes has been vastly improved since the mess we had in the disputed election of 2000. Michigan elections, by the way, have been even cleaner than most.
Everyone who knows how the system works knows that. But most people don’t know much about the machinery of elections. And Donald Trump aided and abetted by scandal-mongering and right wing media, took advantage of that to try to persuade people that the election had been stolen from him, and sadly, millions believe it.
Seventy-four million people voted to reelect him, after all — 74,223,975 to be precise — even after everything, after four years of embarrassing the nation and dangerously weakening our alliances; after first denying and then mishandling the COVID epidemic, after suggesting that it could be cured by putting disinfectants and light bulbs under the skin, after being caught in lie after lie after lie, he still got nearly 47 percent of the vote.
Despite his lies, he knew he had lost. We know that because he admitted that he’d lost to several people.
But when it was clear that Congress was going to do its duty and certify the results of the election, as they have in every election since 1792, he first attempted to get Vice President Mike Pence to invalidate the result.
Then, to quote historian Tim Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Presidential library, “Trump knew that he lacked the Electoral College votes to win or the congressional votes to prevent certification. He had only two cards left to play — neither one of which was consistent with his oath. He pushed Vice President Mike Pence to use his formal constitutional role as the play-by-play announcer of the count to unconstitutionally obstruct it, sending it back to the states. Meanwhile, to maintain pressure on Pence and Republicans in Congress, Trump gathered some of his most radicalized followers on the Mall and pointed the way to the Capitol, where the electoral count was about to begin. When Pence refused to exceed his constitutional authority, Trump unleashed his mob. He clearly wanted the count to be disrupted … in riling up the mob and sending it down Pennsylvania Avenue, he was imperiling the safety of his vice president and members of Congress.
If there was any doubt that he was willing to countenance violence to get his way, it disappeared as he sat in the White House watching live footage of the spreading assault” … and doing nothing to stop it.
That’s what a nonpartisan historian said. As we know, five people died, either that day or soon afterwards. There is no doubt Trump has blood on his hands. Now, I know all of you know this. I know you probably know a lot more about the atrocities Trump committed or tried to commit as President, such as attempting to debase our military for political purposes, though it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of it. There’s something else worth noting, too:
Very late in Trump’s term, a senior editor of NPR told me that we were largely saved from having our nation damaged further by Trump’s utter incompetence. He couldn’t build his wall or get any major legislation passed.
One disgruntled supporter tweeted, “I elected him to drain the swamp and now I realize he couldn’t even drain a bathtub.”
But there are things he could and did do, other than shake our faith in our elections. To quote Tim Naftali again, who wrote a brilliant piece in Atlantic Magazine in 2021 called The Worst President in History
“Trump has openly used race in an effort to transform the Republican Party into an agitated, cult-like, white-supremacist minority movement that could win elections only through fear, disenfranchisement, and disinformation.”
We now know that he has succeeded beyond most our wildest nightmares at that, and what’s more, today’s Republican Party is largely a cult dedicated mainly to Donald Trump. In fact, it almost seems like the vast majority of the GOP has become nothing but that.
Consider this. Every poll shows Donald Trump is the overwhelming favorite to be the Republican Presidential candidate for the third time in a row next year, and that he is likely to clinch that nomination long before the party’s national convention in Milwaukee next July.
This is a man who was convicted of sexual assault and defamation earlier this year, (A British editor I know calls him the PGP, short for pussy-grabbing poltroon.) This is a man who currently is facing charges in four criminal cases in four different jurisdictions.
In New York, he faces 34 felony counts in connection with hush money payments to a porn star. In Florida, he faces 40 felony counts for hoarding classified documents and impeding efforts to retrieve them. In Washington, D.C., he faces four felony counts for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And in Georgia, he faces 13 felony counts for his election interference in that state.
Polls show that most other candidates, especially Nikki Haley, would run stronger against President Biden, but the cult doesn’t care. You saw in Michigan last year that they nominated hopeless statewide candidates who had no chance to win just because they were loyal to Comrade Trump.
In fact, the Republican Party at all levels has become more or less completely dysfunctional. Just look at their efforts to elect a Speaker of the House. If they were a kindergarten class they’d all flunk being able to get along with not only others but themselves. We’ve never seen anything like this since before the Civil War. Or maybe I should say, before the first Civil War.
I hope not.
By the way, I thought about offering my dog Chet as speaker; he is a highly trained Australian Shepherd, which is a breed that is bred to herd things. But I realized that would be animal cruelty, and they probably wouldn’t want him anyway because he is mostly black.
In any previous era of American history, it would have been inconceivable that someone with Trump’s background and baggage would be nominated for dog catcher or hired to take tickets in a toll booth, let alone run for President.
But not only does he look likely to be nominated, various polls all show he could actually be elected. Which is horrifying in itself. And if he is, if he were to be reelected, it would almost certainly be the end of democracy as we know it, and a catastrophe for the world. Now, why do I say that?
Didn’t I just tell you that Trump was and is hopelessly incompetent at the art of governing?
Yes, I did – but here’s the problem: Back in 2016, nobody expected Donald Trump to win – including Donald Trump. On Election Day he told friends that he thought he was going to lose by only six points, which he thought would be a good showing.
But instead, you know what happened. He did lose the popular vote by almost three million votes, but thanks to our weird anomaly called the Electoral College, and tiny victories in the three key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin gave him his fluke election victory.
Well, now he’s attempting to do so again. As of now, I have to say, I don’t think he will succeed. Trump has so many problems and has alienated so many people, including Republicans, that I don’t see that happen.
Some of his cronies like the absurd Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro and now Mark Meadows have flipped and pleaded guilty, and I hope and think that means they will help incriminate him.
Are people really going to want to elect a president who is certain to spend much of the campaign in courtrooms fighting felony charges? The Biden administration record is really rather stellar, even incredible, when it comes to having gotten crucial bills passed and things done. Inflation is down considerably from its peak. We are out of Afghanistan for the first time in twenty years, and even though a suicide bomber killed 13 of our troops, mostly Marines, at the end, we are finally out of a war that killed more than 4,000 Americans, essentially for nothing.
The economy has been stunningly good, there is full employment, and the recession the experts have been predicting for the last more than two years hasn’t happened.
Oddly enough, Joe Biden, a man who used to be criticized for talking too much, hasn’t talked about his policy successes enough. But I am sure his PR team is aware of that, and as they launch into full reelection mode that will change.
However, you never know what will happen in life, and especially, a political campaign. I think the 81 year old Biden is likely to be clearly in far better shape, physically and mentally, than the 78 year old officially obese Donald Trump.
But what if Biden were to have some sort of health incident or scare a few days or weeks before Election Day?
Actually, I am relatively confident that in a head-to-head matchup, Biden would beat Trump again. But that may not be what we’re going to have. There’s this group called No Labels, which is apparently going to nominate a third party candidate, possibly Senator Joe Manchin, who probably couldn’t get reelected next year as a Democrat in West Virginia.
One well-respected political scientist calculates that such a candidate is likely to take five votes away from Biden for every one they take from Trump. Now, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also running an independent candidacy.
But here the story is a little different. Kennedy is, of course, the son of Bobby Kennedy, the great liberal icon who was assassinated when he was running for the Democratic nomination for President in 1968.
His son, however, seems to be more or less crazy, fanatically anti-vaccination, and has compared giving kids Covid vaccinations to what the Nazis did in Auschwitz.
Four of his own siblings have denounced him and begged people not to vote for him. Despite his name, Kennedy is likely to hurt Trump much more if he stays in the race, but we just don’t know how much or how many votes he might get.
But I want to get back to why reinstalling Trump in the White House would very likely be the end for our democracy. Next to the New York Times, I think The Economist magazine is the best and most reliable news source in the western world.
It’s a British publication; they call it a weekly newspaper, but by our standards it’s a magazine.
In July, the Economist took a major look at what is likely to happen if there is a second Trump term, and if you read it, it ought to scare your pants off. The MAGA team has set up their own think tank, the America First Policy Institute, and they have a staff of 172 people working full time on how to really take over the government from top to bottom.
These aren’t just little wannabe wonks either — they include eight former Trump administration cabinet members and 20 other political appointees.
And they aren’t the only ones.
The Heritage Foundation also has teams that are vetting people to serve in the next Trump administration. And anyone who has criticized Trump for anything, including inciting the January 6th insurrection, is automatically disqualified.
By the way, one of the Economist’s main sources for this was that great statesman Steve Bannon – remember him? The guy who managed Trump’s first campaign and who always looks like he needs a shave, a shower and some shampoo. Trump eventually fired him — he fires everyone — but he pardoned him efore he left office.
Bannon said that this time they will have fleshed-out plans and the know-how to really take over the government and destroy the administrative functions as we know them.
“We didn’t have the people (in 2016) because nobody thought we would win,” Bannon said. But they mean to have them this time.
They are counting on Trump to put on his daily gong show and rant and rave and dominate the airwaves while they quietly destroy government as we’ve known it. They want to reinstate Trump executive order known as Schedule F, which was canceled by Biden, under which the administration could fire any bureaucrat for any reason, such as not being sufficiently loyal to the President.
Until now, government employees have been required to be loyal to the Constitution and the United States of America. The Trump supporters wish to change that.
They want their first loyalties to be to one man, and to those who speak for him, and they want the power to remove them, fire them if they are insufficiently supportive.
That is how things worked in Germany from 1933 to 1945 and in Italy at the same time, and Stalin’s Soviet Union. You know how that worked out.
The policies a new Trump administration would follow would be, if anything, worse.
When it comes to foreign policy, Trump has openly said he wants to take us out of NATO, which would clearly have the effect of turning much of Europe over to Putin. He has made it pretty clear he would abandon Ukraine.
This is a case where the domino theory would be valid. Vladimir Putin is an unreconstructed KGB man who has made it very clear he wants to reassemble the Soviet Union, at least in the sense of having Russia absorb all those now-independent countries like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Armenia that were unwilling parts of it.
Every agency and branch of the federal government would be highly politicized in a partisan sense.
And I don’t think any of us has fully grasped what that would mean. That’s why this next election is the most important of any in history.
By the way, even though the next Presidential election is still just over a year away — November 5, 2024 — it probably will be perfectly clear who the Republican nominee is by March, maybe by March 6, the day after the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses.
We already know, barring an act of God, who the Democratic nominee will be, and there’s about an 80 percent change we know the Republican.
Once we do, we face an election like no other in our history. Either we defeat the MAGA crowd, or most likely see an end of democracy and justice as we know it.
You know, of course, that a reelected President Trump would pardon everyone involved in his various schemes, almost certainly including himself.
This is an even worse and less excusable threat than that we faced in the Civil War. The South never threatened democracy in the north; they just had the theory, which many believed at the time, that they could go off and start a separate country. And when they lost, they never attempted to wage a guerrilla war, and everyone accepted that this issue was settled once and for all.
Trump and his followers aren’t that noble.
Defeating Trump and those who support him won’t be easy, and the party he has taken over is now committed to his program.
Even if Trump fails, even if Democrats somehow end up with both houses of Congress, the threat isn’t over.
By the way, while I think it is very likely that Democrats will retake control of the House of Representatives from the troubled children now embarrassing it, the odds are very strong that Republicans will gain a majority in the U.S. Senate. There are 23 Democratic seats up next year and only 10 Republican ones, and many more of the Democrats are vulnerable.
Currently, there are 50 Democrats and independents who vote with Democrats, 49 Republicans, and Kyrsten Sinema, who seems to represent outer space.
We also need to remember that sooner or later, probably by 2028 at the latest, America is bound to elect a Republican president, and a Republican-controlled Congress, and when that happens, we better hope their first loyalties, like those of Liz Cheney and John McCain and every former Republican president, are to the Constitution, not any one person.
In the Lord of the Rings, both the books and the movie, Galadriel says at one point to Frodo that his quest, and really the future of the whole world, is in the edge of a knife.
Falter, she says, screw this up just a little bit, and the world would be plunged into ruin. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but politically, that is exactly the situation we are in today.
So thank you for listening to me today;
Thank you very much.
