Common Dreams

It turns out that Donald Trump was right: the election was rigged. He would know, of course, because he and Lewis DeJoy were the ones who rigged it. Historically, “conservative“ (e.g. “white racist”) efforts to rig the vote were almost entirely focused on preventing people of color from voting. For almost a century, this involved literacy tests, guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, and other low-tech, blatant strategies.

America needs an absolute right to vote, like most other major democracies. One legacy of slavery is that our Constitution does not contain an absolute right to vote for all citizens who have achieved the age of majority. Our property rights are totally intact. If the government wants to take away your house or your car because, for example, you didn’t pay your taxes, they have to go to court to do it.

On April 18, Bob Woodward recorded Jared Kushner saying that Trump had taken control away from the doctors and was going to open the country back up. So what might have provoked that? What was happening right around that time? Trump’s official national emergency declaration came on March 13, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome. The economy crashed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.

Covid-19 infections now represent the third leading cause of death in America. This is an extremely contagious, crippling, and deadly disease. On top of that, there's a growing legion of people who call themselves "long haulers," who have been seriously disabled by Covid and are unable to live a normal life because of severe chronic fatigue, screaming nerve pain, and other chronic conditions. And that doesn't mention all the COVID survivors who've had strokes, heart attacks, and permanent heart, lung, kidney, and brain damage.

Donald Trump was bragging a week or so ago that Obama had “left me 128 judges to fill” as if Obama was just sloppy. The actual number was 105, but Obama didn’t “leave” them; he’d appointed genuinely qualified people, many women and minorities, to fill every single one of those judicial slots, and Mitch McConnell simply blocked them in the senate for the last two years of the Obama presidency.

What we saw last night was the dictator's playbook. Tell violent white supremacist racists to "stand by" and encourage them to show up at polling places to intimidate voters. Bully, bluster and threaten like Mussolini did, promoting your brand as "tough guy" when in fact you're a lazy coward.

Donald Trump said in a rally last night that the coronavirus, “Affects virtually nobody.“ Apparently “virtually nobody” means 200,000 dead Americans, ranging in age from the elderly to infants.

Bob Woodward interviewed Donald Trump back in January and February and now tells us that, way back then, Trump realized that the coronavirus was not only quite deadly and would infect even children, but also was airborne and highly contagious. Right now it's fashionable to attack Bob Woodward for having sat on all that information, and debate whether he had a "duty to warn." It's a reasonable discussion, but it misses the larger picture.

Donald Trump has falslely told us that only 9,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States, that shooting an unarmed man in the back seven times is like a bad putt at golf, that protests are being led by an airplane full of black-jacketed "thugs," and refused to condemn a vicious murderer who killed two people and blew the arm off a third. Now, he is threatening the Mayor of Portland with federal troops again. Which raises the question, is this the America the majority of voters want to live in?

Donald Trump just guaranteed more Americans will die. Trump has been saying for some time that he wishes there was less testing for coronavirus in America, because that would reduce the number of cases that we find, which would improve, in his mind, his numbers compared to other countries. So yesterday the Centers for Disease Control, under pressure from the White House, revised their guidelines to say that you should only be tested if you were physically sick. They made the decision while Anthony Fauci was unconscious under general anesthesia having minor surgery on his throat.