Gas Lighter-in-Chief

 Gas Lighter-in-Chief

When recently questioned by a reporter on whether he had confronted Russian president, V. Putin about intervening in the 2020 presidential election in his favor, our fabulator-in-chief shifted the blame to the Democrats. According to Trump, it is the “Democrats [who] are meddling by wanting and insisting on sending mail-in ballots when there’s corruption all over the place” (Politico, 08-10-2020). The question was asked for good reason since National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Bill Evanina, a Trump appointee, noted that US national intelligence sources identified Russia as actively intervening in the campaign in favor of Trump by targeting Biden in 2020 just as they had targeted Clinton in 2016.

The rhetorical evil embedded in this quip should not be missed. In “tell[ing]… [us] who was meddling in our elections,” Trump sought to accomplish two goals. The first was to shift the blame for meddling in the elections from the Russians to a major political party in our own country (in which the president’s claim could be a treasonous act in itself). The second was that of re-directing blame for “meddling” from himself—extending at least back to Trump’s attempted extortion of the Ukrainian president to baselessly investigate Joe Biden—to the Democrats, based on the president’s evidence-free assertion that voting by mail is self-evidently corrupt. 

This is a line that Trump has been pushing for some months, with the express purpose, now further enflamed, through the purposeful slowing up of the US mail by cutting postal employee and mail delivery hours, removing sorting machinery, and firing key personnel at the US post office. The intent here is, at the least, to raise doubts about the efficacy of mail delivery for the express purpose of sowing confusion and chaos among the American people, with the anticipation that millions of mail-in votes will not get counted for days, if not weeks, after the November 3 election. The deeper fear, which is seeping into the body politic, triggered by this expressed action, is that many mail-in ballots will not even be counted, thereby compounding the problem that the outcome of the election will not be clear for some time after the election.

This chaos, intentionally provoked by destabilizing the post office, will embolden Trump either to spout about the election being stolen from him, or through tampering with the mail service and other forms of voter suppression and related subterfuge, claim victory even if such a result remains far from clear. Either prospect could well tempt Trump into using all the resources of the federal government available to him to remain in power, regardless as to whether he, in fact, won the election, thus initiating a constitutional crisis of the first order.

If subverting the integrity of the US mail during a presidential election for the express purpose of influencing the election, is not a despicable treasonous act that should be repudiated by all citizens across the ideological landscape, perhaps, I do not understand the term. This does not even factor in the negative impact of slowing down the mail for the many other purposes the mail is intended to service, including the timely delivery of medicines and time-sensitive communiques related to important financial matters. 

Trump’s refusal to acknowledge and put a stop to Russia’s meddling in the US election is part of a broader, pro-Putin policy to humiliate the United States, as reflected in the charge that Trump has yet to acknowledge, of Putin’s payment to Taliban militants to kill US military personnel in Afghanistan and of the commander-in-chief’s failure to confront the Russian president on this highly-believable allegation. This is so even as credible information about Putin’s activity was placed in the president’s daily briefing as early as February of this year. When Trump was asked if he ever challenged Putin on this, he deflected. According to Trump, “We don't talk about what we discussed, but we had plenty of discussion.” In other words, it is none of the business of the United States citizenry as to whether our commander-in-chief responded to the charge about Putin by directly confronting the Russian president, or even whether the charge has been thoroughly vetted in order to more precisely determine its ultimate trustworthiness and scope.

Instead of pushing back on Putin and informing the American public, Trump has acted as cheer-leader-in-chief for reinstating the former Soviet Union to the Group of Seven (G7). This is at the very moment where Trump is in the process of pulling US troops out of Germany, which plays right into Putin’s hands of weakening NATO. Perhaps there is more than a little something to Nancy Pelosi’s charge that with Trump, all roads lead back to Putin. What does seem clear is that our disrupter-in-chief puts his own narrow interests ahead of the nation, as reflected in his obscene hugging of the American flag, which more than a few argue is a symbolic screen for his own anti-patriotic behavior.

Incapable of governing in any way resembling the public good, all Trump can accomplish, as evidenced in the last 3.5 years, is to incite chaos, disruption, and division. Given the issues this nation needs to master in the next twenty years, we simply cannot afford another four years of this concentrated disorder.

It is time, Mr. President, to place the national interest ahead of the perceived interest of Donald J. Trump. 

2020