Trump is Sabotaging His Own Country

Donald Trump may like to use numerous U.S. flags as photo backdrops and use members of the U.S military as props in photo ops, but the man cares nothing about America itself or its citizens -something his supporters refuse to open their eyes to since Trump panders to and in their minds legitimizes their hatreds and bigotries.  Now, with it increasingly looking like Biden will win the presidency, Trump is willing to delegitimize the election and sow animus as he tries to save himself from what he probably knows will be criminal prosecution and likely conviction if he loses the shield of the presidency. In my view, Trump has always been an evil and immoral individual.  Now we are about to see how much damage to the nation he is willing to cause as he tries to save is narcissistic ass.  A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's troubling behavior.  Here are highlights:

In the end, the biggest interference in America’s elections didn’t come from Russia, or China, or Iran or North Korea. It came from the president of the United States.

As I write this, we still don’t know for certain who won the election, although Joe Biden seems in a strong position to win the White House and Republicans to retain the Senate.

But we do know for certain that President Trump lied to the public early Wednesday morning when he claimed victory and sought a judicial rescue from voters. His brazenness undermines our election system and the very idea of a peaceful transition of power.

It’s hard to imagine that the Supreme Court, however politicized it may have become, would go along with such a charade. I don’t believe that Trump, if he loses in a clear-cut way, will be able to remain in office; if he tries to barricade himself in the Oval Office, he’ll be escorted out on Jan. 20.

Yet what Trump has already done is what the Russians have always tried to do: cast doubt on American elections and destabilize the United States. The 2018 federal indictment of Russian election hackers alleged that they were engaged in “information warfare against the United States of America,  . . . That’s precisely what Trump is now doing. He may hug and kiss American flags and pretend to be a great patriot, but this is a betrayal of our country.

If Biden wins after this poisoning of the chalice, he will inherit a badly divided country after an election that many will deem illegitimate, and it will be harder to govern and more difficult for the United States to exert influence around the world. It’s one thing for Russian hackers in St. Petersburg to sabotage our government; it’s far more tragic when the president does the same from the White House.

[Mike] Pence let his boss’s lies stand, and most leading Republicans have also kept quiet.

Trump’s latest attack on the integrity of America’s electoral system . . . . comes after years of other lies and efforts to discredit the electoral system. And yes, it’s true that it is an electoral system that has obvious undemocratic elements, but these aren’t what Trump has been talking about.

Biden will easily win the popular vote by millions of ballots, and yet the outcome is in doubt only because of the Electoral College. Between 2000 and 2016, in two of the three times when Republicans won the presidency, it was while losing the popular vote.

The Senate has similar issues. The current Democratic senators represent 14 million more voters than the Republican senators, but it’s the Democrats who are in the minority because of the outsize influence of low-population states.

More broadly, much of the Republican Party seems to fear voters and believes that its best path to victory is to suppress voting or even, in the case of Harris County, Texas, discard ballots. We no longer have poll taxes and grandfather clauses to disenfranchise Black voters, but G.O.P. officials modernized the barriers to voting by people of color.

Trump himself said in March that he opposed efforts to encourage more voting because “if you agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The Democrats had a great deal going for them in this election: a nominee viewed as soothing and electable, streams of new outrages from Trump, frequent revelations of corruption or improprieties involving him, denunciations of him from family members and former aides, and, above all, a mismanaged pandemic that killed 230,000 Americans and devastated the economy.

Yet many voters saw all this and were unfazed. Dr. Irwin Redlener, an expert in managing health disasters, says that Trump won nine of the 10 states with the highest prevalence of the coronavirus.

So as I fret about Trump’s efforts to do Russia’s work and delegitimize this election, I also keep wrestling with this question: How is it that so many millions of Americans watched Trump for four years, suffered the pain of his bungling of Covid-19, listened to his stream of lies, observed his attacks on American institutions — and then voted for him in greater numbers than before?

The answer to the columnist's question is easy.  Trump pandered to the hatreds of these voters and the prejudices be they racial or religious in motivation.  Here in Virginia, Trump did best among uneducated, low income white males - those who perceive their skin color to be their only source of privilege and social standing.  The irony is that the GOP's policies over the years have harmed these white voters the most.