Preamble
I am forever wondering whether I really am a pinko leftist Commie Canadian Euro-Brussels bootlicker who cried into my eco tote bag when Hillary lost… or whether I’m just a rational centrist who realizes that progressive tax regimes help build the middle class, markets need regulation, the Commons & public goods have to be protected and paid for, the costs of all externalities have to be represented in a product’s price, contracts must be enforced, unfair trade practices must be rooted out, and that poor people and the downtrodden can be helped by the state.
Content
For U.S. citizens everywhere, this is likely to be the most important election of our lifetime. This is not hyperbole. Never have the stakes been higher, but neither has the choice been so easy to make.
This is not about policy. This is about the law itself. It’s about the preservation of our democracy. For the good of our country, the right vote is for Vice President Harris. Donald Trump represents an affront to the law. Harris will uphold the law. This election is a choice between a criminal or a prosecutor, and I’d like to explain why this distinction is the only one that matters in this election. Donald Trump represents a credible threat to the rule of law, to free speech, and to free elections; and without the rule of law, free speech, and free elections, the rest simply doesn’t matter. At that point, your policy preferences are irrelevant. If you care about the rule of law, the even-handedness of our government, governmental & judicial systems, and want to make sure that your vote counts in the future, you cannot vote for Donald Trump in this election. I’d like to make the case that, if you do care about the rule of law, Harris is the only choice.
First, not to state the obvious, but Trump is a criminal. He has no respect for the law. He seeks to flaunt the law for his personal gain. Trump is a convicted felon many times over. Trump paid off an adult film actress to stop her from going public with their relationship, and then falsified business records to hide a violation of election law. A jury convicted him of all 34 charges related to the incident, which was meant to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Sentencing has been delayed because of this election.
Additionally Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, then repeatedly defamed her after Carroll won two lawsuits against Trump. The judge ruled that the jury had found that Trump’s actions were considered “rape” according to the common definition of the word.
Trump’s apparent success as a businessman was built on fraud and a total disregard for the law. Earlier this year, a New York court ruled that Trump fraudulently misrepresented his financial figures to get cheaper loans and other benefits. This went on for decades. Trump is now banned from serving as an officer and director of any New York corporation. He was barred from taking out loans from any New York bank, and now must pay 100s of millions of dollars in fines.
There is a myriad of other cases, too. Trump was forced to pay $25 million to students who attended Trump University because the real estate seminars were a scam. Trump is banned from running a charity in New York State because he misused charity funds for his political campaign.
This list of verdicts, settlements, and convictions is likely to grow substantially.
For example, Trump was indicted for legally retaining highly classified defense documents and obstruction of justice. The most serious charge against Trump is that he retained National Defense information, which is a violation of the Espionage Act. Trump kept these secret documents at his private club, a place that has been described as a haven for spies.
Concerning Georgia, Trump was indicted in Washington, D.C., for conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights, all in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Trump was charged with committing a range of crimes related to the 2020 election in that state, including racketeering, solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, and false statements.
Trump has been impeached twice, first related to Ukraine. Trump’s first impeachment occurred following a House inquiry that determined that he solicited foreign interference in his re-election bid, and that Trump obstructed the investigation by instructing his administration officials to disregard subpoenas for documents and testimony. Trump tried to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden by withholding military aid, and Trump also tried to promote a conspiracy theory that Ukraine — not Russia — was responsible for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
His second impeachment was on incitement to insurrection. The House of Representatives impeached Trump for encouraging his supporters to storm the capital in an attempt to disregard the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Now, obviously, both times he escaped conviction in the Senate, but remember: impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. The Trump bipartisan impeachments were unprecedented. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested that Trump should be convicted in court, regardless of the impeachment in Congress.
There is a disturbing pattern to Trump’s crimes. They are explicitly intended to subvert the democratic process. Trump has run for president three times in the past decade, and each time he’s tried to illegally and improperly influence the outcome of the election. In 2016, Trump engaged in the hush money scheme to prevent news of his affair with Stormy Daniels from going public. The Muller Report documents the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, concluding that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election by waging social media disinformation campaigns and by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
The report also details 10 instances where Trump attempted to interfere with the investigation and obstruct justice. Thirty-four individuals and three companies were indicted because of the Muller Report, including Trump allies Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and Paul Manafort who, you will recall, was Trump’s campaign chairman. If a man is judged by the company that he keeps, Trump has surrounded himself with corruption. His 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Vice Chairman Rick Gates were convicted of conspiracy against the United States. His advisers Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, and George Papadopoulos committed obstruction of justice, contempt of congress, and making false statements. Trump organization CFO Alan Weisselberg was convicted of tax fraud. Trump’s National Security adviser, Mike Flynn, lied under oath. Chief strategist Steve Bannon was convicted of contempt of congress, and that’s only the beginning of Bannon’s troubles. Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, was convicted of campaign finance violations. His fundraiser Elliott Broidy went down for corruption and bribery. Even his lawyers Ken Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, and Sydney Powell pleaded guilty to crimes related to the 2020 election. Unbelievably, on his way out the door, Trump granted clemency to his corrupt political advisers Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and George Papadopoulos.
In 2020, Trump did everything he could to overturn the results of that election, even if that meant disenfranchising millions of voters. He pressured the governor and the secretary of state of Georgia to find him votes, just enough to win, and not for nothing he encouraged the riot outside and the siege inside of the U.S. Capitol. To stop the 2020 election, for the first time since 1820, the Capitol was laid siege. Trump encouraged the rioters to kill Mike Pence. He sought to delay the results of the election by any means necessary, and, as detailed in the D.C. prosecution, this was only the most visible part of a larger conspiracy to make sure that the election certification never happened.
As you can see, many of Trump’s crimes and conduct strike at the heart of our democracy. They are both self-serving and anti-democratic. The hush money payments were meant to keep the information from hurting him in the election. The Ukrainian blackmail scheme was for the purpose of soliciting a bribe in the form of fabricating dirt on his presumptive political rival, Joe Biden, and he conspired to bring down Congress.
Here we are in 2024, and Trump is once again waging war on the democratic process. He’s already declaring the election rigged against him. His running mate denies that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. His handpicked leader in the House of Representatives won’t commit to certifying the results in November 2024, and Trump has pressured Republicans in swing states to pass legislation and rules to prevent those states from counting votes until election night, which delays results. He subverted democracy before and is trying to do it again, right in front of our eyes.
That takes me to the next point: Donald Trump will destroy our core freedoms for his own personal gain. Trump frequently undermines free speech by attacking the media, individual journalists, social media platforms, and critics. He retaliated against John Bolton for writing a book, which is the ongoing subject of a lawsuit against the government. A never-sent draft resignation letter by General Mark Milley said that Trump was, “doing great and irreparable harm to the U.S.” In 2020, after police used tear gas and batons to clear protesters and journalists out of the then president’s way for a photo opportunity in Lafayette Square, law enforcement used tear gas because Trump was told he couldn’t just shoot the protesters. He has repeatedly called the press “the enemy of the people,” and he has weaponized the Dept. of Justice against certain reporters. Trump said he would revoke the broadcast license of CBS, which isn’t a thing a president can do, because it interviewed his opponent, Harris.
Also, Trump has a game plan if he’s elected again. It’s called “Project 2025.” Project 2025 is a bespoke manual for fascism. It lays out exactly what Trump can do, how he can do it, and with whom he can staff the government. The worst part is that it includes a whole bunch of things that are arguably legal, but are just old-timey fascism. Trump wants to do one of such weird, “old law that’s on the books still” tricks, but for ending civil liberties. For example, the Comstock Act of 1873 is a federal law that regulated the distribution of materials considered to be obscene, lewd, or immoral. The law primarily targeted materials related to birth control, abortion and contraceptives, but also included pornography. The law is still on the books. Many such old-timey laws are also still on the books. Trump and his allies want to enforce it once again, to ban medical abortions and contraceptive, and to criminally convict doctors.
Then there’s the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, one of the four laws known collectively as the “Alien and Sedition Acts,” passed by Congress during the presidency of John Adams. The Alien Enemies Act gave the president the authority to detain, arrest, imprison, or deport non-citizens who were from nations that were considered to be hostile to the U.S. Trump has said that he wants to use this law to use the military on U.S. soil to intern and deport 10s of millions of American residents.
He doesn’t just want to stop there. He also wants to use the Alien Enemies Act to use the military to deport legal U.S. citizens, including the Dreamers and Haitian immigrants who are legally residing in the U.S., and who — I will remind you, despite the blood liable levied by Trump — did not eat any cats or dogs. That was a complete lie.
Under the same offices, Trump has also vowed to use the military against members of the Democratic Party who he claims are the “enemies from within.”
You don’t have to take my word for it. Many of Trump’s former key appointees and advisers will absolutely not vote for him in 2024. The list is vast and growing. It includes former Vice President Mike Pence, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former Attorney General Bill Barr, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
This is merely the tip of the iceberg. There are 100s if not 1,000s more. There has never been an administration in history where so many of the people that the president himself appointed have changed their minds and have stated that the president is now unfit for office. In part, they recognized that Trump with full faculties was a threat to democracy. General Mark Milley called Trump, “a fascist to the core,” but it’s clear that Trump is also in mental and physical decline. His speeches are word salads. He doesn’t live in the same reality that we do. He just simply makes up facts all day long. While losing a step when you’re almost 80-years-old is not necessarily incompatible with a successful presidency, here the lack of mental faculty means that he’s more likely to be taken advantage of by his advisers, and he’s more quickly to jump to authoritarian tactics.
History has shown that Donald Trump will always take the easy road. In a second term, there won’t be anyone to curb those tendencies, which brings us to the economy.
Economic policies are usually based in policy preferences. There are some who welcome Trump’s plan to place tariffs on all foreign goods; in other words, a sales tax of up to 200% on anything made outside the U.S., a tax that you the consumer would pay, which would cause all Americans to pay $1,000s more per year in tax. In one instance, an iPhone might cost as much as $4,000, for example.
Then, of course, other countries would retaliate by levying the same tariffs on U.S. goods, which would kill U.S. exports. None of that is necessarily illegal, but those who think that Trump would be better for the economy fail to take into consideration the effect of Trump’s lawlessness on this country and on the economy.
The only other economic plan that he talks about would be to deport 10s of millions of U.S. residents, many of whom came to this country as children and have lived as Americans for decades. This policy, while likely completely infeasible, would also be a disaster for the economy and do next to nothing for high prices.
More importantly, Trump’s destruction of the rule of law, free speech, and free elections would itself be terrible for the economy. Individuals and businesses rely on the notion that government will apply the law even-handedly, and they even require the freedom to be critical of the government without fear of government reprisal. They need to know that when a politician is voted out of office, they will leave peacefully, and they need to know that a politician will not use the office for personal gain at the expense of their country, unlike Trump, who steered government and foreign contracts to his own businesses, like the Trump Hotel, and then promptly sold that asset when he left office.
When you take away free speech rights, property rights, and fair elections, and then add in graft and crony capitalism for the president and their friends, you have a recipe for economic disaster, apart from the legal disaster in and of itself.
Imagine Germany in 1932, Venezuela in 2005, or Hungary in 2010. Let’s not add the United States in 2024 to that list.
Countries with strong legal systems attract more foreign investment. Businesses need to trust that contracts will be upheld and they need to know that their success doesn’t depend on whether they personally like the president or not. Trump has threatened CEOs who don’t support him. He gave contracts to his friends. He filled his White House with nepotistic advisers and — specifically — his son-in-law exploited his position to personally enrich himself.
At base, Trump’s advantage on the economy is an illusion, which takes me to my final point.
This time it’s different. Obviously, we saw what a Trump presidency can look like. He was president for four years, so why is this the most important election of our lifetime for U.S. citizens?
Well, this time there are no guardrails. There is no deep state, but there are long-held institutions: the career bureaucrats and political appointees with half a conscience who pushed back against Trump’s worst impulses. Sometimes, it worked. His own advisers would slow walk his craziest ideas, but Trump has learned his lesson, which is why Project 2025 is so frightening. Project 2025 vows to remove over 1 million federal employees and would replace expert and nonpartisan civil servants with a raft of political loyalists.
At this point, we’ve all taken it as a given that if Trump is elected, he would end the many active Dept. of Justice investigations and prosecutions into himself on Day One. Frankly, it’s frightening that we all just assume that he’s going to do that at this point, but, if he does do that, it would likely result in mass resignations at the Dept. of Justice, and Trump would relish that and simply install political loyalists. Instead, he might do that even without the resignations.
Yes, he was impeached twice, but he was also acquitted twice. Congress will not stop the next President Trump.
In the interim, the Supreme Court not only granted sweeping immunity, but it basically laid out an instruction manual on how to do all of the above. Want to use your Dept. of Justice to prosecute your enemies for no reason? Fine, you’re totally immune. What’s that? You want to shoot your political rival? Don’t be silly. Just bomb them with an F-35. The current Supreme Court says, “Have at it!”
The guardrails that once existed to keep Trump’s worst impulses in check are simply gone. A second term President Trump would gut the administrative state and fill it with political cronies. Congress will rubber stamp everything that he does. The Supreme Court will continue to say that almost everything he does is immune from prosecution, and Trump will claim that any election that he loses is illegitimate.
There’s only one guard rail left: a vote so overwhelming, he can’t dispute it.
That brings me to my closing argument. Vice President Harris is the only sane choice in this election. She is a former state prosecutor and state attorney general. She believes in free and fair elections, and in free speech. This election is a choice between law and criminality.
As a senator, Harris grilled Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, about whether he ever opened an investigation because Trump asked him to attack his enemies. This is a key point, because as attorney general, Barr eroded the rule of law himself, though he has now changed tunes. He misrepresented the Muller Report’s findings and shut down an investigation into whether Trump took a USD $10 million bribe from Egypt to fund his 2016 campaign.
I do not believe that Harris would appoint an attorney general who weaponizes the Dept. of Justice the way that Trump has. I believe that Harris would support the Supreme Court justices who preserve the rule of law, and not grant sweeping immunity to the single most criminal president. I believe she would only nominate judges who the American Bar Association (ABA) says are qualified. While this is a low bar, Trump can’t clear that bar, as he nominated 10 judges who the ABA rated as “completely unqualified.” I also believe that it is highly likely that Harris would not destroy the rule of law. It is highly likely that she would actually uphold the rule of law. Typing that out, I can’t believe how low the bar is, but that’s where it’s been set.
There it is. You have the choice between someone who will promote free and fair elections, promote core freedoms, and uphold the rule of law versus a wannabe dictator.
Now, I’m sure many of you already agree with Harris’s policy positions. For those people, you’re already convinced of her bonafides. To those people, all I will say is, “Go out and vote.” Elections are won by turnout. Please do whatever you can to vote this year and to convince your friends to do the same, and not sit on the sideline.
For those of you who disagree with some or all of Harris’s policy choices, I hear you. I also don’t agree with everything that she espouses. However, Harris appears to be running as a fairly standard Democratic president, both small “d” democratic and big “D” Democratic. Even if you hate traditional Democratic Party policies, a normal Democratic Party president is better than a fascist Republican. A president who agrees with every single one of your policy positions, but has this one thing where he destroys the government isn’t really worth it. Even if you didn’t get everything you wanted out of the last four years, or even if you hate Joe Biden, wasn’t it nice having a normal person in the White House instead of a crazy weirdo? Wasn’t it nice to not wake up to deranged posts on social media and to overnight chaos?
It’s not a given, but it is frighteningly possible that if Trump is elected again there is no coming back from this. The post-1945 U.S.-led global order of multilateral institutions and open shipping lanes hangs in the balance. Many of our institutions held back Trump’s worst instincts, and it’s possible they might do so again. However, he and — more importantly — his radical advisers have learned their lessons and won’t make the same mistakes twice.
The election in 2020 was a trial run. This time, the restraints are gone. This really is an election between a felon and a prosecutor. Donald Trump is a fat old clown, yes, but he’s a fat old clown with a gun, and he is surrounded by yes-men. A fat old clown with a gun who is surrounded by yes-men can be dangerous, and this fat old clown would have the nuclear codes and the Dept. of Justice at his beck and call.
I think there is a non-zero chance that Trump would use the Dept. of Justice and the U.S. military against Americans who criticize him, against ordinary Americans who he calls “the enemies from within.” I think this is so because Trump keeps saying explicitly that: he says he will do this.
So whatever your policy preference on the left or on the right, I promise you that it is more important to preserve the rule of law.
I wholeheartedly endorse Kamala Harris for president of the United States. Now, go out and vote, because it could be your last chance to do so.
-with thanks to the “Legal Eagle” YouTube channel, as well as to the many journalists and honest reporters out there, and to their respective organizations, for reporting the news.
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