By David Brooks on May 25, 2020
In a chat with friends, someone asked. “Do you think Trump will win in spite of the 100,000 dead and about 40 million unemployed due to his mismanagement of the pandemic?”, and right now nobody doubts that, incredibly, this is possible, but even more incredible is the fact that we cannot discard the possibility that the sacred US electoral process might be interrupted and even nullified.
To those who think it is an exaggeration to think that Trump could try to question and even attempt to sabotage the electoral process, we simply remind them of what he has done since he won the election. He has insisted, without any proof, that it was massive electoral fraud that deprived him of the majority of the popular vote in 2016. More recently, he has threatened two state governments headed by Democrats for the major crime of sending out invitations to vote by mail in the November general election, as part of the preparations for voting during the pandemic. He has accused this of being “illegal” and part of a “scenario of electoral fraud.” This is part of a range of not-so-secret efforts to suppress the vote, which favors the Republicans.
Toward the end of last week, while visiting a Ford car factory, Trump made a strange comment, one that would be difficult to imagine making without conscious intent: “…the company founded by a man named Henry Ford … good bloodlines, good bloodlines — if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.” A progressive Jewish organization condemned the statements. Ford was a Nazi sympathizer, who wrote the book called ‘The International Jew: The world’s Problem’, and Hitler declared that Ford was an inspiration and awarded him the Nazi regime’s highest honor for foreigners. They stated that Trump’s word were a signal to anti-Semites and white nationalists in the US.
It is not the first time. It is worth remembering that a couple of weeks ago Trump praised ultra-right groups, some of them armed, and incited them to demonstrate against the measures for reduction of spread of the pandemic, denouncing these as assaults on liberty, in front of the capitols of a pair of states with Democratic governors. Trump described them as “good people” in spite of the fact that some carried racist and even fascist symbols, including swastikas. At the same time, some concerned legislators have sought information about some 60 secret emergency powers which the Executive Branch could invoke after declaring a national emergency, an action the president took toward the middle of March.
Trump, in some of his statements, has fed this concern: “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about,” he commented in March, and more recently he proclaimed, erroneously, that as president he has “complete authority” over governors with respect to orders to re-open the economy. Nor are these the first time that he has made this sort of remarks in his more than 3 years in the White House.
In addition, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, recently commented to Time Magazine that we cannot dismiss the possibility of postponing the federal election.
At the same time, the official anti-China rhetoric continues to intensify, spreading the extent of discrimination and hatred beyond people from Latin America to include Asians, and the anti-immigrant measures motivated by the false justification of public health – including abolishing the right to asylum and protection for children – are also being increased, all encouraging the xenophobia that has characterized this regime.
Although some argue that speculation about a basic rupture with the rules of democratic process is tinged with more than a little paranoia, history is full of similar lessons. Thinking that “It can’t happen here” is perhaps the most dangerous thing we can do.
And if this or something similar occurs, the next question is: Pasarán? Will they get past us? This slogan of the Spanish Civil War is in the air again, but this time in U.S. English.
Source: La Jornada, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau