What Trump Threatens

Update: Thank you Steve In Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. I hope to see you all on the other side of Hurricane Milton as I'll be hunkering down in central Florida. If I don't make it... PLEASE get out all the votes for Harris/Walz and make sure trump goes away for good. And if I do make it... PLEASE get out all the votes for Harris/Walz and make sure trump goes away for good! Peace.

The hope is that the popular vote support for Kamala Harris - much like for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 - outpaces the vote for donald trump and that Kamala's numbers are strong enough like Joe's to win in convincing fashion with the Electoral College. trump has done nothing in his 2024 campaign to boost his standing with voters - he remains incredibly unpopular as of October 4th - to where it's unlikely he will ever win the popular vote.

What's troubling is how broken the Electoral College system is, to where trump can either repeat the upset he gained in 2016 or worse create enough chaos disrupting vote-counting to crash the election altogether.

American voters need to understand what's at stake here. People need to remember how disastrous trump was in the White House between 2017 through January 2021. We need to realize how trump threatens to be so much worse if he ever regains the presidency.

I know this will get long-winded, but know this:

trump threatens the entire concept of the Rule of Law. Just by his very existence. Never in our history - should trump bully, cheat, and lie his way into the White House - has a convicted felon reached the high office of the presidency. We had Eugene Debs running for it back in 1920 but he never stood a chance. We've had bad men, men with questionable morals at best - Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, LBJ, Nixon - as President but never before someone with 34 guilty counts from a New York jury and facing more felonies once the election passes. We will have a lawless criminal in a position to avoid legal judgment, willing to break even more laws - now that the Supreme Court made sitting Presidents virtually untouchable - to ensure he never answers for his crimes.

And trump will extend that lawlessness to exact revenge on his enemies, whomever he feels was responsible for "humiliating" him with these charges and convictions. he turned the Department of Justice - especially under William Barr - into an instrument of his vengeance, seeking any means to bring Hillary Clinton to trial over her accusing him of illegal ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign. In his second term, trump will go after everyone - Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary again, Obama, even Republicans like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney who opposed trump in the public arena - he thinks wronged him. trump will even use the presidency to destroy the prosecutors, judges, and juries who held him liable in civil trials and guilty in the New York criminal trial. E. Jean Carroll will be the target of his darkest ire. 

trump will do everything he can to wipe clean the documented history of his sins, and will punish everyone to do so.

trump threatens the rights and welfare - the very lives - of women across the board. Thanks to trump's tenure between 2017 to 2021, the Republicans placed three Far Right anti-abortion Justices on the Supreme Court, the culmination of their 50-year war to undo the Roe V Wade ruling in 2022. They did this to appease their Culture War supporters, but doing so was an unpopular move. This 2024, the Republicans - trump included - are trying to hide their responsibility for taking away women's personal rights, but it's an open secret the Far Right want a total national ban on abortion - and even all forms of birth control - and trump will happily sign that kind of legislation for them.

You can tell trump is still eager to push for stricter abortion bans because he's spreading bald-faced lies about "post-birth abortions" happening in Democratic-led states that he conveniently won't name. You know his campaign is looking to curtail women's rights with his Vice Presidential pick JD Vance out there attacking "childless cat ladies" and insisting women should be at home in the kitchen birthing babies.

trump back in the White House means more women will find themselves punished in some form or another - hit with "childless" taxes, pushed out of the workplace, squeezed out of higher education grants/scholarships, gods help us even directly attacked by wingnut community groups looking to punish and conform - in order to force women - White and Young (even high-school age!) - into life roles they didn't want.

trump and his Republican allies will take away women's rights. This is not fearmongering: This is fact.

trump threatens the rights and safety of Latino / Black / Asian / Arab communities, even the ones who are citizens and legal residents. We know this already: trump has been openly racist and unapologetic about it for decades. We also know what trump did during his tenure: One of the first official acts of his administration was imposing a travel ban on people from the Middle East, creating a massive outcry and incredible burdens on families and foreign allies. We know trump created harsher policies dealing with illegals crossing the southern border, pushing a family separation policy that ruined thousands of families, and led to the disappearance of hundreds of children (did we ever find ALL of them?).

A second trump administration will be worse. It's already public that trump's strongest anti-immigration ally Stephen Miller wants to deport 20 million alleged illegals and migrants, something on a scale beyond even previous attempts by hardline administrations (I will not repeat the name of that operation here, it was blatant racism). The horrifying thing is that based on reports there's not 20 million illegals - it might not even be 11 million - so if trump implements this agenda he will be forcing our government - trump wants to use military force to do it as well, an unconstitutional abuse - into rounding up thousands if not millions of legal U.S. residents all because of their skin color and lack of ID (and for those with ID the accusation those records are fake). We will be seeing the most vulnerable group of that getting targeted: Our children, our teens, our young adults rounded up and punished for trump's nativist rage. This will be the Republican Party - no, worse, the United States because we let this happen - at their our most cruel.

trump threatens to undo our nation's economic stability with his obsession to shift from income taxes to massive tariffs. Even after all the shocks to American industries and markets that trump's tariffs caused during his tenure, he's obsessed with the (false) belief that tariffs worked wonders in our nation's history - he's been pumping up the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 as a (bad) example - and wants to make it so that all the taxation is done via tariffs. In spite of all the evidence - and basic understanding of economics - that tariffs place higher burdens on the poor while the rich get richer even as products get scarcer and more expensive. 

trump and his lackeys do not care that the last time we had massive tariffs put in place - the Smoot-Hawley Act - it made the economic crisis in 1930 go from a standard panic to THE GREAT DEPRESSION. Never mind the trade wars trump will trigger with other nations (depending on if trump uses the threat of tariffs to make those nations or industries pay him off). all trump cares about is ending taxes on incomes and dividends for the uber-rich. Everyone else will lose jobs, lose homes, lose lives.

And that's just on tariffs. trump's threatening to shift our reliance on the US dollar to cryptocurrency (his, no doubt). 

trump threatens to undo the federal government itself. Do some reading on "Project 2025," which had public ties to trump's presidential campaign until people took notice and recoiled in horror (forcing them to hide from the spotlight). trump's railing against the "Deep State" and proposals to "Drain the Swamp" will all lead to undoing the civil service merit system that's been in place since Garfield's assassination. Replacing around 50,000 workers throughout the federal government - who oversee regulations, enforce policy, deal with vendor contracts, provide public services - with trump loyalists who will ignore policy and procedure and do whatever trump tells them. It'll promote corruption - especially with contract biddings and deregulation of workplace safety and protections - on a scale we haven't seen since the Spoils System.

For all the griping by conservatives and libertarians, the federal agencies overall provide good - if slow or bureaucratic - services to the public at large. I've had people come to my library needing help with Social Security disability filings, and they've told me the local SSA offices treated them well and got them on the right programs. Our national parks are beloved and enjoyed. Travelers may gripe about the TSA but we know it's a price to pay for airline travel security. For all the complaints about the IRS, most Americans accept the responsibility of paying taxes and few are ever burdened with audits or accounting errors. There's 100 other agencies in the Executive branch and most of them function as intended because they tend to hire the right people for the jobs.

All of that would go away if trump and his lackeys purge the civil service and install their own cronies. Good customer service - yes, it's practiced by federal agencies - will disappear. Access to funds and grants will fall into a rabbit hole feeding to trump's pockets (or the pockets of corrupt allies). People who were hired based on actual experience and merit will get replaced by those without relative experience or even interest in doing the job properly.

The Far Right has been looking to take a sledgehammer to a federal government they hate because it doesn't play favorites - meaning it doesn't favor only themselves - when doling out funds to poor farmers regardless of race, aiding small businesses regardless of race, or regulating business practices to reduce consumer fraud (also affecting people by race, age, and gender). trump will be willing to swing that sledgehammer at our nation's foundation just so he can profit from the ruins.

trump threatens to end American diplomacy and strong ties to Western (aka anti-Russian) republics / democracies. trump will do this not only to appease his idol/BFF Vladimir Putin, he will do this to punish our European and Asian allies he knows mocked and derided him during his tenure.

It won't be like last time, when trump tried to shakedown NATO members to pay the United States - to pay himself - like a protection racket. If trump returns to the White House, he will exact revenge not only with his tariff wars but through acts of retaliation through breaking treaties and mutual pacts (trump loves to break existing deals because he can then force people to renegotiate with him directly, increasing his chances of personal profit). Given trump's open love for Putin and Russia, we can well expect trump to follow through on forcing the United States to leave NATO, exposing nations like Poland, Germany, and the Baltic states to Russian hegemony.

If trump does force us to leave NATO, he could force our military and State Department to forge ties to Russia as a new "ally" but in truth expose us to Russian takeover of foreign policy and military capability. Anything Putin wants - even some of our best technology and resources - trump will hand over without question. Granted, there will be massive pushback by everyone - even fellow Republicans - horrified by such moves, but if trump succeeds in corrupting the civil service with loyalists the debates will be short-lived and silenced.

We need to remember how trump's mishandling of classified information - a lot of it shared from and with our allies - was a major scandal even before he was caught with boxes of high-level intel at his Mar-A-Lago residence. If trump returns to the Oval Office, he can and will demand every classified document pass through his hands because he will believe he owns those materials, to the horror and disgust of our intelligence personnel if any survive the civil service purge. Our allied nations - NATO and otherwise, even Israel - will refuse to share any further intel with us, straining our foreign relations to where the unthinkable - the end of once-strong centuries-old alliances that provided trade, travel, and trust - will happen. Isolationism wouldn't even begin to define it.

No matter what, trump in office will mean Ukraine is screwed against Russia's invasion. 

In short: trump threatens everything and everyone - even his own followers - because trump only wants to serve himself at our expense. It will be American Fascism - all in service to Overlord TRUMP and his handlers/lackeys/brute squads.

I know I keep saying this, but for the LOVE of everything - God, America, Freedom, Mom and Apple Pie - do not vote for donald trump or his Republican allies. Please vote for Kamala Harris as President, please vote for every Democratic candidate on the ballots, please vote for every Pro-Women amendment referendum in the states offering them.

Do not let trump and his kind threaten us any longer.