Trump leading U.S. towards abyss of social and constitutional disintegration

HALIFAX—Whatever happened to the America that was on its feet and in the street over grand causes like civil rights or the Vietnam War? These days, the pro-democracy protests are happening in other places like Hong Kong. Good on the protesters. After all, China is threatening their most basic freedoms. Still, it requires courage to take an eyeful of teargas fired by guys who all look like Darth Vader. One never knows if the next volley might be live ammunition. So far Americans have tolerated Donald Trump out of oceanic complacency, political naïveté, and perhaps a secret yearning to shed the responsibilities of liberty. If there was ever a time for a million-person march on Washington, it is now. Consider the president’s reaction to the protests and rioting triggered by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. There are still no charges against the officers in whose custody Floyd was asphyxiated, while handcuffed and flat on his stomach with an officer’s knee on his neck. How could a U.S. president tweet “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Donald Trump is leading the country towards the abyss of social and constitutional disintegration. What he offers as a replacement for the system Americans used to live under, would make Ferdinand Marcos blush. The latest sign that a tinpot tyrant is holed up in that big White House on Pennsylvania Avenue is Trump’s threat to “strongly regulate” or even shut down Twitter. Picture the social media run by the Federal Communications Commission. Trump made those threats after Twitter attached a “fact check” label to two of the president’s tweets. Now Trump has made good on his threat. He signed an executive order to limit Twitter’s liability shield, which protects the social medium platform from legal action based on users’ posts. Trump has deployed Twitter to broadcast thousands of lies both before and during his calamitous presidency. His mendacity has run the spectrum from his claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, to his advice to Americans to inject disinfectant into their bodies to fight COVID-19. Trump has repeatedly abused his social media platform to personally attack, malign, and destroy his critics with the full power of the federal government behind him—and few if any facts. Remember “Nervous Nancy’s Unhinged Meltdown”? That was the Speaker of the House of Representatives he tweet-smeared, second in line for the presidency behind the VP should anything happen to the incumbent. Trump has falsely attacked hundreds of other perceived critics with the same scuzzy tactics. Here’s the skinny. Had Donald Trump not been the president, he would have been banished from Twitter for gross violations of its own community rules. By giving him carte blanche up until now, Twitter has allowed Trump to turn the social media platform into a virtual octagon for no-holds-barred political cage-fighting. As a result, this sorry con-man presides over the Bullshit Pulpit, which he regularly uses to bamboozle his own people while advancing his political and personal interests. Twitter deserves a measure of credit for finally calling Trump for a rules-violation by “glorifying violence” in his George Floyd tweet, which the social media platform has obscured behind its warning. Nor will it allow people to “like” Trump’s post. It also deserves credit for advising fact-checking for Trump’s absurd claim that mail-in ballots would lead to massive fraud in this November’s presidential election. The president offered zero evidence for his false tweet. There’s a good reason for that; because there isn’t any. In fact, Republican Senator Mitt Romney said that 80 per cent of votes cast in his state are routinely done by mail-in ballot. There is no massive voter fraud problem in Utah or any other state, according to multiple studies. Even President Trump votes by mail-in ballot. Trump’s renewed claims of massive voter fraud should ring a bell. In 2017, the president set up a commission called the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity. It was tasked with investigating claims of voter fraud. The more likely purpose was to substantiate a lie the president used to explain why Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 election by three million votes: massive fraud at the ballot box. And there was a second objective widely commented on by critics of the so-called Integrity Commission chaired by VP Mike Pence. By putting up a phoney claim of widespread voting corruption, the Republicans thought they could justify unwarranted restrictions on voting, including exclusionary measures like voter ID. The real goal was not protecting voting integrity at all, but promoting voter suppression. It is easier to cheat in close contests, and the Republicans generally lose when voter turnout is high. Less than a year into its work (the group met twice), President Trump disbanded his own commission. All it managed to come up with was a string of personal narratives of wrongdoing devoid of hard evidence. That struck Maine’s secretary of state as woefully inadequate. “The plural of anecdote is not data,” Matthew Dunlap told reporters. The Washington Post investigated Trump’s claim about the 2016 election and found that 0.000002 percent of ballots cast were fraudulent. That means four votes out of 136 million, none of which counted. Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, found just 31 cases of voter impersonation in one billion ballots case between 2000 and 2014 in presidential elections. That means one instance of voter fraud for every 32 million votes. But while Twitter should be praised for putting the choke chain on Trump’s lies and incitements, it is essentially a baby-step taken very late in the game. The same outfit refused to take down dirt-bag tweets from the President in which he effectively accused one of his main media critics of murder. Trump’s target was the host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough. Trump talked about “Psycho Joe” being rattled by damning information coming out on the internet, including the possibility of a “cold case” investigation into his part in the 2001 death of former staffer Lori Klausutis. Did Joe get away with murder? Trump posed the question. Not surprisingly, Scarborough’s wife, Mika Brzezinski, called the president a “cruel, sick, and disgusting person.” At the time of her death, the 28 year-old Klausutis worked in Scarborough’s congressional office when he was an elected Republican. A coroner’s investigation concluded that she died from an undiagnosed heart condition that caused her to fall while at the office, fatally striking her head. Scarborough was hundreds of miles away at the time of the tragic accident. Despite the facts, Trump also supplied a possible motive for Scarborough’s alleged involvement in his aide’s death. An affair between the two perhaps? Pretty rich coming from the Pussy Grabber in Chief. Even after Timothy Klausutis begged Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to remove Trump’s offensive tweets about his deceased wife and Scarborough, the company refused. What cowardice. Trump had already accused Twitter of interfering in the 2020 election and denying him freedom of speech over fact-checking his lies about voter fraud. Now he has moved to remove their liability shield. Instead of holding its ground, Twitter blinked. Executives at the social media platform should have known that bile and misinformation is not freedom of speech. It should have known that truth is the lifeblood of every democracy. By Trump’s perverted standards, perjury should be protected by the First Amendment. Twitter folded on this particular incident not because Trump did not egregiously abuse Joe Scarborough, Timothy Klausutis, and the memory of his deceased wife. It folded because Donald Trump is President. Were Trump not president, his tweets would not be obscured, his account would be toast. Were Trump not president, he would have been charged in Michigan when he broke state law by not wearing a mask while recently touring a local Ford plant. Were Trump not president, he would no longer be an unindicted co-conspirator in the Stormy Daniels case, a matter that put his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen in prison. He would be charged. Americans make a democracy-killing mistake in confusing respect for the Office of President with the bunco artist who temporarily occupies it. This is the man who was saved from being convicted at his impeachment trial by a toxically partisan, Republican controlled Senate. This is the man who fired the head of the FBI who was investigating him. This is the man who has ordered “purges” of disloyal people across the government, including in the Pentagon. This is the man who ordered the wholesale removal of inspectors general who provided oversight of his fast and loose administration. This is the man whose attorney-general dropped charges against a Trump senior staffer, Michael Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators about his meetings with Russian officials. And this is the man who now wants to strongly regulate social media platforms, like they do in North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and China. How fitting that this is also the president of the United States who retweeted the chilling message of the head of Cowboys for Trump, New Mexico Republican Couy Griffin. And what did this cowpoke have to say that caught the eye and the Twitter-finger of Donald Trump? “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” Quo Vadis, America? Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times

Trump leading U.S. towards abyss of social and constitutional disintegration

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Trump leading U.S. towards abyss of social and constitutional disintegration

So far Americans have tolerated Donald Trump out of oceanic complacency, political naïveté, and perhaps a secret yearning to shed the responsibilities of liberty. If there was ever a time for a million-person march on Washington, it is now.

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