Imagine if that foreign invader had already promised to—when he took over—put at least one of our leading political figures in prison.
Imagine if that foreign invader had declared that our freedom of the press should no longer be protected, that “freedom of the press” does not include printing things he believes are not true, that he would make it easier to sue the media, that readers should cancel subscriptions to the newspapers that criticize him, and that even entertainment programs that displeased him should be “retired.”
Imagine if that foreign invader had questioned why a suspect in a minor terror attack should be granted access to a lawyer. Or access to a doctor. Or access to food.
Imagine if that foreign invader had already declared that our country was rife with lawlessness and race riots—especially where the members of minority groups live—and that he was going to fix that by whatever means were necessary.
Imagine if that foreign invader had declared that some of our inner cities were more dangerous than Afghanistan, and that “drugs are a very, very big factor” in protests in those areas.
Imagine if that foreign invader had declared that America was a “third-world country” in a “death spiral.”
And imagine if that foreign invader had surveyed all of the problems—real and imagined—of the country he intended to take over two weeks from tomorrow and declared, “I alone can fix it,” and then said he “will protect you,” because he is “the only one who can.”
Imagine if all that was what we faced two weeks from tomorrow.
It truly isn’t hard to do.
Because that is . . . exactly what we do face . . . two weeks from tomorrow.
TO JOHNSON AND STEIN SUPPORTERS
Post date • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25
The polls have been all over the map, and the numbers in specific polls have also been all over the map, but it is safe to say that as of this week as many as 8 percent of Americans say they plan to vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein for president.
If you’re one of them—especially if you’re a millennial—give an old liberal five minutes to try to explain to you why you should not.
I am not going to try to sell you on Hillary Clinton. I am not going to invoke Ralph Nader. I am not going to wax nostalgic about my nearly voting third party in 1980. I am not going to linger on how I want three or four major parties.
What I am going to tell you is that all of these points—valid, invalid, or somewhere in between—cannot be the priority this election. Not my priority, and not yours—especially not when your vote may decide whether it’s Clinton or Trump who becomes president.
This is really simple.
If you vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, you need to assume that it will be the last presidential vote you ever cast.
I am not being symbolic, and I am not being hyperbolic.
I am pointing out simple realities.
In every swing state, a vote for Johnson or Stein is one fewer for Hillary Clinton, and her victory over Donald Trump—as big a victory as possible, by as large and indisputable a margin as possible—is vital to your safety; is necessary for assuring that the country . . . still exists four years from now; essential to make sure your right to vote still exists one year from now.
The difference between Clinton and Trump is that stark.
Whatever is wrong with Donald Trump emotionally or psychiatrically, the healthiest diagnosis would probably be: extreme anger management problems. He’s asked why this country doesn’t use its nuclear weapons. He has repeatedly talked about putting his election opponent in prison.
He gave a speech at Gettysburg last Saturday—at Gettysburg! Abraham Lincoln!—where he said what his first hundred days as president would be like, and it was all about who would be going to jail, and who he was going to sue, and which news organizations he was going to shut down.
Three times, he refused to promise that he will accept the election outcome if he loses. The one truly, timelessly, eternally noble part of this very flawed democracy of ours—the peaceful transition of power—and he is deliberately leaving doubt about it and encouraging his supporters to believe the election is—or may be—rigged, and even dog-whistling about how they should go to the polling places in inner cities on Election Day and act as a kind of vigilante group against minority voters there.
The man is a bigot. He has shown no commitment to free elections in this country; he is a bully with severe anger management problems, combined with a desire to have and use nuclear weapons—and he’s running not for president but for dictator.
Hillary Clinton? Strengths, weaknesses, potentially our first woman president, all of it—and all of it nearly secondary to the fact that she’s sane and she believes in our form of democracy.
It’s that simple.
You vote for Stein or Johnson and it’s one vote fewer for Clinton—but it’s also one vote fewer that Trump has to match. Because of how this election will play out in the swing states, your vote for Stein or Johnson might as well be a vote for Trump—it will have the same effect.
*
I read not long ago two pieces at Vox by a pair of twenty-one-year-old voters—one for Johnson, one for Stein.
One part of each piece—twin mirror images of dissent—jumped out at me.
This is from the Stein voter, Shawn Schossow, a student at Simpson College, in Iowa:
His vote, he writes, “is a deliberate stand against the two-party system.”
And this is from the Johnson voter, Stephanie Page, who’s at Ohio State.
“I understand that Johnson has little to no chance of becoming president, but I need to use my voice to tell our government that we need to change the way things are done.”
“We need to change the way things are done.”
No argument here.
My generation failed at it.
You are getting your chance.
“A deliberate stand against the two-party system.”
Amen.
And in any other election—Bush-Gore or Obama-McCain, or if this one had been Bush-Clinton—I’d say: Enjoy.
But there is an assumption in both of these statements: We need to change the way things are done—a deliberate stand against the two-party system.
Why do you assume that if you get rid of the two-party system, the only option then is . . . a three-party system? Or four? Or five?
What if it’s one?
What if you get your wish: change the way things are done—no more two-party system.
And you instead get . . . a one-party system?
What if you vote Johnson or Stein—and Trump gets elected?
What about this Trump guy suggests that he cares about what happens after he is elected? Why are you so sure that even this democracy can withstand a crazy man with the authoritarian style of a 1930s dictator and a campaign undertone of putting his opponent in prison?
What makes you think he is not going to put his opponent in prison? Or put his other opponents in prison? Or the media? Or Muslims? Or the LGBTQ community? Or you?
“People tell me to compromise and vote for the lesser of two evils,” the Stein voter, Mr. Schossow, also wrote, “but I cannot compromise when it comes to my beliefs, especially when they involve human rights and systemic oppression.”
The point this year is not “Are you compromising your beliefs?”
The point this year is that you could wind up electing a president . . . who will compromise your beliefs for you—and who will make your complaints now about human rights, or oppression, or the two-party system, look to you in retrospect like a quick dance in the spring rain.
You want to change our system?
Please do.
My generation failed.
If you fail on November 8 and Trump gets elected, nobody’s going to pull you or m
e out of it.
Change all this—at the midterms. Do it in the state legislature. Do it in 2020.
The guy who wants to change all this right now—and whom you may help to become president—has no interest in human rights, especially not yours.
You want more?
He wants less—although I’m sure “systemic oppression” sounds pretty good to him.
If you want to vote for Trump, I can’t stop you; nobody can.
Just remember, though. If you are voting for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson . . . you are also voting for Donald Trump.
TO HILLARY CLINTON VOTERS
Post date • WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26
There was some confusion as to exactly what that was, bobbing above the Trump crowd at Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Even those who recognized its physical components were more than surprised about what they were actually seeing.
Finally, even those who had covered this sixteen-month kaleidoscopic mix of those Americans who have only vague and loose bonds to reality, and others who dwell in a fantasy world made up of equal parts video game and television horror series—those who had been benumbed by the public emergence of the dregs of our society—even they were appalled when they figured out what it was supposed to be.
From the Twitter account of Emily Stephenson of Reuters.
From the Twitter account of Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post.
From the Twitter account of Ellie Hall of BuzzFeed.
A Hillary Clinton mask, stuck on the end of—what close examination proves to have been—an adjustable cane.
In short: Clinton’s head on a metaphorical pike.
As if she had been beheaded.
As if this were the French Revolution and she was the governor of the Bastille prison.
As if—as Ms. Stephenson pointed out—we were living in Game of Thrones.
*
This is mentioned by way of reminding you, if you are a Hillary Clinton supporter, or if you don’t want to see Donald Trump become president, or both . . .
Take nothing for granted in these next thirteen days.
Take no poll at face value.
Take no comfort in trajectories.
Take no break because Clinton has done this well or Trump has done that disastrously.
Assume . . . the worst.
Assume . . . that the ABC tracking poll giving her a dozen-point lead is the outlier, and the L.A. Times tracking poll showing them tied is the baseline.
Assume . . . that whatever you think is a safe margin to save this country from democracy-suicide in two weeks, it is actually too low, too close, too dangerous.
*
Hillary Clinton’s head—on a pike.
*
And, in fact, not for the first time.
From the Twitter feed of Emily Schultz on August 31.
It’s in the foreground.
The stick just isn’t very long.
This was a rush job.
The guy in Virginia Beach? He took his time.
Whoever he is, he planned it out, got his materials, assembled it slowly.
He is the symbol of the Donald Trump gang of bullies.
He is the symbol of what will be recorded as a political campaign, but which, for an alarming number of its participants, long ago ceased to be anything but an enabled venue for violent fantasies and hatred based on—well, based on the need to hate.
It seems specific to Hillary Clinton, but if it had been Bernie Sanders, there would’ve been another motif—and we know what it would have been. If it had been Michelle Obama, there would’ve been another motif—and we know what that would have been. If it had been Joe Biden, there would’ve been another motif—and we can’t even guess what it would have been, because it doesn’t matter. It is the fantasy of normalized violence that is the motif—and that keeps the Trump crowd together.
He stands there blaming Hillary Clinton and the Muslim faith because ISIS has beheaded victims . . .
His supporters show up carrying images depicting Hillary Clinton, beheaded.
*
I don’t know what to do about them if he loses.
I suspect most of them will scurry back under the floorboards and other places where bullies hide when their protection disappears and their cowardice is exposed.
But I do know that the greater the margin, the more states, the more votes . . . the greater will be the chance that some few of them will get the message that this unthinking orgy of fantasy violence is not acceptable in real life, and that the man who has said it has been sent to crushing, humiliating, historic defeat.
*
So if you want to stop Trump and you feel relieved by recent news, sleep better, but do not sleep longer.
If you have viewed the outcome of the election—correctly, I think—as life or death for the Republic . . . you must now view the margin of the election as life or death for the Republic.
Vote; get others to vote; vote in groups; look up and carry with you the various voter intimidation hotline numbers; be ready to photograph anybody who tries to impede you when you go to vote.
And one more thing. Remember Donald Trump’s ceaseless, tireless, classless repetition of the claim that the election is “rigged”—but remember it in the context of what one of this year’s great patriots, his Art of the Deal ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, observed about Trump and projection.
Remember that Schwartz tweeted that “most negative things he says about others are actually describing him.”
Since Trump has endlessly bleated this charge that Hillary Clinton and others are trying to “rig” the election—since his interests and those of the Russian hackers and WikiLeaks are running on parallel tracks, if not the same one—go into the last stretch assuming that Trump’s charge of rigging is actually an admission of an attempt to rig the election for him, not against him.
Does this make you uncomfortable?
Good.
Trump imperils our democracy and is now the proverbial wounded wild animal in the corner. From him—incapable of conceiving of himself as mistaken or rejected or failing—anything, in these last thirteen days, is possible.
And if that still is not motivation enough to fight this with every fiber of your being until the last vote is counted . . .
Just remember where this piece began.
On a pike.
TO WOMEN VOTING FOR TRUMP
Post date • WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26
Depending on the poll, Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump among women by either 55 to 35, or 53 to 41.
The startling part is that Trump has any number larger than zero.
If you are a woman planning to vote for him, this question: How much worse does his record about women need to be?
Doesn’t it bother you that Donald Trump claimed again this week that all the women who have come forward with sexual allegations against him are doing it for the money, yet none of them are suing him—while he says he will sue them all?
Doesn’t it bother you that he keeps insisting that, as he phrased it in the last debate, “nobody has more respect for women than I do”? Yet when a pornographic actress claimed he grabbed her, Trump said: “Oh, I’m sure she has never been grabbed before.”
There he goes . . . respecting women again.
Doesn’t that bother you?
Even if he didn’t do anything, and she and the others are all lying—doesn’t that bother you?
*
Doesn’t it bother you that when a woman employee he body-shamed in public came out for Hillary Clinton, he accused her of also being a pornographic actress, calling her “disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M”?
Doesn’t it bother you that before Alicia Machado, and before all those women—long before that Billy Bush tape
—back in March, his campaign manager shoved a woman reporter to the floor and Trump said she had made the story up . . . and he hinted at prosecution?
“Victory press conference was over. Why is she allowed to grab me and shout questions? Can I press charges?”
Doesn’t it bother you that he wanted to fire women who worked for him at his golf club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for not being “pretty enough”?
Doesn’t it bother you that days after Anna Nicole Smith dropped dead, he went on national radio and said: “She had the best hair, but she had the best face and the best body. . . . Now, when she opened her mouth, it was different. Let’s face it.”
Doesn’t it bother you that when one of his advocates gets into an on-air argument with a woman newscaster, his spokesman . . . accuses her of attacking Trump and makes the thinly veiled threat “Watch what happens to her after this election is over”?
Doesn’t it bother you that he dismissed one woman seeking to become the first-ever presidential nominee of his party by saying, “Can you imagine that, the face of our next president”?
Doesn’t it bother you that after he attacked a Gold Star father—who lost his son as he fought for this nation in Iraq—for criticizing him, he then attacked a Gold Star mother . . . for not criticizing him?
None of this bothers you?
When he claimed that American troops stole cash while serving in Iraq?
When he said that John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he got captured?
When he said he had never asked God for forgiveness?
If none of this bothers you—none of it—none of it makes you think twice about voting for this crude, abusive, sexist, disrespectful, nonreligious man . . . than I have just one more question.
Does the idea of a man like this as president appeal to you because it somehow makes a similar misogynist in your own life seem more okay? I mean, if there’s a President Jackass, does that make the Mr. Jackass you know somehow acceptable?
And he is a jackass to women.
If you didn’t know that, or you won’t admit it, consider one last thing. The magazine Mother Jones has just found this on the archives of a blog Trump wrote for his infamous Trump University.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 9