By Sid Schwab / Herald columnist
As Donald Trump’s unfitness and venality become more apparent every day, there’s someone emerging who’s an even greater danger. It’s you.
Yes, if you still support him, it’s you. You’re the reliable enabler of his cyclonic destruction. He knows it. He counts on you to let him get away with his uncaring ruination, and unless you tear off the blinders, broaden your sources of information, you remain inextricably part it.
If you’re unbothered after what’s happened even in just the last few days, you can’t claim to care about America or the rule of law (the actual rule of law, not Trump’s counterfactual “law and order” campaign doublespeak). Not to mention the health of our planet and people. Ask yourself if you’d have been equally unbothered had President Obama done what Trump is doing.
Consider Roger Stone, the smirking embodiment of Republican electoral trashing since the resignation of the malefactor whose face is tattooed on his back. For decades, he’s gloated about his lies and corruption. Convicted by a jury, unanimously, of seven felonies, ones that threaten the integrity of our justice system — obstructing Congress, perjury, witness intimidation — all to hide Trump’s crimes, Trump let him off, and he’s gloating even more. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him,” he said. “But I didn’t.”
Consider that as you accept Trump’s claim that Stone was “treated very unfairly.” Understand that when he says he could have turned, he’s acknowledging he knows the crimes. Like a Mafia don, Trump rewards silence, telling his other made men, too: lie for me, I’ll take care of you.
If you vote for him anyway, you’re complicit. When you cast your non-corrupt, not-counterfeited-by-a-foreign-country mail-in ballot, check the box that says presidential crime and cover-up is OK by you. Have a look at the photo of Stone flashing the white power sign, surrounded by neo-Nazis pals doing the same. If you have no objection, your unqualified devotion puts you in the picture, too: (tinyurl.com/wp4stone)
If you were unconcerned when Trump’s (not our) Attorney General fired every U.S. Attorney looking into Trump’s and his family’s and his consigliere’s crimes, and the one investigating Mitch McConnell’s wife, you’re hastening the unchecked power and unpunished criminality he seeks. For this is definitional autocracy; it’s Putin’s Russia, Kim’s North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq. By pretending otherwise, convincing yourself it doesn’t now and won’t ever affect you or your children or theirs, you join history’s collaborators, by whose acquiescence dictators have always taken power. People like you, the silence of the cowed, are the reason it happens.
How about Trump’s thersitical attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci? Like Trump, do you share Gameshow Chuck Woolery’s take: Everyone is lying but Trump? If so, let’s talk about that, too, because here’s the thing: changing his message when facts change is to his credit: science isn’t static. It looks for errors, admits them, evolves with new information. Does Trump? Do you? (Update: Woolery deleted his Trump-retweeted tweet: his son just got the virus.)
Dr. Fauci’s early statements can be questioned, when he still hoped Trump would become a leader. And Trump brags about “closing” entry to the U.S. from China (late and only partially), after Fauci said it wouldn’t help. That’s Trump’s indictment. Two million cases and 140,000 deaths later, who was right? When he turns reality upside-down, asserting he saved “millions of lives,” Trump figures you’re willing to forget his delayed action, absent planning, and mockery of and refusal to follow the recommendations of Dr. Fauci and governors like ours. And now he’s cutting the CDC out of its longstanding business of data-collection and analysis. Confident of your gullibility, Trump’s only plan is to hide facts and overwhelm you with disinformation. (But if you praise him, he’ll turn the Oval Office into QVC for you.)
As with climate change, Trump’s incapacity is confirmed by his resorting to impugning coronavirus science and scientists. Having spawned the planet’s worst response to Covid-19, he’s trying to avoid blame by discrediting and silencing one of his only credible voices. Who, unlike soulless sycophant Mike Pence, thinks you need and can handle the truth. Trump’s attempted Maoist-like purge of Dr. Fauci is a humiliating admission of failure. As always, Trump defaults to his lifelong behaviors: attack, blame, deny, lie. And grift. Always the grift. (Esquire: tinyurl.com/grift4u)
To continue his transgressions against America for his own benefit, Trump counts on you to be not just part of the problem, but the problem itself. Are you, still?
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
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