PFAW Member, this is a long email but please try to read it through.
When it comes to Donald Trump, the news media have focused nearly all of their attention for these past months on two aspects of Trump’s presidency: what he has done and what he is doing right now. Indeed, progressives and Democrats have done the same as we highlight the many reasons we need to defeat him.
But something that has begun to trouble me is the realization that, if we’re not careful, a lack of focus on what Donald Trump WILL do if he is reelected could end up being the reason we LOSE this election and see another four years of Trump and Republican rule.
Don’t get me wrong, Trump’s record is incredibly important. There is so much corruption, bigotry, cruelty, lawlessness, dishonesty, and failure that Trump and his enablers need to be held accountable for – not the least of which, what they have done to our courts. However, what is more important to many, many voters is what the next president will do in the NEXT four years.
Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has cost hundreds of thousands of American lives… but what is potentially even scarier is how many MORE American lives his continued mishandling of the pandemic will be into a second term.
The Trump administration is now saying it’s giving up on trying to contain the spread of the virus. The advisor who Trump trusts most on the pandemic -- Scott Atlas, who is not even a public health expert – advocates for a “herd immunity” approach that could cost millions of lives, particularly among the most vulnerable parts of our population like seniors and people with underlying conditions.
This virus is going to be with us through 2021. We simply cannot afford the number of lives lost to and ruined by this disease if Trump is elected to a second term, and the same goes for the economic destruction his mismanagement of the crisis will cause.
The survival of American democracy is also on the line … and it’s not as much because of what Trump has done to erode our institutions as it is because of what we already know he will do.
Attorney General William Barr has represented Trump’s personal interests over those of the People, politicizing the mechanisms of law enforcement in terrifying and previously unimaginable ways. But it hasn’t been enough for Trump. Witch hunt investigations, by both the DOJ and Republicans in the Senate, to try to turn up dirt on Joe Biden and prove conspiracies against Trump’s 2016 campaign both flopped and turned up nothing.
Now Axios and others report that Trump is looking to completely clean house of all public servants who aren’t willing to execute his every corrupt whim … FBI Director Christopher Wray is first on Trump’s hit list, but the list also includes some of his own hand-picked – and very right-wing – intelligence agency heads who have not lived by the credo “Trump First” to his satisfaction. [1]
And just last week, Trump signed an executive order that would make thousands of civil servants “at-will employees” … allowing Trump to potentially clean house of career federal employees who are not sufficiently loyal to him. If you think this sounds familiar, it does, it’s the same formula routinely employed by autocratic regimes, where membership in and loyalty to the ruling party is a prerequisite for a government job. [2]
Our country and our world face historic crises. Of those, the single biggest threat to our country is our current leadership, because it is what is preventing us from tackling and solving the other crises and because that leadership is what is threating the very survival of our democracy itself.
I know you have done a lot and you’re doing a lot. Maybe you’ve given more of your time and money to election efforts in 2020 than in any other election in your lifetime. That’s as it should be. Because everything is on the line.
We’re working every minute to highlight what’s at stake and the stark contrast in the choice Americans face in this election. We have one week left to stop hate and defend democracy at the ballot box. And it’s disturbingly possible that this might be our last chance.
Thank you for everything you do.
-- Ben Betz, Digital & Organizing
Sources:
1. Axios, "Scoop: Trump's post-election execution list," October 25, 2020
2. Government Executive, "‘Stunning’ Executive Order Would Politicize Civil Service," October 22, 2020
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