Editor’s Note:
SFR welcomes Sasha Abramsky as its new National Affairs correspondent. A freelance journalist originally from England, he is western states correspondent for the Nation, with credits in the Atlantic Monthly, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and the New Yorker online. The author of ten books, including the recently published Chaos Comes Calling, Abramsky lectures in the University of California, Davis’s University Writing Program. He will contribute twice a month for SFR.
In six days, the United States will choose its next President. It is a choice carrying entirely momentous consequences for American democracy, and, because of this country’s outsized global footprint, for the well-being of the rest of the world.
If he is elected, Trump has promised to create giant detention camps to house millions of undocumented people yanked out of homes, schools, workplaces, and places of worship by roving immigrant snatch-squads. He has indicated he wants to set the US military against domestic protestors, people whom he has labeled, usingFascist language, “the enemy within.” He has advocated press censorship and suggested that politically motivated show trials for everyone from Nancy Pelosi to ex-head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley are coming. He has pledged to eviscerate US efforts to fight climate change and turbocharge fossil fuels production. He has flirted with the idea of giving the police powers to beat up shoplifting suspects and announced he will pardon those in prison for their violent, insurrectionary acts on January 6, 2021.
Trump has all-but-promised that he will bow to Vladimir Putin’s increasingly predatory demands over Eastern Europe, making it more likely that an unstoppable conflagration will consume large parts of the continent. He has leant in on divisive culture war positions, using every TV commercial, every public speech, as an opportunity to further cleave America into a series of “us” versus “them” camps. In doing so he is ensuring that, if he is elected, large numbers of Americans will be rendered legally vulnerable to ever-more aggressive acts of discrimination. He will make the lives of women more expendable by embracing harsh anti-abortion measures, quite possibly amongst them travel restrictions on the pregnant.
And none of this even gets to the issue of what we will look like when we see in the mirror reflections of a land that excused Trump’s liability for sexual abuse, defamation, and tax fraud; or what Congress twice found to be impeachable behavior while he was sworn to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. We will see a country willing to hand the nuclear football to a convicted felon.
In short, if Trump wins, that mirror will reflect an electorate that not only excuses Trump for his endless and odious acts of illegality, but rewards him for a lifetime of shockingly awful behavior with king-like powers and permanent impunity from prosecution. We will have permanently grubified ourselves in the eyes of posterity.
The timbre of Trump’s campaign isn’t remotely within the normal boundaries of the US political rough and tumble. Milley recently labeled Trump a “fascist to his core.” So too, Gen. John Kelley, one-time Chief of Staff to Trump, told the New York Times that Trump met the definition of a fascist and repeatedly uttered statements praising Hitler. Liz Cheney, the erstwhile number three in the GOP House hierarchy, also believes Trump is a fascist. These aren’t people prone to left-wing sensationalism. In fact, these are deeply conservative individuals screaming from the rooftops that American democracy is on the edge of an abyss.
I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know. But, as the new National Affairs columnist for the Santa Fe Reporter, I would be remiss if I didn’t hammer home what’s at stake.
Sequels are almost always worse than the originals, and if you remember Trump’s litany of graft and grift, corruption, incompetence and sadism between January 2017 and January 2021, you’ll know the original was horror-show enough. Trump was a moral midget then, and he’s a moral midget now. Except this time, his propensity for lawlessness and vengeance would be backed by a recent Supreme Court ruling essentially declaring that most anything a president does—no matter how criminal it would be if anyone else did it—is an official act that can’t readily be prosecuted. Wielded by a man of Trump’s heinous character, that is, pure and simple, a recipe for tyranny.
Here in New Mexico, Kamala Harris is going to score an easy victory; so too, according to all the recent polling is Senator Martin Heinrich. There is no mayoral race in Albuquerque or in Santa Fe this year. New Mexico’s electorate isn’t at the epicenter of monumental political contests or changes this year. Given all this, some local voters will be tempted to sit it out. Don’t!
In a year in which democracy is so clearly on the ballot, it’s essential that even in safely Blue states like New Mexico, voters come out en masse to reject the thuggish, intimidation-based authoritarian message Trump is serving up to Americans. It’s vital America show the world that it remains capable of standing up to the fascist political message spewing forth whenever Trump opens his mouth to fire up the mob.
Put simply, there is no moral margin for sitting out this Election Day. If you feel like your New Mexico vote for president doesn’t matter, you can be damned sure the votes of friends and family in swing states do. Call or email everyone you know in Arizona and Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, and explain to them just what’s on the line.
Tell them, if they need convincing, that years from now, few will care how, or whether, they voted in the 2014 midterms, say. But this election is different. Trump has made it clear he wants to upend the constitutional order and eviscerate the rights of huge numbers of Americans. That’s something that one’s grandchildren will most certainly care about decades from now. And tell your friends in those swing states that, when their grandchildren ask them that question, they won’t want it to come out that they were on the wrong side of history during one of the darkest and most dangerous moments in this country’s long experiment in democracy.