August 24, 2020

By News Corpse (of the Daily Kos community)

Daily Kos

Donald Trump is terrified! He knows he is losing badly to Joe Biden, despite his frantic and impotent efforts to characterize Biden as a puppet of scary, radical leftists, and/or as a mentally deficient socialist. And if you can't beat a mentally deficient socialist puppet, you might as well give up. In many ways it seems like that is exactly what Trump has done.

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump is demonstrating a measure of desperation that is unprecedented in American politics. He has resorted to bizarre, dystopian horror stories about how Democrats are plotting to "terminate" their opponents and that he is "the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness and chaos." Which is true in reverse.

But even those preposterous assertions weren't enough to satisfy Trump's lust for a nightmarish vision of a future wherein he is the loser. So on Sunday morning he tweeted this:

Oops. Apparently Trump's tweet so profoundly offensive that Twitter flagged it for "violating our Civic Integrity Policy for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting." On his Twitter feed you have to click through the warning to see Trump's tweet. For convenience, and in anticipation of Trump deleting the tweet, here is what Trump tweeted:

"So now the Democrats are using Mail Drop Boxes, which are a voter security disaster. Among other things, they make it possible for a person to vote multiple times. Also, who controls them, are they placed in Republican or Democrat areas? They are not Covid sanitized. A big fraud!"

Literally every word of that is false and/or ridiculous. To start with, there is no evidence of security issues with mail drop boxes that have been in use for decades. Trump fails to cite any source for his claim that they are a "disaster." Secondly, it is impossible to "vote multiple times" because every ballot is checked for authenticity and duplication. Third, Trump's inquiry as to "who controls" the drop boxes could be answered if he spent ten seconds on research. They are controlled by the local election authority, which is non-partisan and serves administrations of both parties.

Finally, Trump introduced a new and comically ludicrous concern about the drop boxes being "Covid sanitized." This seems dreadfully insensitive coming from the person most responsible for the tragic loss of more than 175,000 American lives. It is Trump who failed utterly to control the spread of the coronavirus, and still mocks the use of masks and other safety guidelines, while promoting untested and dangerous therapies. And now we're supposed to take his concern about infected drop boxes seriously? For the record, the boxes are maintained and kept clean, and ballots may be inserted without ever touching the box.

Trump has a single purpose with this tweet. He is trying to frighten the American people. He is seeking to foment fear in order to suppress the vote.. He's seen all of the national polls - as well as those in the crucial swing states - and there is no escaping the fact that his prospects for reelection are dismal. So the only course he has left is to dissuade people from voting. And he'll do that by directing the Postal Service to interrupt delivery of ballots. Or by deflating confidence by insisting that the election will be rigged. Or by posting "police" at polling places to intimidate voters. And now by claiming that a completely safe alternative voting procedure could result in the transmission of a deadly virus.

There is a word for that. It's "terrorism," the definition of which is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." So Trump is now officially, by definition, a terrorist. And like any other terrorist, he must not be negotiated with. He must defeated utterly and irreversibly. And he must be brought to justice. And, ironically, the first step toward that end is to VOTE! If you don't, the terrorists win.

Posted with permission