Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Can Trump Get Away With Normalizing a Coup?
September 24, 2020
Will Trump get away with turning the US democracy into an authoritarian one-party dictatorship? He’s not hiding his intentions anymore. (The White House)
By Thom Hartmann
One of the big lessons that Donald Trump has learned through his years at the center of the New York tabloid media is that he can normalize just about anything.
When he was getting bad press because he was having an affair on his first wife, for example, he called newspapers pretending to be his own assistant to say that Marla Maples was astonished with "the best sex ever." It changed the entire newspaper narrative, and Trump proved to himself one more time that he can normalize just about anything.
In the last four years, he has normalized a president lying to the American people on a daily basis, putting lobbyists in charge of every federal agency and then looting the federal treasury, breaking laws like the Hatch Act right out in public, and has even normalized being accused of rape.
He’s so normalized ignoring precautions in a pandemic that his followers routinely expose themselves to a deadly disease without a second thought.
No matter what Trump or the corrupt, sleazy members of his administration do, after a day in the news cycle America collectively shrugs its shoulders.
Now he’s normalizing fascism. He’s normalizing federal police taking over cities, colluding with foreign autocrats, criminalizing protest, and ignoring the results of elections. We have armed vigilantes in our streets, and he praises them as he normalizes a situation America hasn’t seen since the Civil War.
In the entire history of the United States, one of the most highly cherished and praised values of our country is the peaceful transfer of power after an election. Now, Trump is trying to normalize the idea that that peaceful transfer of power does not need to happen.
He’s trying to normalize the idea that states can simply change their laws right around the election so their legislatures can direct their own votes in the electoral college. This radical departure from American traditions is a coup.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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