Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: The Soul of America Is at Stake in This Election, Up and Down the Ballot
October 21, 2020
The soul of America is at stake in this election, all the way up and down the ticket (Gage Skidmore)
By Thom Hartmann
The corruption of Donald Trump is legendary.
He was trying to cut a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow right up to the day of the election in 2016, and lied about it over and over and over again.
He’s been trashing China, but his daughter has been enthusiastically taking trademarks from that country and doing business there, and we now discover he has checking accounts in China and paid taxes in China. He paid more in taxes in China than he paid in personal income tax here in the United States, and it’s increasingly looking like either the government of China or some government-connected entity there gave him a $15 million bribe right after he was elected president.
His administration tore thousands of children from their mothers and fathers and put them in cages, and now more than 500 of them are lost forever. Can you imagine if someone had taken your child away at gunpoint, refused to tell you where your child was, and then you learned that your child was lost, probably forever? That is what Donald Trump and his enablers have done to our fellow human beings.
His charity defrauded veterans and people with cancer, his university defrauded thousands of young people wanting an education, his real estate properties around the world have been used for decades for money laundering by foreign criminals and oligarchs, and, as president, he has been showering favors on our competitors and spitting in the faces of our friends.
He has embraced Nazis and other white supremacists, empowering their hateful movement. He’s using the power of the attorney general’s office to fight one of the many women who have accused him of rape or sexual assault. He is trying to strip “blue” cities of federal funding simply because they don’t vote for him.
Meanwhile, he is now aggressively spreading the Coronavirus around the country by holding maskless rallies. There is literally no other person or organization anywhere in the country holding events like this, because it causes people to get sick and sometimes to die. He doesn’t care. It’s almost as if he’s trying to sicken and kill as many Americans as possible, as quickly as possible.
He has held up bullying other people as an ideal, a role model for our children, as he threatens and blusters and his supporters send threatening emails to voters.
When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated he told us that government was the source of our problems. He lied, and that lie has echoed through the Republican Party in America for 40 years now. Donald Trump is the fullest expression of Reagan’s lie.
While Reagan liked to talk about “American values“ the real values this country has always proclaimed (and imperfectly acted out) include democracy, the rule of law, and the idea that all persons are treated equally by both society and government.
The worldwide environmental and consumer protection movements were started by Rachel Carlson and Ralph Nader back in the 1960s: these are American values.
“We’re all in it together, and we look out for each other,” is the ultimate expression of American values, or at least the values we held and were relentlessly working towards until Republicans seized control of most of our federal government in the 1980s.
This isn’t just an election between people who share American values. Donald Trump and the Republican Party openly trash traditional American values, both at home and on the world stage.
The soul of America is at stake in this election, all the way up and down the ticket.
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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