This column is about the November election, which could result in the most serious threat to our republic since the Civil War. Donald Trump, a would-be authoritarian, may attempt to hold on to power against the expressed wishes of the majority of Americans. All while the COVID-19 pandemic, with its millions of infected and hundreds of thousands of dead, is still with us. Millions are unemployed and may face utility cutoff and eviction. If there is another George Floyd-type event, we may see a recurrence of peaceful demonstrations that become violent.
We are on the brink of a national nightmare. Let’s start with the incumbent president’s inflammatory rhetoric.
He said at the Republican National Convention: “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.” He has made similar remarks repeatedly.
“Every family in Minnesota needs to know about sleepy Joe Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet,” the president said at a September rally, openly touting the superiority of the genes of white people and explicitly embracing eugenics.
At the Sept. 29 presidential debate, Trump said that white nationalist militias, like the Proud Boys, should “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys and similar groups have been recruiting new members ever since.
In my layman’s understanding, such rhetoric and other election-related activities may get even worse due to the impact of the president’s coronavirus infection on his mental health.
On Oct. 8, the president castigated his cabinet for not indicting his current opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and former President Barack Obama. Of course, that may just be Trump being Trump. He did lead chants of “lock her up” regarding Hillary Clinton, his opponent in 2016.
When it comes to voting, the president and his party are actively engaged in voter suppression. One method is interfering with voting by mail. “The United States Postal Service’s inspector general is investigating the agency’s failure to update at least 1.8 million changes of address in a national database in August,” according to Time magazine, “just as many states were preparing to send out mail-in ballots for the November election.”
North Carolina has been rejecting Black voters’ ability to cast mail-in ballots more often than white voters. In Texas, the Republican governor has tried to limit election drop boxes to one per county.
Then there’s voter intimidation. One method is to have “poll watchers” physically harass people wanting to vote both outside and inside their polling place.
Despite these obstacles, there may be record-breaking voter turnout. As reported by The Atlantic, the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalistprojected that about 156 million people could vote in 2020, a large increase from the 139 million who cast ballots in 2016. Likewise, the leading Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies forecast that the 2020 contest could produce an enormous turnout that’s also more diverse than we’ve seen in the past.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the vote-counting process is likely to take days or longer. At a July news conference, President Trump suggested that determining a winner could take “years.”
The current president and his political party will undoubtedly contest the election results in court, and the president will surely appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if he loses in the lower ones.
Let’s look at the composition of the Supreme Court. With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, Trump will have appointed three of the nine justices. Consider who they are: Neil Gorsuch, who filled a seat that should not have been vacant; Brett Kavanaugh, who was publicly raked over the coals by Democrats for an alleged sexual assault 30 years ago, and Barrett, who was nominated closer to a national election than anyone in history by a president who is likely to lose the popular vote on Nov. 3 by a wide margin.
Justice Barrett will have been confirmed by a Republican majority, some of whom will not be in the Senate when the newly elected Congress convenes in January. In 2000, the Supreme Court in effect elected George W. Bush as president. In favor of which candidate would the three Trump-appointed justices rule in 2020?
In my opinion, the probability of election-related violence is very high. No matter which candidate is officially declared the winner, tens of millions of Americans will believe that the election was stolen. The current president will instigate some of the violence himself.
The social fabric that binds us together will be torn even more than it already is. Even so, if there is a transfer of power to a democratically elected president, there will be reason to hope that our constitutional republic will be preserved. Our country will continue to face serious problems and challenges, but at least the four-year national nightmare of the Donald Trump presidency will be over.
Richard Fein can be reached at columnist@gazettenet.com.