Donald Trump is scared to death of you

| 11:15 pm EDT April 11, 2020
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This week Donald Trump tweeted, “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

Weirdly, Trump answered his own question just a few weeks ago: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The more people who vote in elections, more likely Democrats are to win. In fact, most Americans, whether they know it, admit it, or care, are actually more left-leaning that right-leaning. Trump seems to be attuned to this, hence why now he’s openly and rather loudly urging Republicans to “fight very hard” against mail-in voting. Mail-in voting is easy and would increase voter turnout, especially this election cycle.

My question is this: How is it that Americans aren’t more disturbed by this? The President is openly hostile to democracy. Surely this is a new low, even for Trump. The framers of the Constitution are rolling over in their graves. Have we become so complacent that even the specter of having the core of our system of governance unraveled doesn’t bother us?

Trump has clearly caught onto the fact that Republicans lose when there’s high voter turnout. The fact that Trump has caught onto this disturbs me doubly. Trump is as daft as a brush — he probably thinks “turnout” is a kind of cake — which leads me to believe that his advisers, Senate buddies, and Fox lackeys are the ones feeding him this information. They’re the conservative establishment and they’ve known this for ages and operated with this knowledge for ages. That’s what people have been voting for.

People bemoan feeling a sense of futility when it comes to voting—the feeling that no matter what they do, their vote doesn’t count. I see people posting online and speaking in public about how “both parties are the same.” Let me set the record straight. Every vote counts. One party wants democracy to shrivel and die, while the other wants to make sure everyone gets a vote. There’s a huge difference.