Goodbye Donald Trump
Imagine for a moment if Biden supporters with huge Biden/Harris banners unfurled in the beds of their Ford F-series or Dodge Ram pickup trucks had tried to force a Trump campaign bus off the highway. Imagine the counterfeit outrage that would spew forth from the tweeting phones of Donald Trump and his chinless dauphin. Imagine how Fox News would howl for their blood and speak darkly of sinister Antifa plots. One can almost hear Laura Ingraham’s fingernails-across-the-blackboard voice excoriating the pickup drivers. And you can bet without even having to ask that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would disavow and condemn such dangerous, childish outrages against free speech — and they would do so unreservedly.
Instead, it was the other way around. Republicans in pickup trucks festooned with Trump flags menaced and intimidated a Biden bus, at the instigation of Donald Trump Junior who told the pickup drivers to “have some fun.” Donald Trump Senior’s reaction? Trump retweeted a video of this deplorable, cowardly act of deliberate intimidation with the words “I LOVE TEXAS!” Meanwhile — crickets from Fox News.
Welcome to the world of right and wrong and why, illustrated in a simple thought experiment, we know the difference and they don’t. Because we know it’s wrong to bully and intimidate people who are exercising their Constitutional rights to promote a candidate of their choosing. We also know that people who try to silence such lawful expressions using extra-legal means are not patriots, they are anti-American scum, who oppose the letter and the spirit of those very Constitutional freedoms that truly make America great. Reaching for your Constitutionally-protected gun to silence Constitutionally-protected free speech makes you a traitor, not a patriot.
Donald Trump’s latest reaction? Here’s what he tweeted on November first at 8:18pm: “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!”
Trump grants blanket absolution to the wrongdoers and then (what else?) changes the subject according to the endlessly-thumbed Republican playbook of whataboutisms. The thugs in the trucks were not patriots. They were there to frighten and intimidate and endanger lives at the bidding of this stochastic terrorist Donald Trump. Meanwhile this coward Trump is ordering a non-scalable wall to be built around the entire White House complex.
This is why we must win. Donald Trump has enlisted the worst among us to join him in a campaign of hatred and intimidation. They are not interested in justice or democracy, they are only interested in power. It is our sacred duty to deny them that power and to send them back to the moral sewers they crawled out of.
There are a million reasons why Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States, this has been another one. If there’s any justice in the universe, on Tuesday we will send Donald Trump a clear and unmistakable message: We the People repudiate him. We the People don’t want him. We the People are the best part of America and we will prevail. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.