“In a rational nation it would be impossible to conceive of Donald Trump even being allowed to peer in the general direction of the White House,” wrote Northern Kentucky Tribune columnist and Kentucky Journalism Hall of Famer Bill Straub. “He is a rapist, a pathological liar, a cheat who refuses to pay his bills, a man who enriched himself and his family during his time in office and instigated an insurrection against the United States in an effort to retain the presidency. He was found guilty on 34 felony counts in a New York state court of falsifying business records to gain a political advantage.
“This is not opinion. These are facts.”
Trump is also racist, sexist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic. He panders nonstop to white Christian nationalist bigots. At best, he’s an authoritarian. At worst, he’s fascistic.
These are also facts, not opinion.
And in the it-takes-one-to-know-one category: “The policies I represent are the policies that are represented by Trump and Putin,” said Marine Le Pen, who is synonymous with the neofascist National Rally party that was defeated on Sunday in the second round of voting in France’s parliamentary elections.
But even Le Pen, and her party, which harkens to French Nazi collaborators in World War II, didn’t storm the National Assembly to overturn the national election results.
On July 4, while we celebrated Independence Day with the customary fireworks and paeans to freedom and liberty, the citizens of Great Britain — the nation from which we parted company on less than amicable terms on July 4, 1776 — went to the polls and, in a free and fair election, ended 14 years of Conservative rule in Parliament by electing the center-left Labour Party in a landslide.
Wrote Dan Sabbaugh in The Guardian: “‘Today power will change hands in a peaceful and orderly manner, with goodwill on all sides,’ a gracious Rishi Sunak declared in the small hours of Friday morning as he acknowledged his resounding defeat to Labour’s Keir Starmer.
“That may have sounded like a statement of the obvious, given the transition from one British prime minister to the next was certain once the early results had come in, but it stands in sharp contrast to the last US election.
“Nearly four years ago, Donald Trump at first refused to concede, and has repeatedly claimed the election in which Joe Biden defeated him was rigged. He sought to overturn the result, incited riots in Washington DC on 6 January 2021 and attempted a coup to retain power unlawfully.
“But while Trump and his supporters complained about democracy, in the UK the defeated Conservatives were quick to accept the results and even embraced the fact that their right-of-centre party had suffered its worst election defeat in history. Losing, they emphasized, was a virtue of the British system.”
History records that 284 years ago on July 4, Mother Britain’s 13 cantankerous North American colonies issued a Declaration of Independence which charged that “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
This historian cannot think of any greater stateside usurpation or absolute tyranny than the 45th president, who was unseated in a lawful and democratic election, refusing to accept the results and instead fomenting a bloody insurrection to keep himself in power.
Yet, if most polls are correct at this point in the campaign, Trump is poised to win another term. Even so, the professed law-and-order champion categorically refuses to say that he will accept defeat in the 2024 election.
History, of course, is replete with irony. The signers of the Declaration also condemned His Britannic Majesty George III — “His Satanic Majesty” to the signers — for “exciting domestic insurrections among us.” He was “a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant … unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
Twelve score and eight years ago, the tyrant was a monarch across the ocean. Now the tyrant is a homegrown, hate-mongering, democracy-despising self-obsessed demagogue who likewise is unfit to rule a free people.
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