THE AMERICAN POSEIDON ADVENTURE

Tonight, Old Bone Spurs, a documented liar and grifter, will likely once again claim that the 2020 election was rigged.

Let’s remember what that election actually was:

• It was the election in which Republicans, Trump’s own party, made gains in the House.
• It was an election conducted during Trump’s own administration, one for which he ultimately bore responsibility for election security.
• It was an election that Trump’s own Attorney General, William Barr, concluded showed no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome.
• It was an election in which Christopher Krebs, the federal official responsible for election cybersecurity, declared it “the most secure in American history,” stating there was no evidence that voting machines had been compromised or votes altered. Trump subsequently fired him.
• It was an election in which Trump’s legal team lost the overwhelming majority of its court challenges. Judges across the country repeatedly found there was no evidence of fraud that could have changed the election’s outcome. The one limited procedural victory in Pennsylvania involved the handling of a small number of mail ballots and had no effect on the election results.
• It was an election in which Arizona and Georgia conducted multiple recounts and audits. Each reaffirmed the accuracy of the certified results.
• And then there is Trump’s own reported private admission to former aide Alyssa Farah Griffin: “Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?”

Given all of this documented evidence, Trump’s narrative is reminiscent of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone:

“This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call… the Twilight Zone.”

Reality has a way of catching up with falsehoods. We are living with rising costs of living, continuing wars and now the prospect of new ones. We see nonviolent individuals being detained in prison-like facilities, and we have witnessed fatal encounters involving federal immigration agents that have generated intense public scrutiny and legal challenges. Yet Trump, panicking, and delusional, continues to claim his administration is unlike anything America has ever seen before.

On that point, I agree.

We have never before witnessed a Congress so willing to defer to a president while too often failing to exercise its constitutional responsibility as an independent branch of government.

Tonight, may be Trump’s “Reichstag moment.” On March 23, 1933, Adolf Hitler addressed the Reichstag in support of the Enabling Act, falsely arguing Germany faced extraordinary internal threats from Communists and revolutionaries and therefore required emergency powers. Those powers ultimately dismantled constitutional democracy by transferring legislative authority to the executive.

History never repeats itself exactly, but it often offers warnings. Adolf Hitler invoked claims of extraordinary threats to justify extraordinary concentrations of executive power. 

The only lasting protection for American democracy is an informed electorate willing to elect representatives with the integrity, independence, and courage to defend the Constitution, uphold the rule of law, and preserve the checks and balances that have sustained our republic for nearly 250 years.

            VOTE!!!

RESIST!!! & EDUCATE!!!