I am exhausted. I’ve been canvassing and phone banking for candidates in Delaware and Pennsylvania, writing postcards to voters across the country, and today I’m spending a very long election day as a poll worker. I’m exhausted but democracy is hard work and it’s worth it. I’m also quite exhausted with having to push back on Donald Trump and the rot and hate he’s inflicting on the United States. There are many positive reasons to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and I know they will do something great.
But you know me: it’s more fun to complain and point out the negative—and in Trump’s case, he’s so malignant to the very idea of America and our Constitution that it’s imperative for me to point out to my small corner of the internet why you should not vote for him. So, for the third—and hopefully final—time, here is my case against him. To save time, I’m limiting this to just what he’s done since he lost reelection in 2020. I tried to prioritize this list but it’s like a Billboard chart where almost every song is tied for #1. If you’re a Trump voter, you may want to close this tab. The rest of you, get ready to scrooooollllll down.
Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to overturn the election results in an illegal attempt to stay in the White House. You might remember it: a mob attacking the Capitol, people and police officers dying, Congresspeople given gas masks and evacuated, gallows erected to hang the vice president. Trump tried to throw away my vote and the votes of anyone else who voted for Biden. Nobody ever actually presents any evidence of this “election fraud”; the campaign got laughed out of court about 60 times after the election. And when advisors were pleading with him to call off his rioters, Trump sat on his ass in his dining room and watched the chaos on TV and refused to do anything about it. When told his vice president was taken to a secure location to shield him from the mob, Trump said “So what?” Trump also demanded election officials “find votes” for him in Georgia, trying to overturn the will of the people in that state. These were naked authoritarian attempts to subvert democracy, and he’s absolutely responsible for the disgrace of that day. He was impeached for the insurrection (his second annual impeachment) and he’s been indicted, and hopefully he’ll be brought to justice. But if the courts won’t stop him, the people must, and he should never be near the levers of power again.
Donald Trump appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and shattered reproductive freedom in this country. The government should not make reproductive decisions for you. This has led to women like Amber Thurman and Nevaeh Crain dying from pregnancy complications that could have easily been taken care of by a doctor, were it not for abortion bans in Georgia and Texas. Maternal mortality has “skyrocketed” since the Dobbs decision. We may never know how many pregnant women—some raped or facing medical complications—were forced to have children they didn’t want to have, since stories like that don’t always make the press. If Trump gets back in, he won’t need legislation to outlaw abortion—all he’d have to do is direct the Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act and nobody in America would be able to get abortion medication through the mail. The Republicans are coming for IVF and birth control, too—they already voted against protecting the former. Trump said last week that he would protect women “whether they like it or not.” That’s not protection; it‘s control. The idea that abortion should be “returned to the states” is deeply wrong. Bodily autonomy is a human right—why should women on one side of a state line have that right, and women on the other side of the line be denied it?
Donald Trump is a fascist who wants the military to go after political enemies on the left, calling them “the enemy within.” If this doesn’t apply to you, it applies to someone you know, who could very well be rounded up by a Trump administration. He doubled down on this rhetoric at his Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, so it wasn’t a slip of the tongue, and we can’t say we weren’t warned. He basically suggested Liz Cheney should face a firing squad for the high crime of opposing his candidacy. This is a pattern with him: he has consistently spoken about terminating the Constitution and using violence and the power of the state to prosecute his enemies without even a pretext of an accused crime. It is blatantly unconstitutional to declare a person or group of people guilty of a crime without due process, and it’s blatantly illegal to use the military to enforce the law. It would be extremely dangerous to have a man like this in office again, and the Supreme Court would probably let him get away with using the military to go after his enemies, thanks to their disastrous decision giving the president immunity for official acts and putting an asterisk next to the rule of law. Don’t give me some dopey-dope tapdance of “Take Trump seriously but not literally.” Even broaching the idea of using the military to go after your perceived enemies is un-American and disqualifying, and if a candidate for president broaches it, then you act like an American and you vote against him.
Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would remove federal protections against discrimination for sexuality or gender identity, and advocates that the government "maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family." They basically want to legally undo families like mine. Project 2025 would demonize and dehumanize trans people and its clinically hateful language against the trans community sounds like it came from 1933. Project 2025 would outlaw porn in defiance of the First Amendment. It would allow Trump to fire career government employees and replace them with loyalists who will allow him to implement his desire to be a “dictator on day one.” It would allow the government to prosecute anyone who takes an abortion pill. It would round up undocumented migrants and intern them in camps. This is the plan devised by Trump’s advisors for America if he wins in 2025. Don’t believe anyone who says Project 2025 is disbanded or that they disavow it—the ideas remain no matter what the initiative is called. Project 2025 would not end well for immigrants, women, or LGBTQ (especially trans) people.
Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies for campaign finance violations related to his sleeping with a porn star while married. With that rap sheet, he’d have trouble getting a job at McDonald’s or driving a garbage truck, so why are we considering him a viable candidate for leader of the free world? He’s also liable in a civil trial for sexually assaulting a woman in a dressing room, and has been fined millions for defaming her. His company has also been fined $355 million for fraud. Trump behaved like a complete ass at all these trials, insulting the court, complaining about everything, and moaning about his victimhood. Any of these indictments should have been the end of his campaign, but here we are.
Donald Trump purloined top-secret documents when he left the White House and brought them to Mar-a-Lago, storing many of them in unsecure areas such as a ballroom and bathroom. This slob put our national security at risk. Who knows how many secrets he spilled to foreign powers, how many sources he burned, or how many of our people he put in harm’s way. It was only a personal favor from a judge in Florida that saved him from trial and conviction. We can’t trust Trump with national security information.
Donald Trump’s tariff plan is dumb and will wreck the economy. This plan will jack up the prices of goods that foreign companies will export to us and guess who will pay those higher prices? We will.
Donald Trump is still racist to immigrants and people of color. This goes back decades but he’s been on a real tear during this campaign. Trump said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” which probably didn’t sound any better in the original German. He said migrants have committed crimes did so because of “bad genes.” He spread that stupid rumor that Haitian migrants—here in this country legally—are “eating cats and dogs” in Ohio, building on a long racist tradition of saying non-white immigrants eat pets. His mass deportation plan would not only be cruel but would ruin the economy—who would do the jobs migrants used to do that keep the country running? Add all this up and Trump has been saying “Auslander aus.” We can’t say he didn’t warn us.
Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is an absolute tool.
Donald Trump’s own vice president won’t endorse him (probably still salty from almost being hanged). His former cabinet and advisors have spoken against him. National security advisors are against his reelection. His former chief of staff said Trump admires Hitler and wished his staff were more like Hitler’s generals. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs has called him “fascist to the core.” Even Darth Vader and his daughter (not Leia; the other one) are dead-set against him. These are not leftists; they’re diehard conservatives Trump himself hired. They worked closely with him and many are now pleading for the public not to vote him back in. Take the hint.
Donald Trump is out of it and not up to the job of presidency. I don’t know exactly what his problem is but his mental faculties have been deteriorating as this campaign goes on. He’s babbling—I’m sorry, weaving—about sharks and electric boats and Hannibal Lecter as if he’s a real person. It’s not clear that he knows asylum for immigrants is not the same as an asylum for the mentally ill. He grinned like a dimwit and gave a thumbs-up over a soldier’s grave at Arlington. “They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats!” “There are some places, your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl.” He’s yapping about Arnold Palmer’s endowment. He fell asleep at his own trial and fell asleep at a campaign event. He’s too “exhausted” to go to scheduled events. Last weekend Donald Trump—a 78-year-old man—simulated manual and oral sex with a microphone stand at a rally. It just goes on and on and on. If your father acted like this, you’d call a family meeting and discuss options. The press ran Biden out of town on a rail over a lot less. The worst, for me, was Trump playing “Ave Maria” and “YMCA” and swaying to the music for 39 minutes at one of his rallies. You could make a meme or a joke out of this but imagine giving the nuclear biscuit back to someone who fugues out like this. It’s really not funny at all.
Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden Bund rally—all its ugliness and hate—crystallized a lot about his appeal and his mission. Some jackwad vomited out vile racism about Puerto Rico (part of the United States!) being a “floating island of garbage” and said Black people were “carving watermelons” instead of pumpkins. He also took a shot at Jewish and Palestinian people. Trump’s once and future advisor echoed a Nazi slogan and said “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Some nut brandished a crucifix and called Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the Devil” and a “prostitute.” Somebody called Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a bitch” (we can assume he only meant the last word of that). These clowns were invited and vetted by the campaign and their words were displayed on the teleprompter, so the campaign knew what they’d say ahead of time. It was the distillation of what this campaign believes. At the rally Trump reiterated that he will use the power of the state to go after the Democrats as the enemy within—people you know; people like me. Donald Trump has been warning us all along of who he is and who he and his goons will come after if he wins. Their vision for America is obscene.
So if you haven’t already, get out and vote, and let’s send this miserable SOB back to Mar-a-Lago!
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