(Dobbs) If You Vote Tomorrow, Think About All This!
Trump's not on the ballot but if the Trump Party wins big, Trump wins big.
On this election eve, since Census figures suggest that almost one in three of you has yet to cast your ballot and will vote tomorrow, on Election Day itself, I’m going to go all partisan on you, and there’s a good reason why. We’re not dealing any more with Democrats vs Republicans. We’re talking about the Democratic Party vs the Trump Party. To say it plainly if alarmingly, we are choosing between one party, admittedly, that’s too liberal for many Americans, versus the other that’s downright dangerous for us all.
If you haven’t voted yet, that’s what you’re voting on: whether the Democratic Party or the Trump Party will secure control of Congress, and whether the Democratic Party or the Trump Party will win control of statehouses and legislatures where the future of free elections, and compliance with fair elections, will be decided. Having passed laws these past two years to make it harder for many citizens to vote while continuing without credible cause to contest the election of 2020, the Trump Party already has shown its disdain for all that.
If we were only dealing with traditional ideological differences, I’d try to convince you that the Democratic Party wants to keep creating programs that make our lives better and safer— cheaper healthcare, safer streets, modernized transportation, cleaner air, and an equitable system of taxation, not to mention the protection of civil and human rights. The Democrats don’t get everything right, and sometimes, hostage to their own left wing, they overshoot. But are your highways getting fixed, are your vaccinations free and accessible, are your prescriptions soon to cost less? Maybe most Americans these days aren’t big fans of Joe Biden, but there’s not an American alive who hasn’t somehow been the beneficiary of a program his Democrats have passed in the last two years.
By and large, the Trump Party would reverse a lot of that. The Trump Party pretty much wants to just take things away. Thanks to the conservative majority they confirmed to the Supreme Court, a score of states already have taken away a woman’s right to an abortion, they’ve annihilated the right of local communities to enact common sense gun reform, and in some states, they’ve even removed the right of school districts to teach a curriculum that recognizes the diversity of American citizens and American history. They’ve hinted at reducing more rights that have taken root in our lives.
Some of the Trump Party’s leading lights also have threatened to shrink or eventually even stamp out Social Security and Medicare. If you’re not old enough yet to be a beneficiary, the day will come, if they survive. They’ve vowed to stop spending federal dollars to battle the climate change that has been causing more fires and floods and deadlier storms than ever before. They’ve hinted at pulling back on American support for Ukraine in its oppressive war with Russia, as if letting Vladimir Putin get away with genocide isn’t a perilous precedent and as if geopolitically, a Russian triumph wouldn’t lead to more of our allies under threat from the Russian bear. It probably would. The risk for us is, anything that weakens our allies weakens us.
All of that is bad enough. But that’s not the sum total of the danger if the Trump Party takes control of Congress. Because what they’ll also erase is the legacy of the January 6th Committee, which has been getting at the root of the insurrection and looking for ways to not just punish those who took part but to deter like-minded subversives from doing something similar in the future. From what leaders of the Trump Party have said, apparently investigating the president’s son Hunter Biden, who might be criminally liable for his business associations, his tax reporting, and the purchase of a firearm, is far more critical for the security of our nation than investigating a ferocious attempt to overturn an election and carry out a coup. Donald Trump has even pledged, if he wins back the White House in two years, to consider pardons for every convicted insurrectionist. He said in a September interview, “I mean full pardons, with an apology to many.”
You’re voting on that, too.
No, Trump’s name is not on tomorrow’s ballot, but if the Trump Party takes Congress, it will likely nudge him that much closer to running again for president. And then those pardons, those apologies, could become a reality. And, as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman posited last week, we could end up with a presidential cabinet from hell: “Imagine… that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defense secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman.”
The petrifying thing is, we can no longer laugh at the prospect.
But we can laugh at what the chairwoman of Trump’s Party, Ronna McDaniel, said yesterday on CNN: ”If we win back the House and the Senate, it's the American people saying to Joe Biden, ‘We want you to work on behalf of us and we want you to work across the aisle and solve the problems that we are dealing with’.”
It’s laughable because it’s so hypocritically transparent. Two years ago, the American people chose a White House and a Congress controlled by Democrats, in effect saying to the Trump Party, “We want you to work on behalf of us and we want you to work across the aisle and solve the problems that we are dealing with.” It’s no secret, that didn’t happen. To the contrary, both Senate leader Mitch McConnell and House leader Kevin McCarthy declared that their sole priority was to block Joe Biden and stop the Democratic agenda.
So yes, I’ve gone full partisan in this column. There’s so much at stake. Not only in this 2022 election, but in the 2024 election too, just two years from tomorrow.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
And…what about the Trumpians obsession with Hungary’s Orban?
Well said and necesary remnder. Thanks Greg