To the Editor:
Last Thursday, Trump put on another master class in “Magical Thinking” for those prone to mystification and immune to evidence. Another manipulation of reality that defied logic, but he hoped will sell tickets at election time. In an address to the nation, Trump first tested the waters by declaring he was, “happy to report that the country is safer, stronger and far wealthier than it has ever been before.” He clearly thinks we’re all insensate.
Trump sounded the alarm against China for trying to influence the 2018 and 2020 elections, and dramatically released “declassified critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” (most of which had already been declassified). He curiously omitted mention of 2024 Chinese interference, but if the US elections system is “like that of a third world country,” why would that election result be uniquely legitimate?
Naturally, Trump denounced, and called for sanctions against, China? Negative. He assumed you couldn’t follow the shell containing the pea after his shuffle. Instead, his proposed “cure” for foreign interference is his SAVE Act, a draconian voter ID proposal that is really a voter suppression scheme that would do absolutely NOTHING to prevent China, Russia, or Iran, from electronic interference in elections. The SAVE Act is an attack on the American voter which would order a centralized federal takeover of the voting process, despite the fact that the Constitution gives the states control over elections.
If you weren’t unnerved enough by China’s interference, Trump further warned that thousands of undocumented immigrant votes are illegally being counted. That is a verifiable lie. Only a handful of cases have been identified, but Trump wants you to be more alarmed by false images of hordes of non-citizens voting than you are of an unconstitutional federal takeover of elections and control of your vote. The next day, DHS Secretary Mullin threatened the incarceration of the officials of any state refusing to turn over their voter rolls to the federal government. So, damn the Constitution and the Courts, states’ and voters’ rights.
Trump summarized with one last magic trick, a dire warning that “they” (not China, or immigrants, but now the “deep state”) stole the 2020 election, without identifying who – in his own 4-year administration – had orchestrated or allowed the swindle. Thursday night in an interview, John Solomon, Trump’s long-time staffer admitted, “I only know the intelligence community has zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ‘22 or ‘24” Subsequent local audits, and the Courts, found no evidence of measurable fraud from any source in the 2020 election, either.
Voting mechanisms are not connected to the internet. Trump is trying to set the table to steal the midterms in 3 months and the 2028 general election – not by manipulating machines, but by controlling the voting process (including firing elections officials and suggesting DHS presence at polling sites) and some Republicans are all in. “You know, in California, if you even bring an ID to the polling place, they might put you in jail,” chortled Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).
It was notable last week, too, that Trump’s psychotic attachment to his hybrid power/victim persona is so complete that accomplished, grown men undergoing confirmation hearings for vital jobs, went full-on Sycophantic Wimp, and refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020. They would only say that “he was inaugurated.”
There is no reason, either, to expect that anyone in the WH is honest enough to tell Trump that Iran’s military has not been “obliterated,” and that his war is a growing, world-wide disaster.
Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, Ca.