It’s obvious that I haven’t been attending to this blog. I haven’t posted since January. It’s not for lack of thinking; it’s just that the news these days is hard to read. As I write this Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the presumptive nominees and one of them will be elected President in November. Virtually every election is known as “the most important of your generation/lifetime/country’s history” but this one may well be.

There’s a lot I don’t need to write about (e.g. Trump’s dozens of indictments) but my fears boil down to this: whichever way the election goes the Trump camp will do their best to end our democracy and usher in a new era of fascism.

I’ve been suggesting that as the legal nooses continue to constrict around his neck Trump will not face justice. He will instead flee to Russia and ask Putin for asylum. This would explain Trump’s continuing craving of Putin’s approval. Unfortunately Trump has been successful in delaying justice through a long, strange series of inane legal arguments. I fear that none of his trials will conclude before the election.

So here’s my fear:

Scenario 1: Trump wins the election. This may sound crazy but he did win in 2016 after I had spent months saying this was impossible. We’re too far away from the election to be able to make a prediction. If he returns to office he has already promised to use the Justice Department to seek revenge against his enemies. See this article in the Texas Tribune. Ironically this is what he charges the Biden administration of doing: weaponizing the Justice Department against him. He also spends a great deal of time talking about the border with Mexico. He clearly can’t close the border as Mexico is much to important a trading partner. But this threats of mass deportation and increased enforcement will discourage some of this and will be bad for the economy. Most importantly he promises to dismantle the executive branch so that loyalty isn’t to the American people but to him. He perpetuates the lie of the existence of a “deep state” of government employees who wish to take down the government by liberal policies; ironically he will attempt to take down the government through his fascist policies. Trump recognized that many of his goals weren’t achieved because he chose people served the American people over him. He won’t make that mistake again.

Scenario 2: Trump loses the election. Even if Biden wins Trump will (again) refuse to accept the results. When this happened in 2021 he tried to block the peaceful transition of power on January 6th. It was a chaotic day filled with mistakes that he won’t make again.

Trump famously predicted that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose support. I didn’t believe him at the time but I do now. His support base is strong and deep and they have lots of guns. I don’t say this lightly but our only real chance of remaining a democracy lies in some outside factor. Polls show that if Trump is convicted in one of his trials he will lose support but I don’t believe that. He’s gotten too much mileage claiming he’s being persecuted. I do believe he’s running in part to avoid jail time; he has already raised the possibility of pardoning himself.

I can’t promise I’ll get any better at posting to this blog but I’ll try.