Trump has no respect for the basic mechanisms of democracy.

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/trump-election-disdain/678662/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/DNRPu

One common thread connects nearly every major scandal involving Donald Trump: his absolute disdain for the democratic process.

That is certainly true of his recent conviction in New York on 34 felony counts. The charges themselves focused on fraudulent business records created by the Trump Organization to cover up the paper trail left by hush-money payments made in 2016 to women who’d claimed past relationships with Trump. But as the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office made clear to the jury, the motivation behind the payments had everything to do with preventing voters from being truthfully informed about the candidate before they went to the polls.

That instance is no outlier. Trump has shown no respect for elections as a mechanism for governing society since the beginning of his political rise. In the final stretch of the 2016 campaign, he promised that he would accept the results of the election “if I win.” When it came time for his reelection campaign in 2020, he wasted no time in casting doubt on the integrity of the vote—beginning that spring with attacks on the reliability of mail-in balloting and escalating after Election Day to lawsuits, fraudulent electoral certificates, and eventually encouragement of a violent insurrection at the Capitol.

In the runup to this year’s elections, Trump’s efforts to undermine public faith in the process began even earlier. As the indictments against him started to roll in over the spring and summer of 2023, Trump claimed that the four criminal cases constituted “election interference” by Democrats out to damage his chances. “They rigged the presidential election of 2020,” he declares in many iterations of his stump speech, “and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.” He kept up these complaints over the course of the hush-money trial in New York: “This is a Biden witch hunt to keep me off the campaign trail,” he insisted to the press one day from a dim courtroom hallway. “election interference!!!” he posted as the jurors deliberated.

Trump is, as ever, a master of projection. The matter of underhanded meddling in elections did indeed take center stage during his New York trial—but the person orchestrating this meddling was Trump himself.

*snip*

[Lonestarblue]

1. The Republican Party also has no respect for democracy.

Trump is only part of the problem. If elected, he won’t care what other like the Heritage Foundation leaders and people like Leonard Leo do. All he will care about is turning the DOJ into his personal hit squad for prosecuting and imprisoning political opponents who have committed no crimes but for whom fake evidence of crimes will be manufactured. I honestly believe that Trump would be thrilled to order the execution of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Too many voters refuse to see the risks of giving Republicans full power again, assuming that another term for Trump is not dangerous since he was prevented from destroying the government during his presidency and he failed to overturn the election and install himself as president. The safeguards that prevented Trump’s worst instincts will no longer be there in a second term.