Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

Mass death and treason are Trump's political tools--and his assault on our democracy is ongoing

Photo by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash

Guest Post by Alan D. Blotcky, PhD and Seth D. Norrholm, PhD.

We must save our democracy and the American people from the deadly and treasonous Donald Trump.

The ex-President has made it clear that he has his sights on the White House again in 2024. He is driven by a yearning to redeem himself after his disgraceful exit from office; an exit he has yet to admit even occurred. His humiliation is eating away at him. As of this past Saturday night, he is still promulgating “The Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him when, in fact, he lost by 7 million votes and was rebuffed by the American people.

Trump’s continued influence in our politics is a sign that democracy’s survival is still in question. He does not love democracy. All he cares about is his power, his control, his greed, and his corruption with impunity. A second “Big Lie” is that Trump cares about America. Nothing could be further from the truth. He views America as a pawn to be manipulated to meet his own personal and political needs. His goal is to be a dictator in an autocracy.

The death of democracy is his mission. But he hasn’t stopped there.

Early in 2020, as the sitting President, Trump refused to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously for fear that it would hurt his re-election chances. He did not mount a national response to the pandemic and instead relied on lies, conspiracy theories, and magical thinking to distract and fool the American people. Hundreds of thousands of Americans perished under his watch. The pandemic wreaked havoc on America because of his irresponsible, reckless, and botched handling of the national medical emergency. Many experts believe Trump was an accessory to murder because of his intentional and purposeful inaction.

But American mass death did not end there and the evolution of the Republican party in Trump’s image has been much, much worse. Just like Trump, these racists, xenophobes, white supremacists, seditionists, and greedy elitists are willing to sacrifice American democracy and the lives of American citizens for their own hatred, grievances, and ravenous desire for power. Trump wannabes and copycats like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott have used the deaths of thousands more Americans, largely due to the blockade of pandemic mitigation steps such as masks and vaccines, as a political tool. In other words, mass death has been normalized, sanitized, and polished as means to gain or maintain political power.

By some truly gross calculations, Republicans appear to believe that the continuation of the pandemic and its horrific aftereffects will hurt Democratic candidates in 2022 and 2024 as they mendaciously blame President Biden and his Administration for failing to end the pandemic.    

The Republican strategy is clear: to suppress the vote, to lie and promulgate conspiracy theories about their opponents, to make sure that elections can be overturned in their favor, and to ignore the body count accumulating along the way. Republicans want to sabotage democratic ideals and sacrifice lives while pretending to care about them. Another Big Lie.

Our democracy continues to hang in the balance as we march toward 2024.

We are facing a constitutional crisis, one that started with the election of a conman in 2016. He has energized millions of Americans who see him as their exalted cult leader who will take them to the promised land. They see him as their best chance to regain power so that their platform of hate and racial animosity and class grievances can dominate in America. They have been radicalized to view their fellow citizens as enemies—a not-so-transparent callback to the U.S. Civil War. Dehumanization of one’s fellow man is a gateway step to the type of violent authoritarianism that fueled the atrocities that occurred in Nazi Germany.

Trump incited an insurrection of our democracy on January 6th so that he could remain in power despite losing the open and transparent election. Democracy and the will of the people were of no concern to him. The lives of members of Congress, Congressional staff members, and the very group of society he vowed to back—law enforcement—meant nothing to him. Cops died. Some of his followers died. His followers continue to die—often with deathbed pleas for the vaccine they refused because of the insidious nature of Trumpism.

Until Trump and his influence is permanently quashed, our democracy’s viability and American lives are threatened. We must not take them for granted.

We can’t believe this has to be said, but willful killing of Americans and outright treason cannot be tolerated.

Alan D. Blotcky, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Birmingham, Alabama. Follow him on Twitter: @ABlotcky.

Seth D. Norrholm, PhD, is associate professor in psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. Follow him on Twitter: @SethN12.

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