As the presidential election of 2020 unfolds in the US, there remains a dire need to improve America’s understanding of the enormity of what is at stake. Politics has colloquially been regarded as a subjective matter of opinions and arguments for us, especially for families around the holidays. Yet if that was the case before, it is certainly not a subjective matter of opinions any longer.
We have two choices for president, presenting us with two objectively divergent paths to take this country down. One path will begin to restore and heal our constitutional and democratic republican institutions from the damage done to them by the current administration. The other path will continue eroding them, replacing them with a new admixture of nationalistic and theocratic dictatorship. If this election goes wrong, generations of Americans to come will grow up and live under the very tyranny that past generations of Americans fought and died to protect us from becoming.
After the Constitutional Convention had concluded in September of 1787, Dr. Benjamin Franklin was asked by Mrs. Elizabeth Powell, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”[1] Dr. Franklin’s fortuitous news that day bore with it an ominous tone of forewarning, and came to foreshadow the history of the United States to the present day. Even moreso in more recent history, for with the advent of greater freedom for all Americans comes the dual-edged sword of voters’ power and voters’ responsibility to be diligent, deliberate, and reasonable decision makers.[2] When Dr. Franklin spoke to Mrs. Powell, he implied a skepticism of the human lust for power, forewarning of the inevitable temptation of power by lesser men to corrupt the republic and devolve the nation back to tyranny. The price of freedom is therefore vigilance. Not vigilance in the armed defense of the nation, which while also necessary, has certainly not been our nation’s weakness for quite some time now. Rather, it is vigilance of the mind that we the people must possess… if we wish to remain a free nation.
In light of this urgently needed wish, I’ve updated my post “The Right Answers” from a year ago,[3] and repost it here.
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On two occasions, I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
– Charles Babbage (1791-1871), designer of mechanical calculators.
In the summer of 2018, I was asked by someone what I don’t like about President Donald Trump. This was asked, as if it were a reasonable question about a normal, competent person of interest. For a long moment, I could only silently stare back in pensive astonishment.
Dozens of answers flooded into my mind at once. I’d immediately related to what Mr. Babbage had once said when, I imagine, he found himself similarly astonished by the extraordinary confusion of ideas required to even provoke such an exceptionally benighted question in the first place.
Eventually, my astonishment faded enough for me to form a coherent response. I answered with another question:
“Where should I begin?”
Later that day, I wrote down dozens of topics one could cover in response to this question. It occurred to me that I could write a blog with this list. A blog would have the advantage of freeing me from the onerous chagrin I feel whenever the dreaded subject of politics comes up in conversation. I could instead explore my thoughts on this so-called presidency in written form, then simply refer others to it when asked my opinion.
Hence, welcome to my blog.
The Crisis We Face
The premise of this blog begins with the fact that Donald Trump is profoundly unfit for the office of President of the United States. It further asserts that, in order to protect their own power and wealth as well as assert their harmful religious doctrine onto the populace as secular law, most Republicans in Congress have joined with right-wing media propagandists to collectively con Americans into believing a false narrative. Their motivations for doing so are twofold: the fear of rejecting a favored figure among their constituent voters, and being bribed by Trump’s many appointments of conservatives to the federal courts, including three of the nine Supreme Court justices. Together, they collectively portray a false narrative of Trump as a generally good president who happens to be the victim of false allegations. These traitors to the nation foster this collective lie, even at the cost of betraying the very constitutional principles and institutions which protect America from devolving into tyranny.
The aim of this blog is to satisfactorily demonstrate this premise with an evidence-based analysis in time. For now, let us begin with a summary of reasons why we must deem Mr. Trump so extraordinarily unfit for office:
- He has shown strong authoritarian tendencies. He has repeatedly defied the constitution. He has infringed upon its framework of checks and balances and upon several Amendments in order to empower himself. He has abused his presidential powers. He has chosen cabinet members on the basis of personal loyalty to himself (as a king would), rather than on their competence and higher loyalty to the country and the execution of their lawful duties (as should be the case). He has also engaged in nepotism by appointing several family members to prominent positions in his administration. These are features we usually find in dictatorships and organized crime, not the presidency.
- He has demonstrated extreme incompetence as President of the United States. He fails to understand even the basic facts of the issues he’s promised to solve, such as the fact that building his idiotic border wall neglects the fact that a bigger or wider wall would not obstruct undocumented immigrants from entering the country; the vast majority are either already here in the country (i.e. with expired visas), enter through ports of entry, or enter by airplane. Being so badly ill-informed, his solutions therefore tend to be absurd at best, if not outright dangerous. He furthermore has demonstrated a failure to comprehend how the job of president is supposed to work, or how the federal government works more broadly, such as by failing to understand that the attorney general is not his personal attorney (it is the chief law officer of the nation). He also lacks the maturity or temperament required to even adequately perform his duties.
- He has demonstrably stated or restated tens of thousands of lies, falsehoods, and exaggerations during his presidency. A con artist and compulsive liar, he repeats his lies over and over again, knowing that many people do not fact check information and, like sheep, tend to believe whatever is repeated often and with confidence whether true or not.
- He has demonstrably endangered and jeopardized the nation and the people’s lives with an extraordinarily dismal COVID-19 pandemic response. His incompetence has taken the forms of ineffective actions, counterproductive actions, and inaction. Coupled by his selfish desire to confidently appear totally in control while being out of control (i.e. by consistently downplaying the virus, dangerously flaunting expert medical recommendations like mask-wearing, falsely claiming the virus itself is a hoax, or falsely declaring victory against the pandemic while record numbers of deaths are occurring throughout the US), he has needlessly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths (and still counting), severely crippled the US economy, and caused an untold quantity of general suffering for Americans everywhere.
- He has threatened the constitutional rights of American citizens as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, including the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, and citizenship status. For instance, his use of federal troops to clear legally assembled and peaceful protestors in order to make a publicity stunt for his own approval, or his multiple attempts to ban all Muslims from the country, including American citizens at first.
- He has attempted to cheat in the presidential election. By falsely declaring mail-in ballots fraudulent in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, purposely slowing the US Postal Service’s capacity to sort and distribute mail, and coupled by Republican efforts to both discourage and discount votes for Democrats (i.e. gerrymandering districts to cheat in favor of Republicans, closing down voting places to force Democratic voters to travel long distances, wait many hours in line, or not get to vote due to being poor and not owning a car, using the false pretense of voting fraud prevention to exclude or discount votes from legitimate Democratic voters), he has actively tried to exclude legitimate votes for Joe Biden. He has also openly encouraged the hostile nation of Russia to commit crimes against his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, to continue its efforts to spread propaganda on his behalf in both elections, and sought to tarnish his current opponent Joe Biden by attempting to blackmail Ukraine into trumping up false allegations against him and his son.
- He has infringed on humanitarian rights, such as by using the federal government’s agencies to commit child abuse, kidnapping, and child imprisonment at the Mexican border.
- He has infringed upon American Indian rights, such as ignoring legal treaties to push for the construction of oil pipelines through their territories against their will, thereby breaking the law, poisoning their water supplies, and disturbing their cemeteries and religious practices.
- He has demonstrably attempted to obstruct justice, a serious federal crime, on many occasions. He tried to halt multiple legitimate, independent federal investigations into the questionable activities of his own presidential campaign and administration. He has also repeatedly defamed those investigating him, in attempts to tarnish their reputations and cast undeserved doubt about their motives. The only reason why he was not criminally indicted for these or his other crimes (see next) is because a sitting president is constitutionally immune to being charged with crimes; constitutionally, he must first be impeached and removed from office before he can be indicted (which the Republican controlled Senate refused to do in spite of overwhelming evidence of his criminal wrong doing, his traitorous actions, and his abuse of power). And since the Senate’s sham of an impeachment trial completed, his abuse of power has only been emboldened by their lack of applying any consequences to his actions. Very openly, he has since taken personal revenge on several key trial witnesses only doing their constitutional duty, by harassing them, demoting them, or firing them – all because they did not show him personal loyalty and criminally perjure themselves to protect him.
- On a similar note, he has also attempted to solicit criminal actions from at least ten individuals on his behalf for his personal gain, including members of his administration and his own lawyer.
- He has corrupted the office of presidency by unconstitutionally and criminally using it to benefit himself financially, including accepting bribes from foreign governments for special favors.
- He has also been found guilty of committing multiple counts of fraud in a court of law before his presidency, and has been indirectly implicated in two counts of breaching presidential campaign finance laws.
- He has repeatedly betrayed the United States, enthusiastically encouraging Russia, a hostile foreign power, to perpetrate cyber attacks against the United States and our electoral integrity for his own personal gain. He has repeatedly stated that he finds nothing wrong with breaking the law against accepting foreign influence into U.S. elections, and would do it again if it served him. He’s even allowed Russia to place bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan without consequence.
- He has alienated our allies by breaking important agreements and treaties, by taunting world leaders with personal attacks, by making dangerously foolish and haphazard threats against other nations, by showing a curious favoritism towards dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea, and thereby tarnishing our nation’s reputation around the world. He has destabilized international relations, has earned the world’s distrust towards our commitment to agreements and treaties, and has caused the rest of the world to regard the United States as dishonorable and unworthy of world leadership.
- He has vastly destabilized relations with Iran, directly precipitating the current crisis and the potential for war by canceling a crucial deal that had at least guaranteed Iran would not build nuclear weapons for ten years; he destroyed all credibility and trust, failed to replace the deal, and essentially enabled Iran to begin building nuclear weapons immediately.
- He has demonstrably shown an affinity for white supremacists and nationalists, including members of the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Leaders in the ANP and the KKK have repeatedly and publicly praised him for his support.
- He is a racist, a misogynist, and a bigot. He has made numerous efforts to undermine equality under the law for all, and has made many racist, misogynist, and bigoted statements. Though yet to be proven in court, he has been convincingly accused of rape by multiple victims as well.
- He has damaged environmental protections by negligently deregulating air pollution, water pollution, and other environmental and health hazards. His administration has buried studies on climate change and other environmental threats, even removing the language of climate change itself from the EPA’s discourse, and has drastically reduced its policing of violations.
- He and the Republicans in Congress have jointly attacked the Affordable Care Act. This act reduced the uninsured population from more than one in six Americans (around 17% to 18%) to fewer than one in ten (around 9% to 10%) within five years of its passage. Poor and middle-class Americans who have had health insurance and who could not have afforded it otherwise benefited invaluably. In 2017, the only reason why the newly insured did not lose their insurance is because one man, Senator John McCain, defied his party’s expectations and voted not to rescind the act. Neither Republicans nor the president had a plan to replace the ACA when they almost unanimously voted to throw the over 20 million beneficiaries off of their insurance. Republicans in Congress only winged a sham of a replacement plan up after failing to rescind the ACA without a replacement twice; their so-called American Health Care Act provided far less coverage, especially for the poor and older women under Medicare age. President Trump, his lies to the contrary, continues to lack any health care replacement plan whatsoever.
- His administration has severely undermined personal privacy by negligently deregulating communications companies for the sake of corporate profits. Internet and phone companies were made free to browse and sell your personal communications and data to other companies and governments, including foreign governments, without your consent.
- Contrary to popular belief, he has shown a poor understanding of economics and business. In spite of falsely blaming President Obama for a bad economy and taking credit for the economic recovery, the evidence shows that it recovered in the final years of President Obama’s administration instead, though part of the credit goes to the global economy’s recovery more broadly. He also shows a failure to understand basic economic concepts, such as what a tariff is: in spite of his false statements which suggest the opposite, a tariff is actually a tax on Americans who buy products from other countries. His tariffs have actually had detrimental effects on the United States economy for the most part, forcing some small American manufacturing businesses to close, and prompting Trump to ironically create a federal assistance program to help the American farmers his own tariffs were putting out of business.
Dozens of additional points could be added for even more completeness. But, that all said, the crisis facing the nation right now is not really the president per se. The real crisis is the very unfortunate fact that around one in three Americans continue to approve of this reality TV celebrity’s horror show of an administration. And that ratio of support, above all else in American life, should rightly give us great cause for concern for the nation’s future as a democracy.
The root cause is therefore, in a word, ignorance.
The Antidote to Ignorance
I am a student of history, with a formal university education in the field. As such, I’ve learned the skills required to make me an information literate citizen. Information literacy is the antidote to ignorance. It’s the skill set required to conduct proper research, including critical thinking and the ability to locate and evaluate sources of information for their quality of content. Information literacy is required in order to arrive at the truth for yourself.
It’s a commonly believed fallacy that all news media sources are biased and lie. There are multiple faults with this falsehood that only a nuanced explanation can best break down. For now, simply understand that news media sources range from the reliable and trustworthy down to the highly untrustworthy. With a wide range of quality, the real question is how to know which are the information sources you can trust.
Yet I depend on my own independent research to inform my conclusions, which in turn inform my evaluation of the quality of news media sources. The Media Bias Chart published by Ad Fontest Media is a great place to start one’s research.[4] Yet I do not simply rely on others to tell me what is true and false. I actually know how to critically discern the quality of information through identifying and accounting for factors such as author bias, confirmation bias, lies by omission to support false conclusions, and various other causes of falsehoods. And so rather than simply tell you what I think is correct, I will also teach you how to figure it out for yourself.
Hope
While my hope in writing this blog is to convince as many Americans as possible to abandon their support for the autocratic clown and his circus side show of horrors, I also have another purpose. The root cause of the election of President Trump is the ignorance of the American people, which is to say the failure of too many to properly understand or utilize information literacy skills. Hence, I aim to teach my readers to be information literate citizens: to encourage the abandonment of fictional narratives, subjective speculations, and spurious surmises, and to arm you instead with the tools required to properly understand and identify the facts from the fictions for yourself. I endeavor to teach you how to properly evaluate the quality of sources of information for yourself, to arrive at the truth by yourself.
Ultimately, this blog’s true purpose then is to help to dispel the causes of American ignorance. To improve our ability to critically think and evaluate information, thereby reducing our susceptibility to the unprecedented populism, demagoguery, and con artistry that has been happening under this presidency. To diminish the potential unraveling and destruction of our democratic institutions that are beginning to give rise to autocratic rule in the United States.
This blog is for every concerned citizen who cares about our future as a democratic nation. It’s not only for those of you who agree with my premise. It’s for every registered voter and young potential voter who wants to become a better informed citizen, as the Founders intended. Facts are objectively true, and they’re true for everyone. I therefore assert that through learning the fact-finding tools of information literacy, you will inevitably and independently arrive at the same conclusions that I have. So regardless of your political ideology or party, I hope you will join me on this quest to restore sober-minded sanity to America.
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In the meantime, if you are on the fence about voting, whether you believe in the fictional narrative that all politicians are equally corrupt and all the same, or you were a Trump supporter who has begun to doubt some of what he’s done, I hope you seriously consider what I’ve written here and have the presence of mind to be motivated to go out and vote for Joe Biden for President. American generations to come are counting on all of us to make better choices.
Sources
[1] “Papers of Dr. James McHenry on the Federal Convention of 1787,” The American Historical Review 11, no. 3 (1906): 595-624, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1836024 (accessed Oct. 29, 2020), p. 618.
[2] Alexander Hamilton, “The Mode of Electing the President,” The Federalist, no. 68, Mar. 14, 1788, republished by Library of Congress, https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-61-70#s-lg-box-wrapper-25493455 (accessed Oct. 29, 2020).
[3] “The Right Answers,” Whats Wrong?, June 26, 2019, https://whatswrong.water.blog/2019/06/26/the-right-answers/ (accessed Oct. 29, 2020).
[4] “Media Bias Chart,” Ad Fontes Media, https://www.adfontesmedia.com/ (accessed Oct. 29, 2020).
What's Wrong? 