By Mordecai Specktor
Elections 2024 and the aftermath
From time to time, I’ve noted Donald Trump’s hostility to American Indians. Going back 30 years, Trump derided tribes opening casinos that could compete with his Atlantic City gambling emporiums (which he later bankrupted).
“Donald Trump claimed that Indian reservations had fallen under mob control. He secretly paid for more than $1 million in ads that portrayed members of a tribe in Upstate New York as cocaine traffickers and career criminals,” the Washington Post reported on July 25, 2016. “And he suggested in testimony and in media appearances that dark-skinned Native Americans in Connecticut were faking their ancestry.”
“I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations,” Trump said during a 1993 radio interview with shock jock Don Imus, according to the WaPo story titled “Donald Trump’s long history of clashes with Native Americans.”
The story continued: “Trump’s harsh rhetoric on Native Americans was part of his aggressive war on the expanding Native American casino industry during the 1990s, which posed a threat to his gambling empire. The racially tinged remarks and broad-brush characterizations that Trump employed against Indian tribes for over a decade provided an early glimpse of the kind of incendiary language that he would use about racial and ethnic groups in the 2016 presidential campaign.”
And in his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump has gone hard against undocumented migrants in this country. During the televised debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the GOP presidential nominee famously declared that Haitians residing legally in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Trump is a malign buffoon who poses a clear and present danger to this country’s representative democracy, such as it is. We don’t have a parliamentary system with myriad political parties; so, the only way to stop Trump and the unsavory faction that supports him is to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket. Like millions of others in this country, I hope to never hear the whiny, grating voice of Donald Trump again. As the social media meme suggests: Voting Prevents Unwanted Presidencies.
Beyond Election Day on Nov. 5, the possibility of civil disorder looms — whoever wins the presidential election.
“Today the U.S. political situation radiates civil instability,” write Steven Simon (not the Minnesota secretary of state) and Jonathan Stevenson, in the Nov. 7, 2024, issue of The New York Review of Books. “Extremism stoked on the internet has generated the kind of stark disengagement with opposing positions that is conducive to violence. Virulent groups are gaining traction by voicing intense hostility to a federal government perceived as heavy-handed and excessively protective of minorities — an attitude that has coursed through some parts of America for decades, just beneath the surface.”
In this divisive period, the preponderance of political violence is coming from extremist right-wing groups, as we saw in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol. Trump incited the MAGA mob to march to the Capitol as members of Congress were in the process of certifying the Electoral College votes. Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen” provided the inspiration for the riot at the Capitol
(The planning for January 6 by the group Stop the Steal, leading Trump partisans and various right-wing paramilitary groups, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Patriot Front, is documented in a documentary film, Fight Like Hell, which is streaming on YouTube. The film features extended clips of the violent clash that haven’t been seen previously.)
Getting back to the article by Simon and Stevenson, the authors mention that, in the event of a Trump-Vance victory, “possible provocations for a newly elected Trump to assert autocratic authority are easy to picture. Mass protests could erupt over a federal program of mass deportation or a renewed tolerance for racially tinged law enforcement excesses. Effectively shielded by the Supreme Court from criminal liability, Trump would have the license to try whatever he wanted through established bureaucratic channels, subject only to weakened structural and political checks.
It is well short of outlandish to imagine him designating antifa activists as terrorists, invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law, selectively suspending constitutional protections, and having opposition figures charged with sedition — all of which he contemplated in 2020 and supporters like Steve Bannon, retired general Mike Flynn, and Roger Stone have broadly advocated.”
I hope that this dystopian future does not come to pass.
