Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the NY Times and The Guardian

The U.S. election is only days away and the vast majority of people around the world are holding their breath awaiting the outcome. The choices could not be more glaring and yet no one seems to know with any confidence what the outcome will be despite polls showing a large lead for the Biden/Harris ticket. In Trumpland what should be a no-brainer slam-dunk win for Biden has turned into a toss-up.

This is due to the voting system in the U.S. Individual states, rather than having a sensible voting process like Canada where everyone goes to their local school to vote (what could be easier) are instead mired in a Republican / Democratic stand-off where in Texas a single voting area of millions of voters has one ballot box. If this isn’t voter suppression, I don’t know what is. All across the states similar methods are used to ensure that the poor and marginalized Black, Latino/a and other minorities don’t vote because they will tend to vote Democrat in overwhelming numbers. This is why Donald Trump has repeatedly and without any evidence called into question the entire voting process and heavily criticized mail-in ballots as fraudulent. But in Trumpland he is rarely called for these gross errors by the media who accept his characterizations as valid. He is allowed to criticize the Biden/Harris ticket as the radical, socialist left when in reality it is his radical, fascist right that is ruling the nation. Biden/Harris are in reality just salt-of-the-earth liberal Demcrats who are slightly right of center but in Trumpland these are crazy radicals. Democratic socialism like Bernie Sanders advocates is not the Communism of the McCarthy era but a forward-thinking socialism like that practised in the Scandinavian countries that are some of the most successful countries in the world for economic performance, healthcare and the happiness of their people. Trump can claim none of these for the U.S. Are the U.S. people really opposed to Medicare for all like we have in Canada, or free daycare or kindergarten programs? What is wrong with the voters? This ielection is about great ideas not slotting people into political cubbyholes. It is about shifting the mass of wealth that at the top that exists in a couple of hundred families in the U.S. to pay for reasonable expectations of their people. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain. Donald Trump’s laissez-faire capitalism was proven to be a miserable failure in the 1800s and it continues to be a massive disaster in 2020. The U.S. is the last of the great powers to realize this. The pay-as-you-go system in the U.S. does not work. Trump’s fear campaign cannot work. Trump’s rhetoric has skewed the political spectrum so far to the right that the country may never recover. He is asking people to vote for an extreme right-wing, fascist agenda while rejecting the middle of the road in Joe Biden.

Donald Trump is an obnoxious, rude and inveterate liar, a misogynist, racist and boorish individual who is the antithesis of the image of a competent President of the United States and yet almost astoundingly he has a small committed group of extreme right-wing supporters from white nationalists, to neo-Nazis and Christian fundamentalists who hang on his every lie. He has been bankrupt repeatedly and yet says he is going to save the economy. In a normal society these radical fringe groups would not even be given the time of day but in the Trump bully-pulpit they have a big, amplified voice. This is a choice between dictatorship and democracy, insanity and sanity and irrationality and reason. To the rest of the world it is amazing that anyone would vote for Trump – it seems incomprehensible electoral madness. Clearly the United States is no longer a democracy but is sliding quickly into an authoritarian dictatorship characterized by authoritarianism, whims, violence and domination that will end in a bloody civil war.

Most of Donald Trump’s record is one of his own making – a series of lies and half-truths that he invents on the fly and Tweets out to the world. He is eager for praise and recognition while doing nothing to earn it. If he does not get his way the child-dictator pouts and lashes out calling people idiots and incompetents. He shirks responsibility at every turn. In the depths of a COVID-19 pandemic he was unsure what to do so he shifted responsibility off on to the Governors and let them deal with all the fallout. Then he criticized the Democrats and feted the Republicans indicriminately. He has had a revolving door of administrators whose only job is to agree with Trump. If they don’t they get fired. He is the only President who has operated the country  as an individual fiefdom. He has disdained all things rational from wearing masks to voting. He is constantly breaking down rational thinking, scientific facts and traditional media  while embracing misinformation, conspiracy theories, supporting bizarre right-wing groups and has a personal propaganda network in FOX News to broadcast his distorted message. His rhetoric has convinced media that there is a new normal in the Presidency to the point that they even take his false observations about socialism and other things and ask the opposing candidates to respond as did the interviewers on 60 Minutes broadcast. Everything has moved on in the last seventy-five years except Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a living fiction. He has no credibility, little reason nor the simplest vestiges of sanity or intelligence. He fancies himself as Benito Mussolini. The real question for voters is, is Donald Trump sane?

Biden/Harris are the choices for President and Vice-President. In contrast to Donald Trump Joe Biden is a solid, low-key, get-the-job-done performer who has served for decades in U.S. Government, has a history of personal tragedy and success and has served as Vice-President to Barack Obama for eight years. He is a decent person who is dedicated to his faith. The Inited States citizens reject this at their great peril.