Most presidents run on their record when trying to get elected to a second term. Donald Trump can't do that. He can'y do it because his first term was marred by incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption.So, he's taking another path -- a campaign of fear and division. He's trying to scare White voters into believing that other races, religions, and ideologies are going to replace them. He's a bigot, and he's counting on Whites to be so frightened that they will accept his bigotry.
Here's part of what Roger Cohen says about Trump's campaign in The New York Times:
Donald Trump has been all about the fear of replacement, or as it’s sometimes called, “the great replacement.” His has been the stand — I am tempted to say the last stand — of whites against nonwhites.
Of America-first nationalists against migrants; of straight people against L.G.B.T.Q. people; of the gunned-up against the unarmed. Of Trump against all those he believes would replace the likes of him.
All means have been used — lies, brutality, incitement. But fear has been Trump’s main weapon. Fear, which depends on pitting one group against another, is the currency of the Trump presidency. It is therefore no surprise that the America that is about to vote is probably more fractured than at any time since the Vietnam War. . . .
America is particularly susceptible to fear today because the world has changed in unsettling ways. Power has migrated eastward to Asia. America’s recent wars have been unwon. By midcentury, non-Hispanic whites will constitute less than 50 percent of the population.
It is frightening to see an industry disappear, like coal in Kentucky. Trump understood that he could be the voice of that fear. He would build a wall to keep those brown people out!
He is an impostor. He puffs out his chest, Mussolini-style, but he is a bone-spur coward. A narrow ramp makes his limbs tremble. He is good at getting the blood up. He is good at undoing. He is not good at getting anything constructive done.
Less than 20 days.
America will decide whether to opt for the future or burrow self-destructively into some warped fantasy of the past. It will decide whether to reinvent itself again or turn mean and further inward.
As Edward R. Murrow remarked, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
That was in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism. For Senator Joseph McCarthy, the danger to the Republic came from Communist infiltration of American life. The real danger came from his obsessions. From the purges and blacklists that branded countless Americans as un-American.
Murrow, a great journalist, stood up to McCarthy.
Donald Trump does business the McCarthy way. He deals in specters: immigrants, and Muslims, and brown people, and Black people, and L.G.B.T.Q. people.
As with McCarthy, however, the real danger comes from Trump’s obsessions, not from these imagined enemies. . . .
Is it unreasonable to see renewal in a 77-year-old man, Joe Biden? No. We live in the real world, where the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Indecency demands the restoration of decency. That’s ground zero of this election. The choice was starkly evident in the televised town hall events Thursday as Trump spouted wild far-right conspiracy theories while Biden had the self-deprecating honesty to say that if he lost, it could suggest he’s “a lousy candidate.” Biden is not a lousy candidate; he is a good man, a brave man. I doff my hat to any parent who survives with such dignity the loss of two of his four children.
Of McCarthy, Murrow observed: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”
The fault is in ourselves. Time for Americans to look in the mirror — and realize their America is irreplaceable if it is lost.
