Maybe the weirdest thing about 2020 is that Trump can say that he'll violently resist leaving office if he loses the election and we learn that Republicans and Democrats alike are too timid to clarify to him that treason comes with a death penalty. Trump is a thug who refuses to play by the rules and the GOP are cowards intimidated by this thug and Democrats insist on playing by the rules that he will ignore. And so we’re going to get rid of democracy because a reality TV star who thinks he’s being paid $400,000 a year to tweet decides that he doesn’t like elections.
T.S. Elliot's Poem the Hollow Men closes,
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.”
It seems like it's also the way that democracy will end in America, everyone afraid to mention the penalty for destroying the democracy that so many Americans died to create and protect, afraid to make a fuss out of the fact that a sitting president won’t accept election results. One of the aha’s I had reading history is that people have exactly as much power as other people give them. The Pope could have you burned at the stake for saying the wrong thing … until people decided that he didn’t.
So does Trump have the power to end our 231 year old democracy? If people decide that his feelings and opinion are more important than our democracy, he does. People will argue precedent and tradition and process and laws but it is not that complicated. We decide which is more important: our democracy or Trump’s feelings.
Or maybe this is the weirdest thing about 2020. There are millions of Americans who are actually debating which is more important.
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