BY TOM BRENNAN

The painting by Rochester artist Steve Piotrowski, which goes with this cover story for the latest hard copy of the GSO, says it all. We need to stop pretending that this is normal, that this just another partisan election, accompanied by the usual hardball and hyperbole, or the usual arguments about taxes and judges.  Those differences are important. They are hard fought. They will be present in our politics for as along as we have regularly scheduled elections in America.

Creative tension between Democrats and Republicans, between  Right  and Left, has been a strength, and the American people have had a knack for checking the inevitable excesses of  partisans or ideological fetishists.

What we face now is something entirely different and solitary.

It is difficult to know where to start, in summarizing President Trump. Overwhelming the public with outrages against ethics, democracy, and decency is right out of the totalitarian playbook. Trump has done this, and we have become dangerously desensitized. I will focus on the most urgent problem, his hostility to American democracy, and his active efforts to undo it. This is no joke, and if we don’t carry the day on this issue, none of the others will matter.

It would be bad enough if this bizarre accident of a president were merely corrupt, incompetent, and debasing. He is all of those things, and that is more than sufficient reason for voters to turn him out of office. We have survived bad presidents before because we have had checks on the president, in both law and custom. What we confront now is a lawless president, who is openly contemptuous of democratic traditions and advances in our own republic, dangerously and treacherously hostile to our democratic allies around the world, very possibly compromised by our totalitarian adversaries, and a source of encouragement to violent and nihilistic extremists in our own society.

To call this a failed presidency, to call Trump unfit for the responsibilities of this office, is to understate things.

We have never had a president who suggested postponing a presidential election, not even during the Civil War. We never a president, trailing badly for reelection, who sought to undermine confidence in democracy itself by advancing spurious concerns about “voter fraud.” We never had a president refused to accept the outcome of an election, muse in public about serving as president for life, or subvert the Post Office to keep people from voting, a situation aggravated by a deadly pandemic he grotesquely mismanaged. We never had a president who openly encouraged his supporters to go to the polls to intimidate voters.

Not Nixon, or “W,” LBJ, or Clinton in there worst moments.  Not the weak practitioners who occupied the presidency leading up to and following the Civil War.

This is hardly an original thought, but Trump is a bully. Like most bullies, he tests limits, and whines when stood up to.  The limits he is testing with the electoral process is consistent with how he conducted himself in business, his defiance of subpoenas, his general assumption that rules don’t apply to him. Last week he was demanding his attorney general arrest and prosecute his political opponents. We have an expression to describe this behavior: unAmerican activity.  Four years ago, it would been absurd to speculate about a presidential election hinging on who the Army supported.

It matters little that Trump has no ideology, like a Hitler or Mussolini. Trump was a New York City Democrat most of his life.  In his own telling he was schooled by his builder father in the arts of greasing the right palms to get zoning variances and the like. He has been all over the lot on most issues.  Lately he has been a a far right fellow traveler. Nothing in his personal life suggests belief in conservative values. He believes in his own entitlement and aggrandizement. Period.

This is often the case with demagogues.  Governor Faubus was a socialist at first. George Wallace had no interest racism until he saw it empowered him. Neither believed a word they said. It didn’t stop either from doing great harm. Neither got anywhere near the presidency. Their stories ended pathetically, after the public tired of the carnival act.

Having somebody like this in the presidency is a five alarm fire.  Those who have not been run  out of the GOP, currently hold office, and fear the tender mercies of the currently inflamed GOP primary voters do not dare cross the Trump cult. But countless distinguished former GOP senators, governors, diplomats, cabinet members who don’t face the prospect of primaries have endorsed Biden. Polls suggest more Republicans support Biden than Democrats support Trump, a remarkable development in light of Biden having 30 challengers for the nomination, and Trump’s GOP challengers not breaking single digits in primaries.

This not because they crave a Biden presidency, but because they know they can not restore their hijacked party as respectable conservative force until the Trump fever breaks.  Granite Staters who answer this description include ex state party Chair Horn, ex Senator Gordon Humphrey, ex Judge and Congressman Chuck Douglas, who endorsed Biden on the editorial page of his community newspaper, the Bow Times.  They are joined by the Manchester Union Leader.  These are not exactly liberal voices.

Liberals also see the emergency.  Bernie Sanders and most of his organization understand that they can argue with the DLC and other conservative Democrats later. They know which alligator is closest to the canoe, and which one they need to club.

It was different in 2016. The establishment of both parties confronted Trump with smug and entitled competitors. Trump exploited novelty, cultural resentment, the collapse of credible journalism, and a hope that he would rise to the challenge.  We know better now. Republicans and Democrats are coming together as if our democracy faced something akin to a foreign threat.  That is because it does.