This healing oratorio was replaced by visible pain. Barack Obama stood in Philadelphia, where the signing of the constitution laid the foundation stone of American democracy, and warned that his successor was ready to tear it all up to cling to power.
The unusual attack by a former president last week on an insider at the virtual Democratic National Convention crystallized fears that Trump poses a harsher danger to the 244-year-old American experiment than any foreign opponent.
While in Russia Vladimir Putin was involved in an election in 2016, it is now the current resident of the White House who seems to be undermining an American election.
“The biggest threat to the nation was an incident threat and still is,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, told MSNBC this week. “The threat from the inside lies in the Oval Office.”
Trump will be nominated by the Republican Party this week for a second term as president. He will deliver his acceptance speech from the White House, an interruption of the tradition that signals the formidable tool of disillusionment at his disposal. This time, critics say, Trump is conducting two campaigns.
One is a brutal partisan attempt to demonize his opponent Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris, the first woman of color on a large party card, whom he has already called “average”, “disgusting” and “a crazy woman”. The other is a disgusting and potentially catastrophic campaign against the integrity of the elections themselves.
The frontier-driving president has spent four years eroding the law, raising constitutional standards and blaspheming the intelligence community. In recent months, dealing with dark questioning that shows he is losing, he has worked to spread disinformation, sow distrust in democratic institutions and plant doubts about whether the election is a free and fair conquest of the popular will will be.
Trump has floated the idea of postponing the election because of the coronavirus pandemic, although he has no power to do so. He has repeatedly refused to say whether he will accept the result, prompting a once-unthinkable discussion on how he could be physically removed from the White House. At a campaign stop in Wisconsin last week, he warned coldly: “The only way we will lose this election is if the elections are rigged.”
He also directed the postal service. With the pandemic making physical distancing imperative, a record number of post-in-votes is expected, meaning the outcome is unlikely to be known on election night. Trump recently acknowledged that he was blocking money sought by Democrats for the postal service so he could stop people voting by mail.
His allergic reaction to mail-in voting is based on the false premise that it has been deceived by fraud, a claim debunked by various fact-checkers and academic studies Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah – are already conducting elections almost entirely post.
Democrats claim the president’s true motive is to decipher millions of their voters; polls show significantly more Republicans than Democrats said they would feel safe acting to vote in person.
Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said: “This is an attempt to do election interference 2.0. This time it is done by this administration and not by a foreign opponent. Not only is Trump trying to undermine the integrity of the election, he is trying to beat fear and chaos into our election.
“We should not try to overheat or eliminate the post office, which I consider to be part of every community’s nerve center. My mother, when I was a child, worked at the postal service so I knew what it meant to people of color. What they do to disrupt the postal service has a double, sometimes triple, impact on communities that have already been left behind and left behind by other factors. “
Amid a nationwide uproar, the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a Trump donor, announced this week that he would stop cuts to the service until after the election to “even prevent the appearance of influence on election post”. Democrats called it a necessary, but not enough, first step to end Trump’s “election sabotage campaign” – which has once again succeeded in dominating the media agenda, a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy.
The attack proves that Republicans belong to “the party of voter oppression,” Seawright added. ‘I’m black and so for the rest of my life, including my grandparents’ lives, I have tried my best to limit our participation in the electoral process. This just raises my worries about these elections. The playbook is about the same.
‘There are just several players implementing the strategy, and this time the strategy has been recalibrated as voice via mail. Keep in mind that we are still in the midst of a pandemic, where acting on individuals can mean life or death for some people. But black people have put their lives on the line to vote sooner, and if we continue this way, I think we are ready and able to do it again, because this election is just as important. “
This week, a two-part Senate report revealed the extent of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 elections. It found that Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman, worked closely with “Russian intelligence officer” Konstantin Kilimnik. US intelligence has warned that Russia is already running in the 2020 elections with the aim of re-electing Trump.
But such threats appear less fundamental at the moment than those posed by a presidential vanished rogue – a man who this week welcomes the support of believers in a groundless right-wing conspiracy theory that holds the world in control of a shadow of satan worship the pedophile.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, asked: “Who needs Vladimir Putin if we have Donald Trump? If you were Vladimir Putin and you wanted to disrupt this election, what would you do? You have disseminated disinformation. You would make people doubt the legitimacy of the vote. You would be paddling conspiracy theories and you might want to voice mail messages. That all happens without him. Our president does that. ”
Sykes, founder and editor-in-chief of the Bulwark website, warned of a “very ugly” post-election period. “It is very clear that Trump will use every lever of government power to stay in office. There will be a lot of post-in-votes and the vote-in-votes will be very different from same-day votes.
“What he will do – and it will be a lot of market for Donald Trump – is declare victory on election night. Then he will, when the mail-in votes are counted, insist that they are not legitimate, that the elections are stolen from him, and I think it has the potential to create massive doubt and chaos. “
Such a scenario promises to dwarf the shrinkage, chaos and confusion of the controversial 2000 election between Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore, which went in the opposite direction.
Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who was an adviser to Gore, said: ‘I’m not afraid it will not be held and I’m not afraid that in the end we will not get an accurate result, assuming we can do this post office thing. straighten up or just be patient when the votes are counted.
“I’m afraid that what Trump is doing means that, in the end, if he loses, we’ll have a bitterly divided country with about 30% of the population angry, strange, maybe in the streets, something we’ve never been here before. have seen. If Trump loses, he will not be Al Gore who believed he won the election, but who, following the Supreme Court’s decision, is known for the good of the country. ‘
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