"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally" - President-elect Donald Trump
For me, after weeks of hellish, flaming hay bales of undemocratic shit falling out of an eerie Trump-orange sky, this is the proverbial straw that has broken the camel's back. The president-elect has voiced an enormous, hideous self-serving lie whose core message is that our democracy is a lie; that you can't trust the verified vote tallies; that evil unnamed (but probably Democratic and likely dark-skinned) forces have conspired to rob him and his supporters of the popular vote, if not his electoral college victory. For a lot of us, the lie is transparent and self-serving; but for millions of others, those who supported Trump and voted for him, the lie carries the weight of his authority, and is believed. It's a lie guaranteed to sow division and chaos.
No one remotely fit to be president would ever utter such a lie. Whether the lie was issued casually, without concern for its implications, or with a full understanding of its dark weight, makes no difference. At best, the president is utterly incompetent; at worst, he's knowingly pushing our country to a dangerous point of resentment, disbelief, and mutually exclusive realities. Unable to handle the fact that Hillary Clinton has beaten him soundly in the popular vote, he would rather risk burning down our collective house than admit a harsh truth (a harsh truth, remember, that still leaves him with an electoral college win).
So for me, these words, on top of all the evidence we've seen already, from his un-American aspersions against the Muslim religion, to his slander of the Hispanic community, to his enormous conflicts of interest as owner of an international business, definitively mark the president-elect as completely unfit for office, and the point at which his opponents need to purse all legal paths to block him from assuming power, to remove him should he assume it, and to defeat any and all anti-democratic moves so long as he remains president.
I'm sure this sounds overwrought to some, but I don't know how else to express my sense of what's happening to our country. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one thinking this, and I want to give voice to our common sentiment. So much of what Trump has said is outrageous and disqualifying, but for me this is the final break. I am saying this to encourage others to recognize the danger we face, and to begin acting like it. It doesn't matter what Trump says or does from this point forward. The only question every citizen needs to ask him- or herself is, what do I do, as an individual and in concert with my fellow Americans, to counter the influence of this man and what he represents, and to revive and advance our democracy so that in the future, someone like Trump, or someone even worse, is rendered unthinkable and impossible?
I'm convinced more than ever that the answer to this authoritarian threat is a tsunami of democratic action and involvement - neighbors reaching out to neighbors, citizens demanding accountability from their elected representatives (whether Republicans or Democrats), everyone refusing to be satisfied with a political and economic status quo that has brought us the disaster of Trump, a man whose presidency seems guaranteed to benefit only him and his immediate circle, as if the United States were some banana republic. As Trump's words and actions encourage anger and potentially violence among his supporters, his opponents need to engage countervailing qualities: among these, I suggest an unswerving adherence to democratic practices; respect for our fellow citizens, no matter how much we might disagree with them; and an absolute commitment to nonviolence, along with an absolute intolerance of any violence committed by Trump supporters.
My vote for the next couple months is to kneecap Trump's presidency before he even takes his oath of office; to expose and publicize his illiberal views, his conflicts of interest, his attempts to institutionalize racism in the Oval Office and Department of Justice, his plans to screw working-class and middle-class folks out of their Medicare, the fraudulence of his infrastructure plans.
I understand that many people are furious at how this country has treated them, or how they feel it has betrayed their beliefs, and that this has caused them to support Trump. But I also know this: Trump is a cure worse than any disease we are thought to suffer from. Trump is the medicine that kills the patient. As a democracy, we can and should argue about policies and values, economics and equality; but a Trump presidency threatens our ability to have this argument in the first place.
I also know how disoriented and helpless so many people feel in the face of Trump's narrow win. I've been feeling this myself. But even now, in our disarray, the opposition holds a far stronger hand than most people realize. Trump lost the popular vote; his political team is filled with hacks and in-fighting; rather than doing easy, obvious things to defuse his opposition, he has continued to remind us of all the reasons he should never have been elected in the first place. There's a reason why no politician has taken such extreme positions before - because there's an enormous potential risk. Trump is scary, but he's also profoundly flawed as a politician. Trump, and the Republican Party that has embraced him, are clearly writing off vast swathes of the electorate in future elections; you don't need to look any further than the centrality of voter suppression to the GOP and the incoming Trump administration to see how fully they understand this reality. I am betting that just as Trump has helped unleash and embody authoritarian forces that have lurked in potential beneath the surface of American politics, he's also helping to unleash a withering democratic backlash.
A lot of very smart and savvy people have been providing insight and advice on what to do in the face of this crisis, and I've included some of these stories below. The Ezra Klein article from Sunday does a really good job of exploring the implications of the tweet that prompted this post.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/27/13758538/donald-trump-vote-illegally-tweet
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-media-coverage-new-rules-214485
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-president-elect-is-an-internet-troll