Build the wall, damn the masks, cancel the elections

13 Reasons Why—Trump would want to “re-open” America and create a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic:

1. Use strong second wave of infections to postpone or cancel elections.
2. Distract the public from his aggressive pursuit of other agendas: stuffing the judiciary with extremist judges; building the wall; ignoring health, education, infrastructure.
3. Restrict civil liberties, increase surveillance under the cover of “tracking the virus”.
4. Create social unrest that can lead to imposition of martial law.
5. Squeeze the poor and middle class who then look to a demagogue to save them.
6. Throw U.S. and European economies into chaos, benefitting Russia, pleasing Putin, and getting a mega-billion payout via Saudi and Russian investment.
7. Channel huge federal pandemic-related contracts to favored donors and supporters.
8. Use economic pressure to justify abolishing all environmental regulations.
9. Indulge his own malicious glee in getting away with destroying others’ lives. 
10. Kill off elderly, more liberal voters in urban areas.
11. Save on social security and medicare.
12. Kill off the poor and racial minorities viewed as a drain on resources and a threat to the rule of the American oligarchs.
13. Keep Wall Street happy, at least until November, and Main Street pre-occupied.

The media, Democrats, and even military leaders need to step up their game. While the level of criticism of this administration is unparalleled in our history, the outrage, thorough documentation of his incompetent and erratic behavior, and editorials in our leading newspapers questioning his mental health, bounce off our current Teflon Don. We need a well-planned, strategic campaign against what Trump truly is, one that speaks directly and clearly to the full implications of his presidency. 

Demagogues and their followers have always relied on one recurring truth of political behavior: the certainty that their opponents will be too timid, too concerned with their own political calculations, too naive in believing that the thugs will play by the old rules, to oppose them. We can no longer afford this level of timidity and game-playing at the national level because…

Trump is a criminal. He was in bed with the Russian mob years before Putin was a gleam in the Kremlin’s eye. When Putin came to power, he told the mob to “move it on over…the mean old dog is moving in.” He has violated every ethics rule imaginable for public officials. His business dealings were always shady, mentored as he was by his racist father and New York’s number one fixer, Roy Cohn, who brokered connections among the mob, politicians, and landlords and developers.

Trump is quite possibly a traitor. Before 2017, the Trump organization self-admittedly survived on money channeled by Russian oligarchs, which had to have been overseen by Putin. As president, his behavior towards our European allies and foreign policy decisions in Europe and the Middle East may indicate he is compromising U.S. interests for the sake of his banker in Moscow. It is unclear whether his foreign policy is also being influenced by the close ties he has been cultivating with Saudi strongman Mohammed bin Salman, another source of potential financial support for Trump, his feeble son-in-law, and his papier-mache real estate projects.

Trump is a psychopathic criminal. At least 24 women have accused him of offenses ranging from sexual molestation to rape. Serial partying with Jeffrey Epstein and all it implies about underage girls and sex trafficking. Known for refusing to pay contractors until they accept far less than the agreed-upon price for their services. Glee in imposing suffering, absolute lack of empathy, a bully’s mentality. Oblivious to ethical concerns and devoid of a sense of responsibility towards the office he occupies.

Trump’s administration and Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court also represent a criminal enterprise. Millions of voters illegally and unconstitutionally bumped from voting rolls by Republican state legislators fulfilling the right-wing billionaires’ agenda of turning the United States into their own private money machine. Gerrymandering bluish states into solid red states. Appointing judges whose pre-ordained mission is to enforce these disenfranchisements and deprive blacks, Latinos, Muslims, gays, women, and workers of hard-won gains. Immigrants are now fair game to experiment with the extremes of the system: tearing apart families; placing tens of thousands at any one time into health-threatening internment, or concentration, camps; getting America used to treating human beings like trash to be gathered up in “sweeps” and stashed away in human dumps.

Take the wall. Please. 

That ridiculous, impotent wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Billions of dollars are being poured into the sand even as our medical providers scrape for funds and supplies. Small businesses are going under by the millions, we have a highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, and still the gigantic monstrosity of steel and cement smashes its way through national parks and private ranches. As the Tucson News reported, Trump “waived dozens of laws” to greenlight construction. Construction workers, lured by high wages, are flooding into Arizona, ignoring safeguards for preventing the pandemic’s spread. The Federal government, i.e., taxpayers like you and I, is paying for it. But who’s building it?

Kiewit Corporation is—well over a billion dollars and counting, most of it to its subsidiary, Southwest Valley Constructors. Headquartered in Omaha and one of the world’s largest construction firms, in 2017 Kiewit created Southwest to ward off bad publicity arising from this sordid project. Aside from its own destructive character, the wall is inseparable from Trump and ICE’s barbaric assault on immigrants who sought refuge in the United States. Southwest helps Kiewit avoid staining its corporate name over the wall. Kiewit also works closely with Keystone Pipeline builder TransCanada Energy, and has worked with Trump in pushing for completion of the pipeline’s next stage. No surprise it is one of the beneficiaries of the wall construction.

The wall is currently tearing through one of America’s natural wonders, the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, sacred to Native Americans and site of ancient burial grounds, and a treasure for all Americans. Organ Pipe is also a United Nations Biosphere reserve. Because the wall is under Homeland Security’s (DHS) purview, their role in dynamiting and bulldozing huge swaths of Organ Pipe gives one more lie to its stated mission “With honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values.”

Good work DHS. To your blundering interference with serious intelligence agencies, you can add bulldozing and dynamiting “our homeland” for the sake of a demented presidential campaign chant. 

Bad publicity for Kiewit? Southwest Valley is being paid $891 million to despoil Organ Pipe. With much more to come.

Wondering why health care workers are working literally to death battling the pandemic? Look where this administration’s priorities are. Pouring money into this insane wall, a pipedream conceived as a bone for Trump’s screwball supporters to gnaw on. He can deliver the wall but masks be damned.

If Trump were the head of a health care facility, he could be charged with criminal negligence and involuntary manslaughter. If he has compromised the pandemic response in order to direct contracts to his donors, such as in turning down the offer of a Texas company to produce masks for the government, voluntary manslaughter could even be on the table. He’s a crook. To him, the presidency is just one more platform to manipulate, wheel and deal, and take advantage of people’s gullibility.

Leaders in the media, military, and Congress need to step up. Why should West Point allow the Commander in Chief to force them to hold graduation when it threatens the health and viability of the elite cadre of newly graduating officers? We need more people like Captain Brett Crozier of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. Captain Crozier called out the craven Naval command for hiding the impact of the virus on naval readiness and ignoring the spread of infection throughout his ship. The command were so afraid of displeasing their commander in chief they relieved him of his command. Or like Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who alone in Congress challenged Democrats for accepting Trump’s “bail-out” without dissent, even though the main beneficiaries are corporations while small businesses and individuals get a pittance.

Trump is a criminal. He is mentally incompetent. His history as such is well documented. He won’t be stopped until national figures unite to call him out for what he is. His opponents seem to believe that putting up an unobjectionable candidate in November guarantees victory. But it doesn’t, especially since the United States can no longer guarantee fair elections. We cannot defer to a typical presidential campaign. The campaign against Trump has to be revved up now and waged in real terms, in terms of what he truly is. 

If Trump is re-elected, America will not survive. Not in any way, shape, or form we will recognize. It is already “happening here”. People with national authority and exposure need to tell it like it is. Ecologically, economically, politically, in terms of preparedness for the next pandemic, climate change, infrastructure decay, the ongoing health care crisis…we don’t have time for this insanity. We don’t have time for this criminality. Do something.