If Donald Trump wins in November, there won’t be another election — or none that matters.
Don’t take our word for it. Take his.
Trump said it out loud over the weekend in West Palm Beach at a “Believers’ Summit” put on by Turning Point Action, one of the right-wing groups plotting to make America a “Christian nation.”
“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Trump said. “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians … I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
Fixed? How?
So spoke the nation’s most conspicuously amoral politician. Worse than the hypocrisy is the alarming future it bodes.
In political usage, the word “fixed” means rigged.
Trump didn’t say what else, if anything, he meant. In a subsequent attempt to spin it during a Fox News interview, he only made the hole deeper.
“I said, typically, Christians do not vote,” he told host Laura Ingraham. If they do vote this time, he said, “The country will be fixed … We won’t even need your vote anymore because, frankly, we will have such love.”
At best that’s delusional — and badly misinformed. Conservative evangelical christians do vote, and in big numbers, often as single-issue voters. How does Trump think he got elected?
What Trump didn’t say
At worst, it’s worse than even his astounding suggestion that voting isn’t important every time.
He did not manage — or even try — to dispel the impression that he intends to rig every subsequent election, silence criticism and suppress opposition. That would be the “retribution” he has been vowing over and over.
Ingraham gave him chance after chance to refute that. Either her striving went over his head, or he chose intentionally not to correct the record.
Wherever Republicans are in power, they have been trying to make it harder to register to vote and cast a ballot.
This time around, he would have a vice president, J.D. Vance, who says he would have done what Mike Pence honorably refused to do on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump, already the oldest presidential nominee, has hinted at trying to overturn or ignore the two-term constitutional limit on presidents.
Trump’s ominous comments on how he would “fix” the nation fit his pattern. He’s been contemptuous of our democracy all along. It’s what endears him to members of his cult.
No other president ever spoke of jailing opponents or applauded a mob that wanted his vice president hanged.
No other president ever said he would invite a Russian dictator to conquer nations with which the U.S. has a defense alliance.
None has ever accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of America” or promised to establish concentration camps in order to expel them by the millions.
None, other than Richard Nixon, claimed to be above the law, and not even Nixon found Supreme Court justices to say that he was.
And no president or candidate has ever spoken so ominously as Trump did last Friday.
A chilling statement
“This chilling statement,” Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote on her blog, Letters from an American, “comes after Trump praised autocratic Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban in his speech at the Republican National Convention last week and then publicly praised China’s president Xi Jinping for being ‘brilliant’ because he ‘controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.’
“It should also be read,” Richardson noted, “against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his ‘official duties.’”
“God help the Republic,” replied Florida historian Gary Mormino to an email seeking his reaction to Trump’s speech. “I just cannot see how that remark can be interpreted any way else than Trump will declare a dictatorship or Fascist state — with Trump at the top.”
Kamala Harris’ campaign called it “a vow to end democracy.”
From what we’re hearing from our readers, Floridians see it that way, too.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
