The NYT editorial goes on:
"If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats."
He has no right to still be in contention. Apart from his criminal convictions, Senior members of his Republican party have disowned him and endorsed Harris, a Democrat. He has spent the last few weeks insulting and alienating women and minority groups like Puerto Ricans when he should be fighting for every vote and at rallies, he appeared to call for Harris and members of the press to be shot.
According to Trump and his allies, a second term for him will be "nasty", "bloody" and "filled with hardships." He intends to appoint Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of JFK and an avowed opponent of all vaccines to a senior position in US healthcare.
Bloomberg is the latest mainstream outlet to endorse Kamala Harris, warning that the former president is lewd, cruel and divisive, and unfit for office. In any normal country, he would be regarded as a lunatic. His whole campaign has been a catalogue of personal vendettas and grievances. There is no way he should get more than a few hundred votes, yet incredibly, the race remains almost a dead heat.
I was brought up on American films and TV shows as most of us were. Until 1968 these were governed by the Hays code, a set of rules to guide screenwriters and programme makers. It decreed among other things that crime could not be glorified and criminals had to be punished in the end.
This gave a rather whitewashed view of US society and coupled with the way they have defended democracy and helped us win two World Wars, provided the notion that America would always do the right thing, no matter what.
The last few years have rather shattered that illusion and revealed the US as deeply divided, violent, significantly racist, extremely gullible, and in hock to the right-wing Christian nationalists. For a nation built on immigration, it is surprisingly anti-immigrant.
But apart from all that, Trump is simply incapable of running anything much more complicated than a hot dog stand.
Rex Tillerson, once the CEO of ExxonMobil and Donald Trump’s Secretary of State for nearly two years during his first term, is alleged to have described the 45th President as a “f*****g moron.” This is less an insult and probably a pretty accurate assessment of Trump’s intellectual ability. His stupidity is legendary.
Yet, over 70 million US citizens could vote for Trump, many believing he’s a genius.
How is this even possible?
Early psychological assessment tests for the feeble-minded might help to explain it. They defined a moron as an adult with an IQ of 50-70, about the same as an average 12-year-old. This fits with primary debates in 2016 when the text of Trump’s responses were assessed using the Flesch-Kincaid test, as being about the same level as a 4th-grader, a 9-10-year-old. During one news conference in Michigan his score was even lower, at 3rd grade.
Below a moron come the imbeciles with IQs between 25 and 50, and below that are the idiots. I'm not suggesting 70 million Americans fall into these categories but I bet an awful lot of them do. You need to be an imbecile or an idiot to think Trump is anything other than a moron. Of course, many smart people back him knowing full well he's incapable of rational thinking, in the hope they might personally benefit from a Trump presidency.
If there were any doubts about his fitness to be president, his first term showed unequivocally that he was not. Hiring and firing hit new records as the White House spent four years in total chaos while Trump and his family grifted … culminating in an insurrection on Capitol Hill when he lost the 2020 election.
But he is just a few hours away from being rewarded with another four years.
It's time for the real America to stand up and be counted.
