Joe Manchin Archives - Stephen Altschuler

I understand Trump’s new social media network will be called Truth. This guy’s operating manual is the novel 1984. If you haven’t read it, please do. This is our future if Trump takes over again. In the novel, the authoritarian government develops a new language called Newspeak where everything gets twisted and skewed according the government’s interpretation of what is true. And if you don’t speak it, you’re labeled a subsersive and taken in, without due process, for violation of the norm. People are routinely spied upon by their neighbors and cameras are everywhere to monitor people’s movements and intentions. Privacy is gone. Conformity is the rule and the ruler. You must be careful what you do or say every waking minute. And fealty to the leader is essential. Totally essential.

Sound familiar? It’s Trump’s modus operandi. “Fuck him!” Trump said to former Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for committing the cardinal sin of congratulating Joe Biden just a day after his victory. Disloyalty is the worst crime anyone can commit according to Trump. He acts like a cult leader. He acts like a mafia boss. He acts like a totalitarian dictator. And he could very well be reelected President of the United States again in 2024.

If this happens, contrary to making America great again, he will send this country down a rabbit hole of chaos, disharmony, despair, and violent white supremacists. He will send this planet down a final road to perdition, deriding climate change as fake news. Through his Supreme Court, he will elide our Constitution into a mockery, and throw our Bill of Rights into the rubbish with it. America, as we have known it, will go the way of the Holy Roman Empire, gutted from inside out even more than outside in.

How to stop him? Ironically, watch Liz Cheney, an arch-conservative, and daughter of once equally conservative de facto President Dick Cheney. She’s a U.S. Representative who votes against Biden and formerly for Trump policies every step of the way, who I submit should supplant Elon Musk as Time’s Person of the Year. Liz Cheney may be a Republican ultra-conservative but she knows how to speak truth to abusive power. She is the only Congressperson, Republican or Democrat, who has the courage to stand up to Donald Trump and say it like it is, as we used to put it.

“For multiple hours,” she said publicly, “President Trump chose not to take the specific and immediate action many urged – as the violent mob besieged & invaded the Capitol, attacked & injured scores of Capitol Police, & obstructed Congress’s count of electoral votes,” she reiterated. “This was a supreme dereliction of the President’s duty.” And later, under her co-leadership of the House Committee to Investigate the Jan.6 insurrection, she continued her powerful scrutiny of the ex-President, asking a question no other congressperson, to my knowledge, has dared to ask: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s proceedings?”

Such a charge, if proven, could land Trump in jail for many years and, importantly, prevent him from ever again holding public office of any kind in the United States.

Republican Liz Cheney leads the assault on Trump, but it will take the Department of Justice under the leadership of Attorney General Merrick Garland, to arrest, charge, try, and convict him. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that he must do this now, but my dear astute wife intervened, reminding me that, more than likely, AG Garland is waiting for the House Committee to finish amassing all its evidence so he can then use that evidence in an open-and-shut court case against Trump. I hope she’s right.

For if the case against Trump is swept under the rug, or unreasonably delayed, by the DOJ, our country is in dire trouble. We’re facing a political monster who will not cease his destructive ways if not stopped by definitive legal action.

And that’s… The Truth.

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DINO Joe Manchin announced on Fox News (that’s right, Fox–so called–News) that he will not be voting for Biden’s signature Build Back Better bill that will cover social and domestic programs. I’m beginning to see that when the Senate became a 50-50 deal, Manchin saw that as a golden opportunity to become a power broker–a very rich power broker. I expect fossil “fool” magnates, as well as Trump Repubs, saw him as a viable cog in Biden’s agenda to set this country on the right track. Money began to pour into Manchin’s coffers from Republican sources as they increasingly saw him as an ally in their obstructionist schemes.

So between the fascist Trump and the DINO Manchin, we are in quite a pickle for I would also surmise that the voting rights bills are also off the table. Without Manchin’s support for modification, the filibuster continues to give the Republicans a powerful arrow in their quiver of treasonous hypocrisy.

The only solution I can see is a colossal Democratic victory in the 2022 midterm election in both the House and the Senate that would politically vaporize Trump, Manchin, and Sinema. How about it, y’all? Let’s shock, and essentially save, the world and get out there and make such a surprise landslide happen. Otherwise, it’s curtains, my friends.

What strikes me most about Trump is what he doesn’t say. For example, and perhaps mostly glaringly, he hasn’t said a word encouraging people to take the Covid vaccine. If he cared about the welfare of the people of this country and the world, he would be out on the hustings, shouting from the rooftops, to take the jab. But no, not a word from him on this vital subject. Why? All I can figure is that he doesn’t want President Biden to benefit from the end of the pandemic, a pandemic that he, Trump, perpetuated and accelerated through his ineptitude and narcissism. Another reason is that he doesn’t want to antagonize his followers who are against vaccines–like QAnon wackos, Christian evangelicals, white supremacists, and slavery and Jim Crow apologists.

The sad truth is that Trump doesn’t care. About Americans, about democracy, about the economy (except his own business), about immigrant families, about crime on the streets and hyper-availability of guns, about equal justice for all, about Blacks or Browns or Yellows or Reds, about Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Atheists, about scientists, scholars, educators. Nor does he care about valid, democratically-run elections, like the one he lost so decisively in November 2020.

By hanging on to the Big Lie, like a monkey hangs on to the grub of food in the trap hunters have set for them, Trump reveals an addiction that is bringing him further down a rabbit hole of destruction, and dragging along with him all his Republican minions who are duped by his lies.

The answer for those of us who see through his lies, is not to keep harping on Trump. He, himself, is a lost cause, and unresponsive to any criticism, sanctions, censures, even lawsuits at this point. His cult followers will merely brush aside any of those attempts at vilification and label him a martyr. No, the answer lies in the election of 2022, perhaps one of the most critical elections in the history of our democratic republic.

2022. It’s just around the corner. And the outcome will test the influence, if any, that Trump has on our electorate. Will Trump-loyal Republicans regain control of the House and/or the Senate? Or will the Democrats further solidify their hold on these Houses of Congress and make Joe Manchin irrelevant? And what of voting? Will Republican efforts to suppress the vote prove successful? Or will voters find a way around these scurrilous laws to vote enmass? Or will Republican laws actually reverse the results of elections they deem not in their interests, namely those that put Democrats in power?

It will all be laid out before us quite graphically, in the results of the 2022 election. And it’s all up to you and I, the voters. For despite the new Republican voter suppression laws, where there’s a will to vote, there’s a way to vote. So no matter what the obstacles, I deeply hope you will vote. And if the GOP tries to reverse the outcome of the election, I hope the courts will respond as they did when Trump tried to reverse the vote of the 2020 election, and prevent Republican-controlled states from doing so.

Otherwise, if either fails, you can kiss our democracy and the country we love goodbye!