VICTOR, Idaho
From deep in the heart of what the chattering calls “Trump Country,” otherwise known as the Mountain West state of Idaho, I write on the eve of America’s momentous presidential election.
Thousands of miles from the place I call home—New York City—relentless forecasts of Election Day outcome are broadcast on network television news programs hosted by well-coiffed commentators and insufferably confident pollsters. “Thumb suckers,” is what old newspapermen such as myself call their jabberings. At this point, they sound like buzzy flies in a butcher shop at summertime.
The swarm now unites in singular prophecy: Whomever prevails in the contest for the White House, whether Kamala Harris or the disgraced ex-president Donald Trump, the margin of victory shall be “razor thin.”
I can almost hear good old Joe Biden saying, “Malarky!”
Yes, many of my countrymen are as dumb as doorknobs. But no, the electorate writ large is not dumb enough to cast its vote—again—for the vile Donald Trump, more noxious now than ever before. This time, we shall not return White House keys to an adjudicated fraudster and sex predator, a renowned liar and deadbeat, a nativistic peddler of golden sneakers and Christian bibles printed in China—$60 apiece, $400 if autographed by Himself.
Definitely no keys for the obese bible thumper with a serious flatulence problem, convicted in New York last May on thirty-four felony counts of fraudulent business expense records that camouflaged “hush money” payments to a leading lady of the pornographic cinema with whom he had an extra-marital fling in Las Vegas while his third wife was newly home from the maternity ward with their infant son.
Yes, the American electorate of 2016 was bamboozled by “The Donald,” as the original of his wifely trio tagged him. Yes, we actually elected a man who wears more facial makeup than Dolly Parton, never mind firm assurances from thumb suckers back then that Hillary Clinton would handily defeat Mr. Trump.
But then, after four chaotic years of Mr. Trump’s harum-scarum term— highlighted by two impeachments and his incitement of the January 6, 2021 armed insurrection against the government in reaction to his failed reëlection bid—voters ousted him in accordance with the ancient proverb, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
Of late, The Donald gaslights the insurrection of four years ago by characterizing January 6th as “a day of love,” when in fact it was a violent culmination of the Big Lie he and his minions promulgate to this day: their evidence-free claim, debunked in more than sixty court challenges, that the 2020 election Mr. Trump lost was “stolen” by “evil” Democrats and “rigged” voting machines supposedly linked to the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez.
The “love” seen by Donald Trump cost five deaths, hospitalizations of one-hundred and forty police officers assaulted by his loyal sturmtruppen, eight-hundred and eighty-four criminal convictions of sturmtruppen thus far prosecuted, and almost $3 million in damages to the Capitol building—invaded by club wielding “patriots,” as Mr. Trump references the roving bands of his loyal thugs and vandals who urinated and defecated in the private offices of congressional members.
Yet now comes The Donald with another bid for reëlection as the Republican Party candidate to oppose a Democratic Party nominee—this time Kamala Harris, currently vice president of the United States whose government background includes her service as a U.S. senator, California’s attorney general, and chief criminal prosecutor of San Francisco.
This year, it’s felon versus prosecutor in a battle for the White House. And this year, at last, the American electorate is capital-W wise to The Donald.
Thus do I stick out my optimistic neck to predict landslide victory for Kamala Harris. For as President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) famously advised, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
Mr. Lincoln’s maxim holds true even here in Trump Country, the rock-solid Republican state of Idaho. High school English teacher Mary Lu Barry of Twin Falls tells us that Donald Trump’s long-running bluff is over. Dead at last is his quest for “fear and division,” as she put it.
In an October essay for the Idaho Statesman newspaper, she wrote—
“I have watched as our Idaho congressmen, our governor and our local legislators [all Republicans] continue to support Donald
Trump, and frankly, it is appalling. Trump embodies everything that we should reject in a leader. If he applied for a position in my English department, or any responsible business or government role, he would never be hired.
“I find myself constantly questioning how anyone could support him for president when he so clearly lacks integrity, decency, courage, judgment and, most importantly, character. Character is the cornerstone of leadership, and Trump has none.
“As an informed citizen, I base my views on facts, not social media soundbites or viral misinformation. I believe many of
Trump’s supporters are misled by his bluster and false promises.”
•
“Donald J. Trump’s America is a grim place, a nation awash in marauding immigrants stealing American jobs and eating American cats anddogs, a country devastated economically, humiliated internationally, and perched on the cliff’s edge of an apocalyptic World War III…”
So wrote Peter Baker for the New York Times, where he is the paper’s chief White House correspondent. His lengthy essay reflected on The Donald’s tens of thousands of lies during his years as president, his unsettling ignorance of global affairs, and his racism.
Racism recently shown by his insistence that dark-complexioned Haitian immigrants eat their white neighbors’ pet dogs and cats “and other things they’re not supposed to eat,” as he declared in a televised debate with Ms. Harris. (He left the question of “things” unspecified.)
Racism on exhibit with posts to the media platform he owns, Truth Social: “Kamala [Harris] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World,” writes Mr. Trump. “And she has had them resettled, beautifully, into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens, that’s what they’re doing.”
Mr. Trump’s gorgonic visage—perfectly captured in his police mugshot as Prisoner No. P01135809, on the occasion of his indictment in Georgia on state felony charges of election interference—is now little more than wallpaper. Even the most ardent of his disciples find his once explosive grievances so much easily ignored hot air. So says the essayist Peter Baker.
Mr. Trump has become mere cheap spectacle, a boob. The American public is sick and tired of his spectacle.
We have had quite enough of The Donald’s pretense of competence. Even his slackest-jawed among his cult seem to have slunk away. In the waning weeks of the campaign, they began leaving early from his long-winded, repetitive rallies, bored with the Trump schtick. The rest of us tune him out when he pops up on television and radio to spew his bile.
We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
•
Enter Kamala Harris of California, and her running mate for the office of vice president, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, a genial Midwesterner and former high school football coach with a knack for getting straightaway to the essence of America’s emergent hopefulness.
In their first campaign appearance together, in August at Temple University in Philadelphia, Ms. Harris was flush with emotion when an arena crowd of ten thousand welcomed her with a lengthy standing ovation and thunderous cheers as she and Governor Walz strode on stage to the rousing Beyoncé anthem, “Freedom.”
Coach Walz, as she enjoys calling him, turned to Ms. Harris and said, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”
Joy in the prospect of “turning the page,” as Kamala Harris says. Or as Beyoncé says—
Breathe for me/Sing for me/
Honestly guidin’ me/
I could be more than I gotta be…
Turning the page means leaving the dark Era of Trump to the light of reasoned political discourse leading to bipartisan progress for a people who would “listen to the better angels of our nature,” as the late President Abraham Lincoln urged in his inaugural address of 1861.
Innate trust in better angels and intangible joy form the bases of a conclusion shared by two esteemed academicians, conclusions that support my own view of a thumping victory for the Harris/Walz ticket—
• TOM MILLER. A data scientist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Professor Miller eschews conventional political polls in favor of averaging the tens of millions of dollars waged at betting markets—“prediction markets,” as he prefers. “The poll asks, “Who do you want to win?’” the professor explains, whereas bettors who lay out cold, hard cash are asked, “Who do you predict will win?”
And who does Professor Miller see emerging on top in this year’s election? “It’s a landslide for Harris/Walz,” he told Newsweek magazine. “It’s going to be a landslide.”
• ALLAN LICHTMAN. An historian at American University in Washington, D.C., Professor Lichtman has been dead-on accurate in calling outcomes of the last eight presidential elections. He, too, ignores conventional polling over demonstrated public acceptance on thirteen areas of policy executed by the party in power at the White House—in this case, the policies of President Biden, arguably the most consequential Democrat since President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). Though he does not use the term “landslide,” Professor Lichtman sees a huge victory for Kamala Harris, and it delights him.
“We are going to have a new and pathbreaking American president,” Professor Lichtman told USA Today.
“Kamala Harris will become the first woman president of the United States, at least cracking if not shattering the glass ceiling, and she’ll become the first American president of mixed African and East Asian descent, foreshadowing where our country is going.
“We are rapidly becoming a majority-minority country.”
In the not too distant future, The Donald, age 78, will drop dead. As dead as the original wife he buried at a golf course he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. Perhaps someone will dig his own grave there as well.
When his death comes, we will shake our heads in sour remembrance and relief at his passing. We shall speak of Donald Trump’s heartlessness: his dismissal of military veterans as “suckers and losers,” of cages he built for children he ordered separated from refugee parents housed elsewhere in what news media are afraid to acknowledge are concentration camps…
…of his disregard for the life of his own vice president on the day of insurrection, January 6, 200l.
As recounted in newly-released federal court filings, Donald Trump, in his final days as president at the time, was informed that his fascist hunting parties were rampaging through the Capitol corridors in search of then-Vice President Mike Pence—for the purpose of stringing him up on gallows they erected just beyond the Capitol doors they bashed open.
“Hang Mike Pence!” the fascists chanted. “Hang Mike Pence…Hang Mike Pence!”
Mr. Trump’s reaction: “So what?”
The Donald will die, but the American fascism he birthed will survive, at least for a while. Our post-election work must be to still the ugly noise of marching boots—as we have done before, at home and abroad.
We must do it once more in the New Year.
“Make America Great Again,” Mr. Trump calls his determined “MAGA” movement. As such, he registers neither shame nor embarrassment in plagiarizing Adolf Hitler’s 1932 Nazi party slogan, “Machen Deutschland wieder groß.”
Few of the grandees of American conservatism, of the sort we knew in control of the once respectable Republican Party, are as alarmed by MAGA and its führer than retired U.S. Army four-star General Mark A. Milley. He spent the last years of a distinguished military career as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon from 2019 to 2023, first appointed to that position by Mr. Trump.
General Milley came to know The Donald well, along with his frightening determination to upend American democracy.
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” the general told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.
“I realize [Trump is] a total fascist,” he added. “He’s fascist to the core.”
Mark Milley was undoubtedly on the mind of then-President Trump when one day in 2020, in a private Oval Office conversation, he angrily complained about wayward military commanders.
“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” groused Mr. Trump, according to confidential sources cited by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
The notoriously ignorant ex-president seemed unaware that seven of Hitler’s top generals attempted to assassinate Der Führer in July of 1944.
On the same day The Atlantic hit newsstands, the New York Times released tape recordings of an interview with John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps platoon commander who served in the 2016 Trump administration as chief of staff. Asked by the Times if he agreed with General Milley’s view that Donald Trump is a fascist, Mr. Kelly responded in the affirmative.
„Certainly the former president is in the far-right area; he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators,” said Mr. Kelly. “He has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.“
NOTE: Trump mouthpiece Alex Pfeiffer disputed Mr. Goldberg’s reporting on Mark Milley’s statement.“President Trump never said this,” said the mouthpiece.
•
Many will not see beyond Mr. Trump’s buffoonish theatrics. But backstage, the fascist markers that define him are there: racism, ethnic stereotyping and scapegoating, fear for the sake of fear, glorification of a mythical Aryan past, anti-intellectualism, the Big Lie technique.
In the last week of his campaign, Mr. Trump’s Hitlerian remarks about immigrant “scum” and “vermin” that “poison the blood of America” were leavened with the ludicrous, as so happened during a memorable campaign appearance in Pennsylvania.
There, Mr. Trump dwelt weirdly at length, so to speak, on the late professional golf champion Arnold Palmer’s penis.
“Arnold Palmer was all man,” enthused The Donald, surrounded by a sparse assembly of his faithful. “And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women! But this guy! This is a guy that was all man! This man was strong, and tough! And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other [professional golfers], they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my god, that’s unbelievable!”
Mr. Trump added, “I had to tell you the shower part of it because it’s true. What can I tell you? We want to be honest.”
History tells us, repeatedly, of realizations sensed too late. Everyone laughed at Hitler in the 1920s, for instance.
In Ian Kershaw’s seminal biography of Adolf Hitler, né Schicklgruber, speaks of the early comedic aspects of the greatest monster of the 20th Century.
Such a sight he was back in the day: Adolf Schicklgruber strutting around beer halls rousing the rabble. Young Schicklgruber with his clipped brush moustache, a hair-do accentuated with greasy forelock, his girly flat-palmed salute, his little brown Nazi suit, his manly calf-length leather boots.
In his own words, Mr. Kershaw reports, Herr Hitler might well have imagined a ridiculous rabble-rouser of our own time: he of the absurd yellow hair-do, dainty hands, ill-fitting suitcoats left open to the protrusion of his hamburger gut.
“It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us…whether they represent us as clowns or criminals,” Mr. Kershaw quotes Hitler as having written. “The main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again.”
•
This time, we Americans are lucky. More than enough of us recognize—right now, before it is too late—the fascist peril that lurks behind a façade of entertainment. Regardless of partisan affiliation, more than enough of us will do something about the existential threat named Donald Trump.
We will use the power of our vote. We will do the right thing.
Change is in the air, including the air over Trump Country, so-called. Feel it, breathe it. See the page turn.
Here in Idaho, for instance, a new statewide association of non-MAGA Republicans—Take Back Idaho—asks that voters heed their better angels.
The association’s manifesto begins: “The hearty, forward-looking men and women who founded this great state and nourished it through good and bad times into this new century would be greatly saddened to see the depths to which far too many have descended.”
Further:
“[Our mission] is to maintain the peaceful and respectful way of life that Idahoans have enjoyed for generations. [We] provide crucial information needed to make informed voting decisions, utilizing a variety of mediums backed by data and evidence.
“Take Back Idaho emphasizes empowering Idahoans by providing context and data on special interest groups that use confrontational tactics to promote self-serving agendas that do not prioritize the well-being of Idaho citizens.”
Throughout the country, groups like Take Back Idaho have risen up to challenge a man who yearns for generals like Hitler had. On November 5, we will turn the page, resoundingly. We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Enough! Or in clearer terms, the Spanish word that gives oomph to our determined wish for an end weariness: ¡Basta!
