Julien Davis: Most of Trump's base of supporters is armed to the teeth

To The Daily Sun,

Regarding the preservation of democracy in America, we have, particularly in recent years, slipped into very dangerous territory. I want to examine a few of the president’s most recent actions through the lens of three of the 14 points of fascism established by author Laurence W. Britt: supremacy of the military, controlled mass media, and fraudulent elections.

First and foremost, let us consider Portland. In response to BLM protests, most of which were peaceful, the president sent a team of unidentified paramilitary agents to “keep the peace,” which evidently included assaulting nonviolent members of the protest and kidnapping individuals, taking note of their identifying documents, and driving them around for quite some time before dumping them outside the city. These agents did not have probable cause to detain these individuals, violating their 4th Amendment protections from unreasonable seizure. Further, these green-clad men acted in a way that resembles the Brown Shirts of Nazi, Germany when disrupting labor demonstrations.

On the issue of Covid-19, it has recently come to light that our president knew about how contagious and devastating the pandemic would be, but chose to lie about its presence in the U.S. As a result, we are now approaching a death count of two hundred thousand people. Additionally, Trump has seized the responsibility of Covid-19 data management from the CDC and transferred control over the flow of information to his own administration, thus calling into question the validity of the data on coronavirus numbers.

Then, there is the issue of mail-in voting. The use of mail-in ballots is more than ever before a majorly useful tool for ensuring the enfranchisement of as many people as possible considering the circumstances. Even so, President Trump has been relentlessly spreading doubt regarding the legitimacy of mail-in voting. This, of course, despite the fact that the rate at which vote-by-mail fraud occurs falls somewhere between .0004 and .0009 percent of instances, according to a meta-analysis conducted by the bipartisan Brennan Institute of Justice. Regardless of this statistical data, the Trump-Pence base is convinced that the integrity of mail-in voting is questionable at best and downright counterfeit at worst. This in tandem with his appointment of Postmaster General DeJoy, whose actions have resulted in the slowing of the postal system, are alarming.

Make no mistake about it, this is not a mere instance of the president, as he so often does, lacking knowledge of a particular issue: this is a strategy by the president to legitimize his claims that the election is rigged should he lose come November. And to support his claims, Trump has the allegiance of approximately 35-40 percent of the country, most of whom are armed to the teeth with weapons of war. He’s riled up this base of people once before on the issue of reopening the economies of various states in the south, and he will do it again should it appear as though he has won on election night only to be proven wrong by the delay in counting mail-in votes.

Julien Davis

Gilford