Trump Just Out and Said He'll Deploy 'Law Enforcement' as Poll Watchers on Election Day

From Esquire

As Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States on Thursday night, Donald Trump was on another channel helping to heighten the contradictions. It's not merely that Biden demonstrated basic empathy for other human beings, particularly those who've lost loved ones to COVID-19, while the president once again bashed Michelle Obama for understating how many Americans have died on his watch. (Again, imagine how little you'd have to care about the tens of thousands who've died to talk this way—to use this as a cudgel against your opponents.) And it's not just that Biden described problems that the country faces in actual reality, rather than Antifa uprisings, or abolishing the suburbs, or the idea anyone wants to turn the U.S. into VENEZUELA! Or, yes, voter fraud.

One of the core themes of all four nights of the virtual Democratic National Convention was to vote now—vote early. The Republican Party's decades-long assault on voting rights has now culminated, as so much else has, with a president who is a particularly grotesque and garish expression of their core values—such as they are—and priorities. Voter-suppression policies like voter-ID laws, a big favorite among Republican state legislatures of the last decade, claim to combat the virtually non-existent problem of in-person voter fraud while targeting groups that tend to vote for Democrats. Other policies, like closing thousands of polling places, causing long lines and dysfunction at the ones that remain, are just straight-up election rigging. And the president has debuted more of this stuff, waging war on voting by mail—first through deranged rhetoric, and then by attempting to destroy the Post Office. He has admitted this openly, in public.

And now, having tried to scare people away from voting by mail—which is functionally the same as voting absentee, which he and many of his Cabinet members do regularly—he is turning back to voting in person. Apparently unsatisfied with previous Republican ratfucking attempts, the president announced on Sean Hannity's Fox News show that he is just going to do fascism.

Consider, for a moment, that Trump and Sean Hannity tuck each other into bed each night with a phone call. (In a new book excerpt, CNN's Brian Stelter reports that Hannity's confidantes say Hannity has outright told them the president is "crazy.") It seems likely that they discussed this exchange in advance, like Trump's obvious set plays with OAN correspondents at White House press briefings. Ask me about poll watchers, so I can get it out there. Hannity obliged, and the president readily announced:

Could "everyone" and "everything" possibly include the various federal forces the president has grown so fond of using in American cities? And where, exactly, will these agents be deployed? Might it map onto some of the same areas where the president's lackey Postmaster General has been assaulting the mail infrastructure, like the crucial swing-state cities of Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Cleveland? This might not be legal, but we've seen that doesn't always matter. It's also likely that the Republican Party will match this anti-democratic use of government resources with "poll watchers" of their own. They've set aside $20 million—and want to recruit 50,000 people across 15 states—to serve as watchers who will challenge the registration of voters they say are ineligible. They are able to do this thanks to a 2018 federal court ruling, which overturned a four-decade ban on the practice after Republicans were repeatedly found to be intimidating or working to suppress minority voters in the name of preventing "fraud."

Remember: there is no evidence voter fraud is a significant problem, even if there was one recent issue with vote-by-mail in New Jersey that was immediately detected. That's why the president just made shit up here about "them" sending mail-in ballots to "all Democrats." It's a fiction. It's paranoia and delusion, fed to his base to justify his assault on democracy. He does not want people to vote, because he fears that if they do so in large numbers, he will likely lose. He's not the first Republican to operate this way, clearly, but he has demonstrated a particular enthusiasm—and ruthlessness—for trampling the most basic institutions and mechanisms of democracy to get his way. Now, it seems, he will use the implied threat of outright force under the color of law to prevent people voting in person, while simultaneously ratfucking vote-by-mail.

And that's the real resonance of Joe Biden's talk on Thursday night of this election being a choice between the dark and the light. It's about empathy and basic humanity, sure, but he was also right to rope in things like science, and reason, and free inquiry. The president does not believe in any of this. He does not subscribe to the concept of objective reality, of a shared set of facts about the world that we can all use to argue for the best way forward. He believes the truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe, and that the best way to do that is through rhetorical force.

Bludgeon your followers with the same delusional lies, over and over again, until it becomes God's own truth. Bludgeon your enemies with slanders big and small, intimidating them with the sheer audacity and force of your speech. It's not about persuading them, it's about making them submit. And when rhetoric fails, it seems, he will be willing to turn to more direct force. This is a rejection of the Enlightenment, and the principles that undergird democracy and made it possible. It is a return to the darkness, where those in power feel no need to justify their choices to those they govern. Power becomes its own justification. This election presents a stark choice indeed. Vote early.

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