By Michael Gold
The price of apples is up fifty cents a pound at my local discount supermarket. Ground beef prices are up almost 13 percent from last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis states. Food price inflation is up three percent over the last 12 months, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And I don’t need to tell you that gas prices are climbing.
So, what is the President of the United States doing about all the inflation wrecking consumers’ wallets?
He’s started a war with Iran that doesn’t look like it will end any time soon. In fact, it looks like the Iranians don’t want to end it, unless we hand them the Strait of Hormuz on a platter.
And he’s relentlessly attacking our right to vote.
Trump keeps haranguing Congress to pass the entirely mis-named SAVE America Act, which would require every voter to produce documents proving they’re citizens, such as a birth certificate and government identification card. It isn’t difficult to see that this bill, if it becomes law, would prevent a lot of people from voting, which is pretty much the unspoken idea.
This bill is based on a lie. Voter fraud is not a wide-scale problem in this country, despite all the Republican screaming and whining about it. A lot of the GOP’s energy on this issue comes from Trump’s entirely false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Let’s explore 2020 a little bit. Trump was the President at the time. Yet he says that through some magical foreign interference from Venezuela, China or three-headed space aliens living on Pluto, the Democrats somehow managed to switch millions of votes from Trump to Biden.
This is a complete fiction, a fabrication, invented in the fever dreams of Trump, who has subverted our system of democracy pretty much every day, a big lie picked up by his all-too-compliant party and spread throughout the land.
Also, Trump’s Department of Justice is now in the process of attempting to get ahold of state voter records in order to pressure states to conduct illegal voter purges, which will serve to further suppress the vote.
Trump has gotten several red states to gerrymander their Congressional districts this year, which contravenes the traditional ten-year requirement to redistrict only after the U.S. Census results are compiled and published. That alone means that about twelve seats that were competitive before are now going to go Republican, according to the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter.
On some level, I think Trump knows his policies are unpopular. His tariffs have acted as a drag on the economy. The Iran war has pumped up gas prices. The oil companies are doing very well, thank you very much. But the regular working people on the street are not.
Of course nobody should want Iran to get a nuclear weapon in its hands. The Iranian regime is one of the biggest sources of religious terror and tyranny in the world. They have sought to dominate the Middle East through terror proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and Yemen. They’re fanatically intent on turning one country into nothing but ashes – Israel.
The Iranian government executes their own people in public, to intimidate the population and to ruthlessly keep themselves in power. They killed between 7,000 to 30,000 people in the wake of street protests starting in December of last year, then extending into January. In Iran, if you’re a woman, if you don’t dress according to the regime’s dictates, you can be thrown in prison.
We should all be happy if the Iranian government fell and was replaced by a democratic republic. But this doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon. To say that the Administration has made a complete mess of this war is to insult messes.
The Iranian regime was doing pretty badly, before Trump decided to attack them without consulting anybody. Unbelievably, Trump has made the Iranians stronger as a result of the war. He had no strategy going in and he has no strategy to fight the war now. Iran has effectively choked off most shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic, including oil tankers. This affects the price of oil here in the U.S., of course.
His tariffs are raising prices across the board. The average American household has seen a $900 increase in costs this year, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, which provides the public with a tariff tracker on its website.
He’s insanely threatening Canada, traditionally our greatest and closest friend, with 50 percent tariffs, because of their terrible wildfires. But climate change isn’t real, the Administration says. Canada must be setting these forest fires on purpose, just to maliciously upset the President. Don’t even think about buying a hockey stick now.
Of course, Trump believes foreign countries will pay for the tariffs. This is obviously untrue. We pay. He’s veering pretty far from the principles of capitalism, which believes in free markets. Where are the Republicans who should be howling about that?
The Administration has thrown sand in the wheels of our economy with the tariffs and the war. Trump’s response is unfortunately predictable.
He thinks of himself first. I’m not even going to get into his use of the highest office in the nation to enrich himself and his family, through his cryptocurrency, real estate and other business ventures.
The American people are a distant second in Trump’s mind. He must be right and everybody else is wrong. So, the best thing for him to do is to shrink the amount of people who can vote, so the Dems don’t win the House or the Senate in November.
The prospect of Democratic control of either chamber scares him so much he’s trying to suppress the vote. The media has been awash with all kinds of rumors, that Trump will call out ICE or the National Guard to police our polling places, the purpose of which is to intimidate citizens to turn away from the voting booth.
The other idea I’ve heard is that the President will declare a national emergency and suspend the election. That’s a tough one. It’s a wild thought, but a President who organized a massive riot at the Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 election results is capable of doing things to change the November 2026 outcome that might well be unimaginable to us today.
A likely scenario is that if the Dems win the House, Trump will claim that they cheated, then challenge the outcome in the courts, a fight that could drag on for months.
The Dems are not certainly no white knights. I’m not particularly fond of some of their candidates in New York and Michigan, who have produced some very undemocratic ideas. One of their Senate candidates in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, threatened recently to put political opponents’ heads on a pike. Hopefully, he’ll lose his August 4th primary to Haley Stevens. I’m not optimistic on that one, though.
Despite these flaws, the Dems represent our best hope for putting a check on an Administration that ignores the welfare of the citizenry, enriches itself handsomely and targets anyone who disagrees with their point of view, by either suing or arresting them. The last thing Trump wants is to be accountable for anything he’s done. The Dems in Congress will call him to account.
No political party is perfect. The Republicans certainly have their share of obnoxious bomb throwers, from Jim Jordan to Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.
One of the biggest reasons the Democrats need to win at least the House is that they still believe the American people have the right to choose their leaders, that we have a say in how the government will be run and how we conduct our lives. I can’t say the same about the Republican Party today.
Trump sees every encounter as a zero-sum game. He must win. And if he subverts the election in November we lose.
To help keep our system of elections safe, make sure every eligible citizen can vote and stop election interference, consider contributing to https://www.democracydefendersfund.org.
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Michael Gold is a columnist for The Yonkers Times. His work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, The Hartford Courant and other newspapers. He’s a volunteer trustee with the Putnam County Land Trust.