Closing Time at the Last Chance Saloon
PARIS — I'm flying back to Tucson this weekend for High Noon at the Last Chance Saloon. When the dust settles, I'm counting on a tequila sunrise, not a hemlock margarita. Can a plurality of Americans in a few key states be so greedy, cruel or easily duped?
Then, again...
Andy Borowitz is still fall-down funny, but in an upended America his biting satire is hard news. He captured the threat in a single question: Do we want a Hitler or not?
Trump's true colors have been clear since his blood libel against Muslims and Mexicans when he descended his fool's gold escalator nine years ago. Citing Nazi Germany seemed extreme then. In Madison Square Garden, he went full-blown Führer.
"Make no mistake," Tim Walz said later. "He knew exactly what he was doing." Lincoln Project ads and history books make plain it was a redux of a frightening pro-Nazi rally in 1939. Same place, similar howling haters. But with Old Glory flags, not swaztikas.
Stephen Miller updated Hitler's word. “America,” he said, “is for Americans — and Americans only.” He plans for the military to hunt down more than 10 million people and concentrate them in camps until they are airlifted to countries that may refuse them.
The American Immigration Council calculates a "highly conservative" cost of $315 billion, besides lowering GDP by up to 7 percent as immigrant-run businesses close, losing American jobs. Wide sectors of the economy would suffer.
In fact, migrant numbers are plummeting. The bipartisan border security bill would have brought processing under control. Trump blocked it so he could blame Biden for a crisis he created before 2020.
Yet polls favor him on the border, economy and inflation. Republicans appeal to memory-bereft Americans by asking if they are better off today than four years ago. Not even close.
Within 10 weeks after Trump stopped pretending Covid would magically disappear, a pandemic ran wild. Forty million Americans lost jobs. Bodies piled up in refrigerator trucks, as the economy dipped to Great Depression levels.
Under Trump, then later because Republicans politicized Covid and many refused vaccines, a million Americans died lonely, painful deaths.
The Congressional Budget Office predicted recovery would take a decade. Trump reluctantly supported a $2 trillion relief package, equal to his 2017 tax cut. Democrats pushed through massive stimulus legislation with no Republican support.
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Borowitz urges giving every voter a copy of The Economist's special issue. Its cover reads, "The Envy of the World," over a roll of dollars blasting into space.
An intro piece explains:
"Although supersized stimulus during the pandemic fueled inflation, it has also ensured that America has grown by 10% since 2020, three times the pace of the rest of the G7. By contrast, stingier Germany is mired in recession for a second consecutive year."
In Mississippi, the poorest state, average wages are higher than in Canada, Britain or the European Union. Jobs are plentiful. "America’s dynamic private sector draws in immigrants, ideas and investment, begetting more dynamism," it says.
Politics have yet to make a visible effect, it adds, because strength is broad-based, and stimulus money provided a sugar rush. But as divisions deepen, "Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are promising ever more damaging policies—Mr Trump especially."
World-watchers saw this coming. Timothy Snyder, who wrote the chilling book, "On Tyranny," and Jason Stanley, a propaganda expert, packed a Yale public symposium in November 2017. I joined the panel, having reported on despots since the 1960s.
Our consensus echoed Edmund Burke, an Irish thinker in the 1700s: Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Snyder's first rule was to resist anticipatory obedience. But look around.
Jeff Bezos blocked a Harris endorsement in his Washington Post, the bedrock paper of record that brought down Richard Nixon. Clearly, he feared angering Trump. Rather than support the Post's reporters and columnists, cancellations followed. The Los Angeles Times and chains controlled by hedge funds did the same.
This is just what Trump wants. If he wins, expect a flurry of lawsuits and legislation to muzzle news media that do not feed his insatiable ego. As controversy raged, the Post's Jennifer Rubin explained how dictators succeed, quoting Snyder's essential caution:
“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.”
Media self-censorship is far more damaging than censors' blue pencils or after-the-fact sanctions. That applies to all democratic safeguards.
The Las Vegas Sun stood firm with an editorial detailing Trump’s worsening lapses. He "is crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.” And it echoed Borowitz's other vital point.
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Trump, addled and diminished, can create havoc at first but will likely have to hand power to JD Vance, now only 40, and in the long term far more dangerous. Devoid of principles, he is a malleable tool for billionaire autocrats and fundamentalist ideologues.
Vance defined himself at the outset by calling himself a combat Marine while slamming Walz for embellishing his own military record. Walz spent decades as a National Guard officer. Once in the past he referred to carrying a weapon of war.
But Vance spent a brief hitch as a public-affairs officer, a flack who wrote handouts from the safety of comfortable headquarters. In Iraq, we called guys like that Jiblets. Their Joint Information Bureau worked hard to keep real reporters seeing the war up close.
A warmup "comedian" for Trump's rally called Puerto Rico an island of floating garbage. Trump let that pass when he spoke four hours later. In the outraged aftermath, he claimed that whenever he encounters Puerto Ricans, they flock to him "with hugs and kisses."
Unlikely. He tried to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland. When a hurricane devastated the island in 2017, he tossed paper towels to families that had lost everything, blamed the governor for corruption and hurried back to Mar-a-Lago.
Vance feigned ignorance. "Maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke," he said. "Maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it. I’m not gonna comment on the specificity...but I think that we have to stop getting offended at every little thing in the United States of America, I’m just so over it.”
And there is Elon Musk, who admitted on his X'd-out Twitter that Americans would suffer a lot of pain before they saw new prosperity. But he wouldn't, nor would his wealthy backers who their fortunes entitle them to reshape America in their own image.
In Trump's cabinet, he plans to slash $2 trillion from discretionary spending economists say now amounts to only $1.7 trillion. That would essentially eliminate funding for education, transportation, housing and environmental protections.
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There is much more to say but no time remains. It all depends on how many voters take the trouble to vote for one of two candidates — or squander a ballot on Jill Stein, whose expected 1 percent or so is likely enough to tip the balance in battleground states.
Every seat in Congress and state legislatures, as well as every other job on the ballot, is crucial. A clear Democratic majority can blunt lasting damage so that Americans can return to a functioning two-party system in 2028.
Harris delivered her grand finale at the Ellipse in Washington, where Trump instigated the first armed assault on the Capitol since Britain tried to take back their ex-colony in 1812.
The irony is as striking as it is tragic.
When Eastern Europeans brought down a rusting Iron Curtain, I was in Prague where Alexander Dubcēk, deposed in 1969, told a million Czechs in Wenceslas Square that their Velvet Revolution had succeeded.
The crowd jangled bunches of keys in the air, an old Czech good-riddance gesture to unwanted dictators. I turned to a father with his daughter on his shoulders for a translation. He was too choked up with tears to comply.
Later, I got to Bucharest from Paris with a few reporters on the night Romanians rose up to chase Nicolai Ceausescu out of power, braving withering resistance from his dreaded secret police. A kid lugging a gear bag full of makeshift weapons volunteered to interpret.
We crisscrossed the town for a week until hold-out snipers faded away. At one point, he stopped. "You know," he said, "It still feels so strange to hear the word, democracy, on my tongue."
Harris's 29-minute speech (Trump likely noticed her crowd was four times bigger than his at the Garden) was a pitch-perfect attorney's closing argument. She listed looming dangers, laid out her domestic and foreign policy and her inclusive approach to all Americans.
Then in a big finish she recalled past Americans’ history, from defeating a "petty tyrant" king 250 years ago, the Civil War and battles over minority rights.
"They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant. The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators."
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Last Chance Saloon is no figure of speech. In Arizona's Maricopa County, police snipers and drones protect the tabulation center. One vignette among so many others nationwide. Bad guys, armed and dangerous, are not migrants but Trump's Brown Shirts in red caps.
Experts who study the signs warn that turnout may be lower than in 2020. Too many apathetic voters believe the threat is overblown. Maybe it is. But what sort of person is willing to bet their own children's future on it?
I'm optimistic. It's not over until the fat man's in Sing Sing.
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Harris at the Ellipse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaE6FhbWVxM
heathercoxrichardson@substack.com
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