The Bible describes Satan as: -the ultimate deceiver, a "liar and the father of lies" who twists truth, disguises himself as an "angel of light," and leads the whole world astray. Open your eyes.
âWhen behavior consistently shows a lack of empathy, truth, and accountability, people are going to call it what it looks like. You donât have to agreeâbut you canât pretend people are reacting to nothing.â
He failed the tests of leadership and betrayed America. Voters must stand up to him in November.
Finally, The New York Times Editorial Board says Trump is unfit to hold the Office of the President of the United States!
This is a "giftđlink" so you can read the entire, HISTORIC editorial by The New York Times Editorial Board stating in no uncertain terms that Donald Trump is unfit for office.
Below are some excerpts from the five subsections of the editorial: I Moral Fitness, II. Principled Leadership, III. Character, IV. A President's Words, and V. Rule of Law
I. MORAL FITNESS MATTERS
Presidents are confronted daily with challenges that require not just strength and conviction but also honesty, humility, selflessness, fortitude and the perspective that comes from sound moral judgment.
If Mr. Trump has these qualities, Americans have never seen them in action on behalf of the nationâs interests. His words and actions demonstrate a disregard for basic right and wrong and a clear lack of moral fitness for the responsibilities of the presidency.
He lies blatantly and maliciously, embraces racists, abuses women and has a schoolyard bullyâs instinct to target societyâs most vulnerable. He has delighted in coarsening and polarizing the town square with ever more divisive and incendiary language. Mr. Trump is a man who craves validation and vindication, so much that he would prefer a hostile leaderâs lies to his own intelligence agenciesâ truths and would shake down a vulnerable ally for short-term political advantage. His handling of everything from routine affairs to major crises was undermined by his blundering combination of impulsiveness, insecurity and unstudied certainty.
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The Supreme Court, with its ruling on July 1 granting presidents âabsolute immunityâ for official acts, has removed an obstacle to Mr. Trumpâs worst impulses: the threat of legal consequences. What remains is his own sense of right and wrong. Our countryâs future is too precious to rely on such a broken moral compass.
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Below the cut are excerpts from the other four subsections.
II. PRINCIPLED LEADERSHIP MATTERS
Republican presidents and presidential candidates have used their leadership at critical moments to set a tone for society to live up to. Mr. Reagan faced down totalitarianism in the 1980s.... George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act.... George W. Bush, for all his failures after Sept. 11, did not stoke hate against or demonize Muslims or Islam.
As a candidate during the 2008 race, Mr. McCain spoke out when his fellow conservatives spread lies about his opponent, Barack Obama. Mr. Romney was willing to sacrifice his standing and influence in the party he once represented as a presidential nominee, by boldly calling out Mr. Trumpâs failings and voting for his removal from office.
These acts of leadership are what it means to put country first, to think beyond oneself.
Mr. Trump has demonstrated contempt for these American ideals. He admires autocrats, from Viktor Orban to Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un. He believes in the strongman model of power â a leader who makes things happen by demanding it, compelling agreement through force of will or personality. In reality, a strongman rules through fear and the unprincipled use of political might for self-serving ends, imposing poorly conceived policies that smother innovation, entrepreneurship, ideas and hope.
During his four years in office, Mr. Trump tried to govern the United States as a strongman would, issuing orders or making decrees on Twitter. He announced sudden changes in policy â on who can serve in the military, on trade policy, on how the United States deals with North Korea or Russia â without consulting experts on his staff about how these changes would affect America. Indeed, nowhere did he put his political or personal interests above the national interest more tragically than during the pandemic, when he faked his way through a crisis by touting conspiracy theories and pseudoscience while ignoring the advice of his own experts and resisting basic safety measures that would have saved lives.
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A second Trump administration would be different. He intends to fill his administration with sycophants, those who have shown themselves willing to obey Mr. Trumpâs demands or those who lack the strength to stand up to him. He wants to remove those who would be obstacles to his agenda, by enacting an order to make it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with those more loyal to him.
This means not only that Americans would lose the benefit of their expertise but also that America would be governed in a climate of fear, in which government employees must serve the interests of the president rather than the public.... Another term under Mr. Trumpâs leadership would risk doing permanent damage to our government.
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III. CHARACTER MATTERS
Character is the quality that gives a leader credibility, authority and influence. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trumpâs petty attacks on his opponents and their families led many Republicans to conclude that he lacked such character. Other Republicans, including those who supported the former presidentâs policies in office, say they can no longer in good conscience back him for the presidency. âItâs a job that requires the kind of character he just doesnât have,â Paul Ryan, a former Republican House speaker, said of Mr. Trump in May.
Those who know Mr. Trumpâs character best â the people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House â have expressed grave doubts about his fitness for office.His former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, described Mr. Trump as âa person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.â Bill Barr, whom Mr. Trump appointed as attorney general, said of him, âHe will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the countryâs interest.â James Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general who served as defense secretary, said, âDonald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people â does not even pretend to try.â
Mike Pence, Mr. Trumpâs vice president, has disavowed him. No other vice president in modern American history has done this. âI believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,â Mr. Pence has said. âAnd anyone who asked someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.â
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It may be tempting for Americans to believe that a second Trump presidency would be much like the first, with the rest of government steeled to protect the country and resist his worst impulses. But the strongman needs others to be weak, and Mr. Trump is surrounding himself with yes men. The American public has a right to demand more from their president and those who would serve under him.
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IV. A PRESIDENTâS WORDS MATTER
When America saw white nationalists and neo-Nazis march through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and activists were rallying against racism, Mr. Trump spoke of âvery fine people on both sides.â When he was pressed about the white supremacist Proud Boys during a 2020 debate, Mr. Trump told them to âstand back and stand by,â a request that, records show, they took literally in deciding to storm Congress. This winter, the former president urged Iowans to vote for him and score a victory over their fellow Americans â âall of the liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps.â And in a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire, he used the word âvermin,â a term he has deployed to describe both immigrants and political opponents.
What a president says reflects on the United States and the kind of society we aspire to be.
In 2022 this board raised an urgent alarm about the rising threat of political violence in the United States and what Americans could do to stop it. At the time... the Republican Party was in the middle of a fight for control, between Trumpists and those who were ready to move on from his destructive leadership. This struggle within the party has consequences for all Americans. âA healthy democracy requires both political parties to be fully committed to the rule of law and not to entertain or even tacitly encourage violence or violent speech,â we wrote.
A large faction of one party in our country fails that test, and that faction, Mr. Trumpâs MAGA extremists, now control the party and its levers of power. There are many reasons his conquest of the Republican Party is bad for American democracy, but one of the most significant is that those extremists have often embraced violent speech or the belief in using violence to achieve their political goals. This belief led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and it has resulted in a rising number of threats against judges, elected officials and prosecutors.
This threat cannot be separated from Mr. Trumpâs use of language to encourage violence, to dehumanize groups of people and to spread lies. A study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, released in October 2022, came to the conclusion that MAGA Republicans (as opposed to those who identified themselves as traditional Republicans) âare more likely to hold extreme and racist beliefs, to endorse political violence, to see such violence as likely to occur and to predict that they will be armed under circumstances in which they consider political violence to be justified.â
The Republican Party had an opportunity to renounce Trumpism; it has submitted to it. Republican leaders have had many opportunities to repudiate his violent discourse and make clear that it should have no place in political life; they failed to.
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But with his nomination by his party all but assured, Mr. Trump has become even more reckless in employing extreme and violent speech, such as his references to executing generals who raise questions about his actions. He has argued, before the Supreme Court, that he should have the right to assassinate a political rival and face no consequences.
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V. THE RULE OF LAWÂ MATTERS
The danger from these foundational failings â of morals and character, of principled leadership and rhetorical excess â is never clearer than in Mr. Trumpâs disregard for rule of law, his willingness to do long-term damage to the integrity of Americaâs systems for short-term personal gain.
As weâve noted, Mr. Trumpâs disregard for democracy was most evident in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to encourage violence to stop the peaceful transfer of power. What stood in his way were the many patriotic Americans, at every level of government, who rejected his efforts to bully them into complying with his demands to change election results. Instead, they followed the rules and followed the law. This respect for the rule of law, not the rule of men, is what has allowed American democracy to survive for more than 200 years.
In the four years since losing the election, Mr. Trump has become only more determined to subvert the rule of law, because his whole theory of Trumpism boils down to doing whatever he wants without consequence. Americans are seeing this unfold as Mr. Trump attempts to fight off numerous criminal charges. Not content to work within the law to defend himself, he is instead turning to sympathetic judges â including two Supreme Court justices with apparent conflicts over the 2020 election and Jan. 6-related litigation. The playbook: delay federal prosecution until he can win election and end those legal cases. His vision of government is one that does what he wants, rather than a government that operates according to the rule of law as prescribed by the Constitution, the courts and Congress.
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So much in the past two decades has tested these norms in our society.... We need a recommitment to the rule of law and the values of fair play. This election is a moment for Americans to decide whether we will keep striving for those ideals.
Mr. Trump rejects them. If he is re-elected, America will face a new and precarious future, one that it may not be prepared for. It is a future in which intelligence agencies would be judged not according to whether they preserved national security but by whether they served Mr. Trumpâs political agenda. It means that prosecutors and law enforcement officials would be judged not according to whether they follow the law to keep Americans safe but by whether they obey his demands to âgo afterâ political enemies. It means that public servants would be judged not according to their dedication or skill but by whether they show sufficient loyalty to him and his MAGA agenda.
Even if Mr. Trumpâs vague policy agenda would not be fulfilled, he could rule by fear. The lesson of other countries shows that when a bureaucracy is politicized or pressured, the best public servants will run for the exits.
This is what has already happened in Mr. Trumpâs Republican Party, with principled leaders and officials retiring, quitting or facing ouster. In a second term, he intends to do that to the whole of government.
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A new POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll shows that Trumpâs criminal conviction hurts him with independents.
Some polls show that Trump's 34 felony convictions have somewhat been a net negative for him. This one from POLITICO-ipsos continues the trend.
This poll was conducted from June 7-9 and had a sample of 1,027 adults, age 18 or older, who were interviewed online; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points for all respondents. This is the fourth poll on the Trump prosecutions that POLITICO Magazine has conducted in partnership with Ipsos since last summer.
Twenty-two percent of respondents said that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them less likely to support Trump. Only 6 percent of respondents took the other side of that question â reporting that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them more likely to support Trump.
More than twice as many independents say they are now less likely to vote for Trump as opposed to those who are now more inclined to vote for Trump.
In states decided by small margins, a few thousand votes by independents can make a huge difference.
In conversation, don't just say Donald Trump â say convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump. A bit of a mouthful, but successful advertising campaigns are ones that use a lot of repetition. Liberals need to get over their obsessive and counterproductive reluctance to repeat things. If you want to win then repeat a lot.
The Biden-Harris campaign produced this ad to show the difference between what convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Trump has been doing and what Biden is doing.
