What is ahead is more violence, lies and chaos

There are 50 days remaining before the American people choose the 47th president of the United States. There will be chaos, danger and violence ahead. The cause of the mayhem is singular when it is deconstructed and reverse-engineered. The age of malice has been the vision, work and achievement of Donald Trump, whose rottenness, low character, meanness and faithlessness were long decried by the conservative movement until it became their anthem.  The embrace of a petulant fascism, shaped by the deformities of its leader’s specific disorders has obliterated the concepts and important principles that gave birth to the nation, the Republican Party, and most importantly, the idea that progress in America is a settled issue.

Donald Trump is a man of violence. He has stoked and curated it for the purposes of harnessing the fear it induces to help him take political power. There are dozens of examples of Trump using violence, such as when his disgraced daughter Ivanka, toast of Café Milano, orchestrated the attack on peaceful protesters so that he could parade from the White House to St.John’s Church and desecrate the Bible, like he would later do to Arlington National Cemetery and Ground Zero. Trump and his advisors have long fantasized about using the military to quash dissent, arrest opponents, deport millions and build vast detention camps.

Here is Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway and her colleague at The Federalist calling for ABC moderators and executives to be criminally charged:

January 6 was a vast act of violence that Trump has claimed was peaceful, despite the deaths, injuries and trauma. During his political rallies Trump has stoked violence and incited it. During a presidential debate he invited a fascist militia to wait until the time was right to strike.

Violence stalks our children in schools, worshippers at synagogues, churches and mosques, people at country music concerts, work, shopping malls, highways and anywhere where there are more than three people gathered. This is our national sickness, and America’s politicians have always been targets.

Elon Musk literally dared a sick American and MAGA extremist to attack Vice President Harris as an act of revenge because what happened to President Ford has now happened to Donald Trump. He posted on X:

Why do they want to kill Donald Trump? And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.

He subsequently deleted it due to the backlash, but it generated more than 30 million impressions on the platform. He tried to backpedal today, saying:

One lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.

He later added:

It turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery.

There has been much talk in the media about the need for Vice President Harris to be more specific about “policies,” whatever that means, given that she is the only candidate on the ballot with a record of coherence around anything in this race. Certainly, even the driest-mouthed commentator yearning for a sip from Kamala Harris’ white papers must appreciate the clarity of the MAGA position around guns. Just recently JD Vance said we had to get used to it, and for 20 years after every shooting there has never been an absence of “thoughts and prayers,” so let me add mine that the USSS with an annual budget of $3 billion can better protect the 6th hole next Sunday.

It does bear mentioning that there is no Secret Service protection for the citizens of Springfield, Ohio, who have been terrorized by a Nazi smear picked up by their Senator JD Vance and Donald Trump that Haitian immigrants are eating pets. Insanity has resulted. The town’s hospitals and schools are inundated with bomb threats, and the mayor of the town is begging Donald Trump and JD Vance to stop the insanity before something truly terrible happens.

JD Vance has made it clear that he won’t stop. He believes that he holds a license to make up vile and vicious smears worthy of Joseph Goebbels or Julius Streicher for the public good. His interview yesterday with Dana Bash revealed Vance as a lying psychopath, whose sociopathy literally pulses behind his dead eyes and smug expression. It was astonishing and deeply frightening. He said this about the claims that Haitians are eating their pets:

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Here’s the full exchange, in which he also told Bash to “shut up:”

The violence being stoked and curated by Trump and Vance isn’t just going to wash back on them, but on all of us if we don’t banish these purveyors of hate, lies, venom and mayhem from the corridors of power where life and death decisions are made.

Another extraordinary weekend in America has passed, and what is clear is the trajectory of events. There is always a moment when the boundary of late August and September seem a bit blurry, but by mid-month it is clear that summer is over no matter what the temperature may be. The days are shorter and getting shorter and the temperature is cooling, while the leaves are crisping, dropping and starting to accumulate. What is ahead is more violence, lies and chaos. The bill is going to come due. How can it not? When it does, the “who me?” crowd will be deeply aggrieved when their obvious culpability becomes a discussion just as they are now.

It is no accident that the epicenter of violence and division in America has become a fertile ground for violence. Violence begets violence begets violence. It has always been this way. Reaping and sewing are important concepts. Some say they are even biblical.

Whatever lies ahead there is a simple truth that should be known by as many people as soon as possible: only love conquers hate.

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