American presidential elections are always definitive, but not nearly as much as the last two have been or what the next one in November will be. 2016 marked a horrendous departure from the norm for America, when a television personality with no legislative experience, whatsoever, was chosen over an accomplished stateswoman with more qualifications than any previous presidential candidate in the history of our republic. 2020 was the year that we clawed back the reins of power from the grasp of a lunatic who had allowed 1.1 million Americans to die of COVID-19 on his watch, because he was too busy whitewashing it as a “hoax” rather than preparing for it. Now in 2024, either this madman will be restored to power to gut our Civil Service and destroy our form of government, or vanquished for good.

Charlie Sykes has a column up today that shows how incredibly far America has fallen that the GOP has twisted itself into pretzel shapes to rationalize why Trump should still be its standard bearer and why he’s still on the ticket. But it all makes perfect sense. Reince Priebus spoke to Trump about dropping out of the campaign after the Access Hollywood tape and Trump was enraged and refused. And of course the GOP didn’t push all that hard. They then came to be glad that they didn’t, when Trump won the following month. So yes, while there is tremendous fault with the Republican party for putting this clown on the ticket again, the tragic truth of the matter is that they’re hoping that the same angry, disillusioned, and confused America that elected Trump once will do it again.

A lot of people simply do not care that Trump is a convicted felon or an adjudicated rapist. And for the hard core Trumpers, that will never change. Trump, at this point, could kill his children and eat them in a pie and his hard core believers would not bat an eyelash. Such is the way of fanaticism. Here’s what happened in Wisconsin that Charlie Sykes wrote about that illustrates the depths to which this nation has fallen.

I WILL VOTE FOR THE FELON!

This is also not a parody.

It is, in fact, a letter to the editor of our local paper by Alex Leykin, who is the chairman of the Republican Party of Ozaukee County, a key swing county in the key swingiest state of Wisconsin.

He opens with his personal story and a tortured historical analogy, and it gets worse from there.

As a Jewish immigrant who escaped the totalitarian Soviet Union and was welcomed as a refugee to this amazing country we call the United States of America, I will openly, loudly and proudly proclaim here and now that I WILL CRAWL THROUGH ANY OBSTACLE to vote for the man Democrats have declared a “felon” and all Republicans.

Of course, Trump was not declared a felon by Democrats, but by a jury of his peers. But these are mere quibbles for the GOP leader. At no point does Leykin mention — or even allude to — the specific crimes for which Trump has been indicted and convicted. No mention of the hush-money-for-porn-star coverup; the violations of the Espionage Act, defrauding the federal government, or racketeering. Nor does he make mention of either the business frauds or sexual assault.

Leykin’s enthusiasm is based solely on Trump’s status as a “convicted felon,” which the GOP leader argues is a self-evident qualification for high office. (A status that should come as rather good news to the criminal class at large.)

At one time or another most of my family had been declared a “felon” by the Soviet regime. in the West, these people were known as refuseniks, dissidents, etc. But in the place where I came from, we were all “felons.”

At this point, one is tempted to note that Trump is no Natan Sharansky. But Leykin is actually making a far more deplorable point.

The GOP chair is at some pains to insist on the moral equivalence between the old Soviet Union and the “totalitarian” regime of his adopted country. To the chairman of the Ozaukee County Republican party, being a convicted felon in this country (for anything?) is equivalent to the persecutions of dissidents — including Alexei Navalny, the dissident murdered by Trump’s BFF, Valdimir Putin. He writes:

Even more recently another regime, this time right here in America, has arrested and imprisoned members of the opposing political party. After realizing that arresting and imprisoning dozens of opposition members was not enough our Democrat party decided to do the same with the leader of the opposition party and so they did.

Got all that?

The piece then goes on to the sophistry surrounding those indicted in the fake elector scheme. All in all the writer to the local newspaper embodies a new kind of batshit authoritarianism which would have been laughable in a pre-Trump age, but which is now being presented as thoroughly reasonable commentary.

• The embrace of felons seems like an interesting flex for the party of Law and Order, and curious minds want to know whether the New Enthusiasm for Felons will extend to other members of that class.
• The moral equivalency. It burns. You’ll have to take my word for it, but there was a time when conservatives rejected attempts to flatten or erase the moral and political differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. But in the Age of Trump, Republicans have internalized the idea that we are really no better than our enemies. [Recall Trump’s 2017 defense of Putin’s murders. ““But he’s a killer,” [Bill] O’Reilly said to Trump. “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump replied.”]
• Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. would beg to differ.
• But the herd of independent minds is gathering around the right’s new equivalency narrative. Here’s deep-thinker Niall Ferguson in The Free Press: “We’re All Soviets Now.”

Yes, if you read that piece hotlinked in blue, you will see that the hush money trial is being conflated to resemble the kind of legal machinations that led to the imprisonment and eventual murder in prison of Alexander Navalny.

All this has been made possible by the entry into politics of a TV game show host with a lot of financial problems and even more delusions. Here’s the bottom line: Either the fact that Trump is a convicted felon and an adjudicated rapist is going to impact people, the Silent Majority of 2024 and they will vote him into oblivion. Or, America is gone. And I don’t know what comes next.

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