Four Big Reasons Not to Vote for Trump

Trump, keeping his promise about American carnage

W.J. Astore

Back in May of 2016, I wrote an article on two big reasons not to vote for Donald Trump. Those reasons, his denial of climate change and his cavalier approach to nuclear weapons, remain valid. But I’d like to add two more that we were unaware of in 2016: his total inability to bring people together, i.e. his divide and rule approach to everything; and his murderously incompetent response to Covid-19.

If there are any lukewarm Trump supporters reading this, I hope you join me in voting your conscience, which in my case meant rejecting both Trump and Biden for candidates I believe in (in my case, Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders).

Don’t vote for a man-child, Donald Trump, who’s golfing and tweeting while the planet burns; who has no idea what nuclear weapons can do, but who threatens to use them while bragging about the size of his nuclear button; who dismisses Covid-19 as just another virus that will magically disappear; and who is so eager to divide us in the cause of enriching himself and his family.

Here’s what I wrote in May of 2016:

Nuclear proliferation and global warming are two big issues that Donald Trump is wrong about.  They’re also the two biggest threats to our planet. Nuclear war followed by nuclear winter could end most life on earth within a matter of weeks or months.  Global warming/climate change, though not as immediate a threat as nuclear war and its fallout, is inexorably leading to a more dangerous and less hospitable planet for our children and their children.

What does “The Donald” believe?  On nuclear proliferation, which only makes nuclear war more likely, Trump is essentially agnostic and even in favor of other nations joining the nuclear club, nations like Japan, South Korea, even Saudi Arabia.  When all countries should be earnestly working to reduce and then eliminate nuclear stockpiles, Trump is advocating their expansion.  (An aside: recall in a previous debate that Trump had no idea what America’s nuclear triad is; add intellectual sloth to his many sins.)

On global warming, Trump is essentially a skeptic on whether it exists (“hoax” and “con job” are expressions of choice), even as he seeks to protect his resorts from its effects. Along with this rank hypocrisy, Trump is advocating an energy plan that is vintage 1980, calling for more burning of fossil fuels, more drilling and digging, more pipelines, as if fossil fuel consumption was totally benign to the environment and to human health.

Along with his tyrannical and fascist tendencies, Trump is wrong on two of the biggest issues facing our planet today.  His ignorance and recklessness render him totally unfit to be president.

19 thoughts on “Four Big Reasons Not to Vote for Trump”

  2. I have recently subscribed to Bracingviews after following you and others at Tomdispatch. I did vote for John Anderson in 1980; Reagan had Colorado locked-up. I would hate to write in Tulsi Gabbard and have Trump win another term by one vote!!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. If this happened, it wouldn’t be your fault. It would be the fault of those who voted for Trump, and the fault of the Democrats for putting forward a candidate with no appeal to you.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. I agree with everything you said right up until your urged voting for Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. My tendency is to endorse Gabbard but Sanders was really over even before the convention. IF he won the nomination he would have been rejected at the polls because he has too many negative tags associated with his name beginning with the great evil, “socialism”. The blind minded populace would be convinced to vote against that, regardless of Trump’s facism would present. Fascism has less impact on our shallow-educated minds than does “socialism”.

    But the real issue for me here is that you continue to press the idea that a Sanders/Gabbard vote means something. It does not, at least this time. I believe there to be an existential threat to our democratic republic, warts and all, by Trump and his fascist/white supremacist following. Wasting a vote on the “ideal” candidate is nothing more than a wasted vote.

    For now I think getting rid of Trump and Trumpism is the imperative. IF real change is to be made as it should be, once the survival of the democratic republic is assured for at least another four years is the time to really push and push and push for a more rational, sane, and progressive America.

    IF by some horrid chance Trump wins again, then that vision of a brighter, fairer and more beneficial
    America may well be faded into a sad lament.

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      1. How nice that you took comfort in your voting preference. But I believe that nothing can be taken for granted which should have been one overarching lesson from the 2016 election. This election is not about any one of us. Rather it is about the preservation of the American experiment into democracy and whether any form of it can truly endure. I am quite certain that my state will be blue also, but I live along the borderline where above which reside a lot of thin minded individuals who proudly display their Trump signs in front of their trailers.

        The only way I can vote for our democratic republic and against Trump facism is to hold my nose and vote for someone who might actually have a chance at being elected. I am ashamed that I voted the same way in the last election and I am ashamed in the social failure that the American democracy appears to be right now, but I will not and cannot vote in never-never land. So I will cast my vote with the hope that I can cast a vote again in 2024 for a better, progressive and intelligent candidate who understands the difference between a democratic republic and a fascist state.

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      2. I understand your point of view, and I believe it’s shared by millions who will “vote blue no matter who” to prevent another four years of the orange menace.

        I didn’t “take comfort” in my vote. I simply prefer to vote for candidates I believe in. Candidates who support my priorities. Biden doesn’t, and neither does Trump, so I won’t vote for either.

        What I despise is the idea that not voting for Biden is a vote for Trump. No, it is not. This kind of vote-shaming is exactly why so many people are pissed off at the DNC.

        Sadly, I think that a Biden/Harris victory will do nothing for progressives. They will serve as “bipartisan” moderate Republicans. And in 2024 we can expect a ticket of Harris/Buttigieg. A woman of color and a gay man: what diversity! Except they’re both establishment tools.

        When progressives hold their noses but still vote for Biden/Harris, why should the latter do anything for us? They expect we’ll always give them our vote since “we have nowhere else to go.” It’s a cynical game they’re playing, one that turns off a lot of people, and one that could end in yet another Trump victory on Nov. 3rd.

        And when the DNC looks to cast blame, they need look no further than the mirror and the choices they’ve made.

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      3. I don’t believe that voting one’s conscience is ever a waste. The idea is supposed to be to endorse the candidates whose beliefs and policies most closely match one’s own, NOT to cast a vote for the person most likely to win. But we’ve lost sight of the overriding principle.

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  4. As you know I’m currently reading “Rage” the new book by Bob Woodward on the Trump Presidency and a real page turner I might add. If half of the things I’m Reading in these Trump/Woodward Interviews is Truth, and I’m pretty sure it is– just let Trump talk his Ego will convict him! I wouldn’t want this mans trigger finger on the red button for 4 more years period… No criticism from me on if Woodward should have reported on this earlier in time…

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  5. “I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.” — H. L. Menken

    “America has only one political party, The Property Party, and it has two right wings.” — Gore Vidal

    “If you give the American people a choice between a Republican and someone who only talks and acts like a Republican, they’ll pick the real Republican every time.” — U.S. President Harry S. Truman

    In 2016 many Americans in states where mostly “trees and acres” live (in the memorable phrase of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) the sparse populations voted largely against the snake-haired Medusa with the dead NAFTA albatross around her neck offered up for President by a corrupt Democratic party that had just spent eight years worshipping Ronald Reagan and proving themselves even further to the right than him. Hence the Electoral College vote for the “real” Republican instead of the phony imitation offered up by the other — and quite pathetic — right-wing faction angry at being tossed from power after failing to utilize it for anything other than making the wealthy even wealthier and themselves even more despicable in the eyes of a betrayed and forgotten anti-war working class.

    So here we go again in 2020 with Corporate America’s two right-wing factions (Genghis Khan vs Attila the Hun) each hurling insults at the other for lacking sufficient commitment to The Barbarian Credo, namely: “It is not enough that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.” Donald Trump rails against “socialists” while Joe Biden boasts that he has beaten the closest thing to one (at least rhetorically) that Americans have seen since Dennis Kucinich. Looks to me like two right-wingers trying to out-right-wing each other: the usual ghastly spectacle in American presidential elections.

    Count me out. I do not want to waste my vote validating one right-wing corporate tool or the other right-wing corporate tool. To vote for right-wing corporate tools only results in more right–wing corporatism — precisely what the Global Oligarchical Collective desires. I have voted for Ralph Nader twice in the past and Dr Jill Stein once. Best votes I ever cast. That more of my countrymen chose to validate right-wing corporate imperialism, has nothing to do with me. Others “won” right-wing corporatism for themselves by voting for it. Yet millions of them seem rather disappointed, if not enraged, at what they chose for themselves when offered meaningless labels like “R” and “D.”

    The United States Marketing Territory and Population Containment Zone (USMTPCZ) does not have a “democratic” political system, and the put-upon proles who reside there really ought to get about the business of constructing one. Haplessly acquiescing, election after election, to one of two flavors of right-wing corporatism amounts to “choosing” sulphuric or hydrochloric acids as one’s favorite beverage. Not (to mix metaphors) my cup of tea.

    I did vote for Representative Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic Party primary this year, but since the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with her, I want nothing to do with them. I don’t think I’ll waste my vote by voting this time around.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. The Mars Society recently finished their annual convention, this one conducted “virtually” because of concerns relating to the Corona Virus. I spent several days watching and listening to the various presentations, mostly by scientists, engineers, NASA officials, and space entrepreneurs (like Elon Musk) regarding prospects for human expansion into the solar system at large, particularly the Moon and Mars, the nearest planetary bodies where such human settlement might have some possibility of establishing a foothold. I mention this in connection with the present topic of US political electioneering, because of something that Dr Robert Zubrin — an aeronautical engineer and President of the Mars Society — wrote back in 1999 in his book Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization:

    “We do not, in fact, have a democracy. We have a semi-oligarchy with democratic influences. Ordinary citizens have little control over the government, as their elected representatives mostly do as they please or as their Beltway consultants suggest and respond to the public only when massive pressure is evidenced. In addition, many government operations are secret, and the legal system is unfathomable. Of course, when the United States was founded, such indirect representation was the best approximation to democracy that was feasible. But today, with the availability of the Internet and other forms of instantaneous electronic communication, there is no fundamental technological reason why the general public could not directly engage in voting on legislation, taxation, expenditures, and other issues, up to and including those of war and peace. It might be argued that the general public is not qualified to do so. Personally, as one who has interacted with some of those calling the shots within the present system, I see no evidence for the public’s inferiority.”

    “Such skepticism of the people’s capacity to engage in direct government is reminiscent of similar skepticism offered by sophisticated European observers of the practicality of the Founding Fathers’ notions of the viability of representative democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right of the people to bear arms, trial by jury, and so on. To the establishment eighteenth-century mind, all of these concepts were prescriptions for chaos. It took a “noble experiment” in a new land to prove their viability. Until that was done, it was impossible to implement most of them in Europe. Similarly, the representative system in the United States will never yield to actual democracy until the latter is proved somewhere. For that, a new “noble experiment” will be necessary.”

    The U.S. political system and “government” desperately require an update and overhaul. Way past time to move from the Eighteenth into the Twenty-first century. The Corporate Oligarchical Collective certainly has, and the American people — if they truly wish to avoid techno-feudal serfdom — had better get busy doing the same.

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  7. So, let’s see. . . . Trump and the Republicans blame the Chinese for American’s self-inflicted disasters. Joe Biden and the Democrats blame Russia for America’s self-inflicted disasters. No one on the ballot for President holds Americans accountable for their own self-inflicted disasters, let alone proposes demobilizing the pork-barrel US military establishment and abolishing the CIA: two of the greatest causes of America’s self-inflicted disasters. But by all means, vote for one or the other of the two corporate tools demanding that you anoint them Corporate Xenophobe/Scapegoater-in-Chief. Your “choice.” Take it or take it.

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  8. Here in Indiana, I voted all Blue. Biden has little chance to win this state, there are more down ballot chances for the Democrats, especially the Congressional District I am in. In 2016 several streets in my area had Trump signs – not one this year. Perhaps it is a foregone conclusion Trump will win Indiana.

    It is really difficult for me to wrap my mind around all the loyal Trump Cultists here. I could understand in 2016 the seething rejection of Hillary. She came across as so entitled to be the first woman president.

    Biden is so bland he is like a 1970’s Jerry Ford Republican. The Trump Cult and it’s Reactionary predecessor – The Tea Party has regularly rejected in the primaries any type of Jerry Ford Republican. Here in Indiana the Jerry Ford Republicans have found a home in the Democratic Party. AOC and The Squad types scare these Repubicrats.

    In 2012 Richard Lugar long time US Senator from Indiana lost the primary to a total Reactionary Primitive Republican Richard Mourdock, 60 to 40%. Mourdock lost the general election to Democratic nominee Joe Donnelly after the media attention over his comment in a debate that “life is that gift from God that I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

    Democrat Joe Donnelly defeated Moudock. One-term US Senate Democrat Joe Donnelly was defeated in 2018. Donnelly was as close as you could get to Republican – It could not save him as he was defeated.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Interesting comparison to Jerry Ford. That’s what Biden is: a moderate, pro-business, pro-finance, Republican.

      But Jerry Ford was younger and more sure-footed (despite his reputation for slips!).

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