'He's Willing to Put Democracy on the Block'
With three question marks, two words in all caps and one incendiary tweet, Donald Trump on Thursday morning unleashed one of his most hostile sallies on democracy yet. The corrosive missive, smearing the November election as “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT” before the first vote has been cast and floating the notion of delaying the date, was probably shocking not so much because of its content as by the reaction it swiftly elicited. People who habitually do not respond to the president’s tweets responded to this one—a point-blank and bipartisan repudiation that included a roster of important Republicans.
The tweet even alarmed a cadre of longtime Trump observers—the biographers and former staffers and executives who long ago became accustomed to his provocations. But they also weren’t that surprised.
From Trump’s financial failures of the early to mid-1990s, after all, to his failures then and later as a casino owner in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to the similar tactics he deployed in the stretch run of the election in 2016, the people who know Trump best have seen versions of this before. And always the motivation is the same—to save face by muddying the runway headed toward a looming loss by calling into question if not outright attacking the validity of the system itself.
The sole difference, they say, and it’s a big one, they grant, is the gravity of his role—he’s the president not of the Trump Organization but of the United States of America—and what’s at stake: the health and sustenance of the country’s democracy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/he-s-willing-to-put-democracy-on-the-block/ar-BB17oej7?li=BB141NW3&ocid=DELLDHP