By Michael Woyton
We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
That is what I keep saying to myself on this Election Day Eve here in America.
As I looked through the news and the social media Monday morning, I started thinking about how things felt eight years ago as we were plunged into the impending first term of the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist known as Donald Trump.
Because there was so much being thrown at us after Hillary Clinton conceded the race, I didn’t want to rely on my memory about those nascent days of Trump’s rise to power.
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Fortunately, I had “The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year” to turn to, still accessible via my Kindle app.
Written by former Wall Street executive and president of The New Agenda Amy Siskind, “The List” is what she called a first draft of history of things happening because of Trump’s election that were “not normal.”
As I started re-reading Siskind’s meticulous work, I was startled by the very first entry for Week 1: Nov. 13-20, 2016:
“1. Acts of hate — Of the first four hundred acts of hate cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), I had seen many covered by the media. Then I noticed the updated count exceeded seven hundred, and I realized I knew very little about those additional three hundred.”
The source that Siskind provided was an article in the New York Daily News by Chris Sommerfeldt published Nov. 19, 2016. It was headlined “More than 700 ‘Hateful Harassment’ Attacks Reported Since Donald Trump’s Election.”
The first week closed out with entry No. 9 from Vanity Fair: “A request for tolerance for, and understanding of, white supremacists. Following a white nationalist conference held in D.C. during which participants gave Nazi salutes and chanted ‘Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!,’ Trump issued a statement that avoided condemning the actions directly and instead claimed that he ‘will be a leader for every American.'”
Needless to say, the rest of “The List” went on from there.
At least, though, we have the written record of that first year and more through Siskind’s “The Weekly List” podcast, and as I’ve often said, it is important who gets to write the history books.
What will happen after Tuesday’s General Election is anyone’s guess, but I believe we have a very good idea what is at stake if Trump is elected to a second term.
Vice President Kamala Harris said in her “closing argument” speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., that Trump would, if elected, walk into the Oval Office with his enemies list and she “will walk in with a to-do list,” Forbes reported.
She also said Trump is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.”
Over the past couple of days, we’ve seen Trump become more and more outrageous and dark, saying, among other things, that America is a failed nation.
His speeches frequently use violent imagery: suggesting that former Rep. Liz Cheney should be shot in the face and that he would be OK with someone shooting the news media to get to him.
Trump even asked a rally audience if they wanted to see him “knock the hell out of people backstage” after enduring a sound problem, the Independent reported.
No doubt he will bring that anger — and people like Steven Bannon and Stephen Miller who will help stoke it — back into the White House.
Trump has vowed to begin a large-scale deportation operation to remove an estimated 11 million people who live in the United States but do not have legal immigration status, according to ABC News.
Economists said such a prospect would result in a massive decrease in the country’s GDP.
And then there’s Project 2025.
Trump has repeatedly said he knows nothing about the plan crafted by the Heritage Foundation to reshape America into an authoritarian-led government.
Whether or not he knows anything about Project 2025 — come on, he knows — Sen. JD Vance surely does.
Trump’s running mate has ties to the Heritage Foundation and even wrote a forward to a book written by the foundation’s president Kevin Roberts, the New Republic said.
The book, called “Dawn’s Early Light,” was originally subtitled “Burning Down Washington to Save America” but is now subtitled “Taking Back Washington to Save America.”
Project 2025 aims to replace federal civil servants with Trump loyalists, get rid of NOAA and the Department of Education, ban abortion, establish a biblically based definition of marriage and family, ban pornography and shut down tech companies that allow access, strip taxpayer funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and stop offering school lunches to children who can’t afford them.
That list is just a fraction of what Project 2025’s 900 pages call for.
There is no doubt in my mind that Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson will eagerly enact what is contained in Project 2025.
And we must never forget the blank permission slip the U.S. Supreme Court gave the presidency by saying any commander-in-chief is completely immune from prosecution for any crimes committed during official acts in office.
So far, 76.4 million mail-in and early in-person votes have been cast throughout the entire country. In 2020, a total of 158.4 million votes were tallied. There are still a lot of votes yet to be cast.
If early voting locations are not open Monday, please be aware that after Tuesday it will be too late.
Lead art: Michael Woyton
On Second Thought 