Trump's equivalence game

The 2024 presidential election will be a moral and ethical gut check for voters.

• The battle for American democracy in 2024 will boil down to equivalence.

  To vote for former President Donald Trump, voters must convince themselves that the Republican candidate is morally and ethically superior to Democratic incumbent Joe Biden. The only possible way they can reach such a conclusion comes by purposely ignoring facts and accepting lies. The biggest lie of all, the fiction that far too many Americans have chosen to accept, is that Biden stole the 2020 presidential election from Trump by committing fraud. More than 60 lawsuits have produced no empirical evidence to support that conclusion. Investigations have debunked dozens of conspiracy theories.

  But as Trump marches inevitably toward the Republican presidential nomination, the GOP continues to encourage the election fraud myth. The party has no choice. The canard creates the moral and ethical equivalence between Trump and Biden that Republicans need.  If Biden cannot be vilified for greater crimes than Trump, if voters legitimately elected Biden in 2020, then 2024 Trump voters must face the fact that they now want the United States led by:

  • A man who encouraged a treasonous attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the peaceful transfer of power after a free, legal election.

  • A man recorded asking the Georgia Secretary of State to find 11,700 votes that could be used to overturn the result of a free, legal election.

  • A man judged to have sexually assaulted a woman so seriously that he faces a civil judgment of roughly $90 million.

  • A man judged to have committed so much tax fraud in his personal business that he faces a judgment of $355 million.

  • A man who had sex with a porn star and may have illegally falsified business records to cover up hush money payments in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

  • A man whose family grew rich on the special access afforded to them as appointed officials of Trump’s presidential administration.

  • A man whose denial of the extent of a deadly pandemic for political purposes needlessly cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.

  • A man who paid homage to international despots and killers like Vladimir Putin.

  • A man who empowered violent White supremacists by publicly offering them credibility and even entertaining one of the worst of the bigots at dinner.

  • A man who suggested that illegal Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug dealers rather than laborers doing jobs that Americans do not want.

  • A man who sat for an interview with Alex Jones, the talk show host who falsely claimed that a mass shooting of elementary school students was staged.

  • A man whose Supreme Court appointees gave control of women’s reproductive rights to state legislatures run by White men.

  • A man whose tax rate cuts for huge corporations were many times higher than the rate cuts he offered middle class individuals.

  • A man who lied to the public during his first term in office by insisting that his isolationist import tariffs cost the Chinese when the tariffs actually increased costs for American businesses who then passed price increases on to American consumers.

  Biden certainly has policy warts. Inflation caused by the pandemic relief legislation Biden promoted headed off economic disaster but was so generous and poorly administered that it was easily abused and raised consumer spending. This, in turn, drove gas and food prices higher than pay increases for rank-and-file Americans. Now, interest rate increases to address this inflation have staved off a recession, but in doing so raised housing prices to the exclusion of some would-be middle class and low-income home buyers.

  The Federal Reserve appears poised to cut interest rates in the coming months. Pay may catch up with prices, but probably not before the election.    

  Instead of a public policy debate, this election will be a national gut check. More than at any time in U.S. history, American voters in 2024 will determine whether a politician’s character counts for anything in this country.

  Does it matter that one candidate faces 91 felony accusations and the other faces none?

  Does common decency matter in America’s commander-in-chief?

  If so, there is no way that Donald Trump is morally or ethically equivalent to Joe Biden, much less superior.

  If Trump’s criminal accusations and lack of decency are not sufficient reasons for a majority to vote against him, Americans will have blessed immoral and unethical behavior that most of us would never tolerate in ourselves or our loved ones. Trump consistently substitutes bullying, bigotry, and intimidation for civil debate. In this campaign season, he already has already shown that if elected, he will continue to degrade American principles and leadership and replace them with autocratic norms.

  As Trump locks down the Republican nomination for president, the only question left is whether we as voters will let him.