A Violent Holocaust

 

This week, early voting began in the American presidential election. Frank Bruni writes:

Trump supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and chanting, “Four more years!”

This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

Republicans are planning to have tens of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace. Trump has not just blessed but encouraged this. On Fox News last month, he bragged to Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

It's going to be a helluva election. Bruni asks:

Is a fair fight still imaginable in America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing segment of the population, no.

Right on cue, we commenced a fight over Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat that could become a protracted death match, with Mitch McConnell’s haste and unabashed hypocrisy potentially answered by court packing, among other acts of vengeance, if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate.

That’s a big if, because we’re also hurtling toward an Election Day that may decide exactly nothing — and I don’t mean that night. I mean for months. I mean forever.

It looks to me that the United States is on the verge of a violent holocaust. I hope I'm wrong.

Image: The New York Times