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I think U.S. Rep. Jared Golden’s position on the 2024 general election (“Donald Trump is going to win the election and democracy will be just fine” in the Bangor Daily News recently) is both irresponsible and either willfully ignorant or embarrassingly uninformed. This is not only because of his unnecessarily defeatist attitude about our loss to Donald Trump, but much more especially because of his woefully oversimplified assessment of the threat Trump poses to our republic.
Some Republican officials and organizers are seemingly preparing not merely to challenge this November’s election results in the event that the Democrats should win, but to refuse to certify those results. And Trump’s lawyers are now arguing that his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election by having his alternate electors fraudulently declare themselves duly appointed was within the bounds of his official acts as president, and that he is therefore immune from criminal prosecution for this effort. Then there’s Project 2025, involving the consolidation of governmental power in the executive branch, largely through the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trump loyalists who will answer directly to him.
Trump has said repeatedly, and seemingly not at all in jest, that he could serve as president for more than two terms. Michael Knowles and other right-wing and alt-right commentators have called for an end to presidential term limits so that Trump could rule indefinitely. But democracy will be just fine? Apparently in Golden’s world it will be. The real world would beg to differ.
John Mariana
Farmington
