TERRY MOSHER
We are in the final stages of democracy and the early stage of the Trump dictatorship. Trump is not running for reelection, he instead is determined to smash the election process and declare it illegitimate. You saw him last night take a sledgehammer to the last visions of free debate. He knows he will lose the election so he is going to delegitimize it, send in his Proud Boys and their ilk to create chaos in major cities run by democratic governors and mayors and then declare martial law, call out the military to restore order, rule the elections fraudulent, abolish Congress, roundup his enemies and claim himself President for Life. Can he be stopped? Only if the military refuses his orders. As I watched the entire Trump family stroll into the debate hall last night I shuddered. They were dressed in their finest and I thought this is it, this is the end of democracy. They are oh so criminal, so dressed to the irons, so ready to assume control. The hair on my arms stood at attention and my breathe deserted me. It was as if Hitler was reborn and entered the room. When the final vestiges of the chaotic debate washed over a nearly empty hall at the Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Melania Trump, smiling from ear to ear, rushed to the stage, Trump grabbed her hand and together they departed stage left. Joe Biden and Jill Biden hugged tightly stage right as if they knew this was it. It was. Democracy died. Mark it on your calendar – September 29, 2020 – because that was the end of a 244-year experiment that at its finest was held up to the world as a success to the human condition and a beacon of hope for millions around the globe. That hope dissipated last night like steam from a cooling kettle. It is twilight in America. Our enemy has come and has come from within. It was in 1956 when Nikita Krushchev said, “We will take American without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within.” It was Abraham Lincoln, no less, who said, “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected. I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” The enemy has come, and it is us.