"Mr. Trump has done immeasurable damage to the institution of free elections in his country."
Across major American cities, retailers are boarding up windows, and police are putting more officers on the beat amid fears that the US election could bring renewed civil unrest.
In an unprecedented development as the race to the White House approaches the finish line, merchants and other storefronts in cities such as New York, Boston, Washington DC and San Francisco are boarding up windows in anticipation of a highly polarized Election Day, news reports show.
In New York, the iconic Macy’s in Manhattan was boarded up on Friday.
Nordstrom, the high-end department store chain, said it planned to board up some of its 350 stores and hire extra security for Election Day, the New York Times reports. Tiffany & Company, the luxury jeweler, said that “windows of select stores in key cities will be boarded in anticipation of potential election-related activity.” Saks Fifth Avenue said it was “implementing additional security measures at certain locations in the event of civil unrest due to the current election.”
In Los Angeles, the city of Beverly Hills has already declared its Rodeo Drive shopping area will be on lockdown for two days starting on Election Day. Merchants on Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue are also bracing for post-election trouble.
Worries about unrest around the election have been fanned by President Donald Trump, who has refused to say whether he would agree to a peaceful transfer of power if his Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden Jr., is victorious.
Over the course of the last three and a half years, Mr. Trump has been called many things—a bully, a misogynist, a racist, and of course, a liar. But under all that, too, he is a weasel that wants only to take credit, and not responsibility.
Mr. Trump the weasel, in front of TV cameras, refused to take responsibility for the growing number of Americans—more than 200,000 at last count—who died from COVID-19. First he blamed China for the virus, then state governments for being unable to contain the pandemic, and finally, beyond logic and belief, the doctors on the front line for padding the number of COVID-19 deaths so that they could earn more money.
Mr. Trump the weasel has also refused to take responsibility for white supremacists who are emboldened by his tweets. When push comes to shove, he claims he doesn’t know the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group he asked to “stand back and stand by,” or the QAnon, conspiracy-theory nutjobs that believe he will save the nation from an international ring of pedophiles that includes Democrats.
In the last days of a surreal campaign, Mr. Trump, spreading coronavirus at each of his stops, praised his supporters in multiple vehicles bearing Trump flags who tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas, tweeting “I LOVE TEXAS.” Mr. Trump the weasel called the hooligans “patriots” who “did nothing wrong.”
Now, by casting doubt on the final tally of the hard-fought election, Mr. Trump the weasel is already shirking the responsibility for a possible loss and setting the stage for unrest by saying the only way he can lose is if the other side cheats, all this while his Republican Party allies do all they can to suppress the vote in key battleground states.
In doing all this, Mr. Trump has done immeasurable damage to the institution of free elections in his country, as have his enablers in the Republican Party.
Sadly, even if Mr. Trump loses the election, he will still have done so with 30 percent to 40 percent of Americans who have demonstrated time and again the most deplorable ignorance and lack of reason. Now that is a lot of damage.