Elise Stefanik has said, “I’m honored to have been chosen as a New York state chair for the Trump campaign in 2020.” So, Elise, you are honored to support a president:

¯ whose delayed, divisive, erratic and, on occasion, bizarre approach to the COVID-19 virus, and whose failure to use the Defense Production Act to create a national strategic plan for massive testing capability and labs to process them, exemplify a tragic failure of leadership;

¯ who is shockingly uniformed but frequently claims to know better than qualified experts;

¯ who asserts total authority but disclaims responsibility;

¯ whose modus operandi are lies, doublespeak, misinformation and gaslighting, serving to annihilate truth;

¯ whose other favorite tactics are to denigrate, blame and bully all who criticize or question his policies and to retaliate against those who seek to speak truth to his power;

¯ who increasingly surrounds himself with yes men and women, as he is unwilling or unable to hear truth spoken to his power;

¯ who attacks the free press by labelling anything he disagrees with as “fake news”;

¯ who opposes vote by mail in this time of a pandemic because, as he has acknowledged, it would hurt the Republicans;

¯ who distracts by demagogic scapegoating, especially of his favorite target, immigrants;

¯ who seeks to undermine international organizations and cooperation, including the World Health Organization, rather than urge it to learn from its failings, all the more troubling in a time when efforts to deal with COVID-19 requires international cooperation;

¯ who attempted to extort a foreign country that is fighting off Russian aggression for his personal political benefit;

¯ who denies Russian intervention in the 2016 elections to help his candidacy, even though it has been documented by a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee;

¯ who has a history of corruption including using funds from a charitable foundation for personal benefit and creating a faux university that scammed unwitting students;

¯ who, along with aides and family members, has repeatedly used the prestige and power of the U.S. government to help friends and relatives make money;

¯ who supports tax cuts for the very wealthy and big corporations, which increases the national debt, exacerbates inequality and becomes an excuse to cut basic social safety nets;

¯ who deliberately sows divisiveness in our multi-racial nation;

¯ who has a long history of racist actions and comments and whose demagoguery, which includes dog whistles, is often directed against people of color;

¯ who honors a right-wing racist with the freedom medal;

¯ who has propagated lie after lie about immigrants, documented and undocumented, and entrusted immigration policy to a white supremacist;

¯ whose Muslim ban excludes the very countries whose citizens have engaged in terrorism in the U.S. (i.e., Saudi Arabia and Egypt);

¯ whose inhumane treatment of migrants seeking asylum damages the physical and mental health of young children and their parents;

¯ who has diverted military funds from their intended purpose to create a border wall that Congress decided not to fund; but most frightening of all:

¯ whose willful denial of climate change, rejection of science, promotion of the fossil fuel industry, and aggressive attacks on the environmental protections threaten the future of the planet;

¯ not to mention his attempts to undermine the Clean Air Act, which will bring back acid rain to the Adirondacks;

¯ and more.

Elise, you are honored to chair Trump’s New York reelection campaign in spite of all of this? This is why, for the future of our country and planet, I fear the reelection of President Trump.

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Monique Weston Clague lives in Keene.