A LTE About Two Examples Of How Trump Is Anti-Democratic

This was submitted as a letter to the Daily Camera in April 2025 and published on April 18th. To be honest, I have collected a bunch of little facts about Trump that I dream of making more visible to either the whole population and/or certain chunks of the American population, either when they will do the most damage, or when I have a good excuse for reminding people about them, etc. I briefly but sufficiently weaponized two of these facts below.

 

Tom

Editor,

Donald Trump is getting closer and closer to making plain his contempt for democracy. In some ways this letter might soon be unnecessary. But it wouldn’t hurt to offer more evidence and develop comprehensive arguments that might be better than what we’ve been doing so far.

There is one thing from the last election that I don’t think was used to attack Trump. That is, his calls for reforming Nebraska’s election laws so that, with the Electoral College, it’s winner-takes-all. Nebraska, as well as Maine, awards two of it’s electoral votes based on the result for the whole state, and then gives one more vote per congressional district to whoever wins each of the districts. But Trump had nothing to say about this in relation to Maine, and the thing is he would have benefited in the election from a winner-take-all law in Nebraska, but not in Maine. He has no principled objection to what Nebraska does, he just wanted to win and didn’t care how.

Trump recently suggested that he might have the Federal government take over the running of Washington DC. It’s already bad enough that DC doesn’t have statehood (which means they have no votes in Congress), it would be a huge (undemocratic) step backwards if that were done. Even progressives don’t believe in getting rid of local government- to one degree or another we love it. I think the non-white majority in DC is pretty much why Trump and other GOPers oppose statehood for the city. I should also remind everyone, especially those who rose to power as leaders of the Tea Party movement (i.e. Rand Paul), that a massive part of why America fought a war for independence was the problem of “taxation without representation.”

Tom Shelley
Gunbarrell 

A 2023 LTE About Gaza And The IRA

Below is something I wrote about Gaza. It (probably with some changes to what is below) was published in late Dec. 2023 on the web-site of the Boulder Weekly, but not in the print version of their paper and I can't find it on their site anymore.

 

Tom 

 

 Editor,

 

I have been a supporter of the Palestinians for about 30 years. In 2002 I convinced the other members of a CU-Boulder group (Students for Justice in Northern Ireland) that we should endorse the campus Coalition for Justice in Palestine. In the last 15 years one of the main topics on my blog is supporting the Palestinians. But an even bigger part of my blog is about opposing anti-Semitism, and I’m proud to say that those two parts of my blog overlap heavily.

 

There are many progressives who reject anti-Semitism but have failed to condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7th offensive. Although that failure is not necessarily bigoted, what Hamas did IS bigoted. They are religious fundamentalists and overwhelmingly targeted civilian life, and it was Jews they were after. As someone who looks back and supports almost everything the IRA did in The Troubles, I condemn the Oct. 7th pogrom but I would not condemn a Palestinian effort that resembles what the IRA did- targeting the security forces and (using methods that almost always prevent civilian death) destroying government and commercial property.

 

Why would I say something like that? Because although what happened Oct. 7th was horrible, the Palestinians have very serious and legitimate grievances. Those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens experience a fair amount of inequality (the State is officially Jewish, it cannot be simultaneously democratic). Those in the West Bank have it even worse (they are state-less (they have no citizenship, and thus no civil rights)). And those in Gaza the last month have endured a nightmare much worse than living in the world’s largest open-air prison- which was their existence for almost two decades until the last month.

 

They have every reason to be furious at the Israeli state and Israel’s Jewish population. But intentionally killing civilians in war is, to one degree or another, wrong, and in this case bigoted. Palestinians should leave that to Israel and/or it’s settlers, as we see in the West Bank and Gaza.

 

There must be a cease-fire in Gaza!

 

Tom Shelley
Boulder