Time for America to wake up: President’s talk of invoking martial law is frightening and could end our democracy

 

When will the adults in Washington, D.C. take over the conversation and tell the madman in the White House to stop all of this crazy talk of overturning a legal election result? That had better happen soon, as the latest bit of news to break --- that there was a heated conversation in the Oval Office about Trump wanting to declare martial law and redo the voting in the states that he lost --- is not only the talk of a delusional man, but it’s how Hitler took power in the 1930s – by voiding all democratic norms.
That’s not hyperbole; it’s history, and unless the president’s Republican enablers stop this nonsense, the president will lock up all of the people who didn’t vote for him – and if you think that can’t happen here, you obviously never heard of all the Germans who sat by idly while Hitler exterminated the Jewish people, the gays, Catholics and anyone else who didn’t swear their allegiance to the Nazi Party. It’s high time for more GOP officials than Senate President Mitch McConnell to speak out and acknowledge that Biden won the election and Electoral votes that have made him the president-elect.
It's frightening and bone-chilling that invoking martial law to overturn an election is even being discussed by the president of the United States --- all while a pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 people to date continues to rage. 
I beg GOP leaders to stop all of this talk. It’s scary when the disgraced former national security adviser, Michael Flynn --- who pled guilty to lying to the FBI and had to be pardoned by Trump -- goes on national TV to argue that martial law makes sense.
That is NOT what America is all about!
Please, if you voted for Trump, realize that as what happens in elections, your candidate lost an election that the nation’s top cybersecurity chief and the attorney general said were fair and not affected by fraud.
When will the president's enablers realize that the conspiracy theories of fraud are groundless and make no sense because the SAME voting system that elected Republicans down the ticket and that had Trump winning 74 million votes and numerous states were also in place for Biden’s 81 million votes and 306 Electoral College votes?
It had been frighteningly disturbing to hear that way too many GOP members of Congress are still trying to figure out a way to have the Congress undo the victory. Their attempt to have a lawsuit by Texas annul the results of four swing states was tossed unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court, and yet they persist in trying to take away the votes from the people who voted against the president.
But, as scary and disturbing as that was, now the latest news that our president is actually talking about declaring martial law to keep him in power and REDO the election is crazy and really a cause for us to pray to God for saner heads to prevail before we have a massive Civil War on our hands.
If the GOP congressmen and GOP officials across the country don't stop this nonsense by enabling Trump, they will be directly blamed for ending our democracy.
Here are some facts to consider – again:
* Biden won the same number of Electoral votes, 306, as Trump in 2016, a number that Trump then called "a landslide." 
* Unlike Trump in 2016, Biden won the popular vote by several million votes, 81 to 74 million.
* Homeland Security called the voting in 2020 the most secure of any recent election.
* The Department of Justice investigators sent by Attorney General William Barr to investigate the vote found no evidence of irregularities in the voting that would have changed the outcome. Barr later publicly said the same thing, and then had to resign because Trump doesn’t care about the truth, only about his warped version of it, and gets rid of anyone who disagrees with his lies.
* Local election officials of both parties in multiple states have also said that the voting was conducted legally and without any instances of fraud.
* Christopher Krebs, the director of the federal agency --- the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – that had attested to the integrity of the 2020 election, was promptly fired by our petulant president because he rejected the president’s blatant falsehoods and told the truth.
* Trump's lies defy common sense for many reasons, but consider this: How can the SAME VOTES cast in the election that properly decided local, Senate and Congressional races --- including many that the Republicans won as they cut the Democrats’ numbers in the House --- be VALID for those races, and then FRAUDULENT for the presidential one, or more specifically, just for those people who chose not to vote for President Trump?
The answer, of course, is that they can't --- unless you’re a dictator and only allow yourself to be on the ballot and don’t consider anyone who votes against you to have cast a legitimate vote, a view taken only by dictators and a sore loser like our president.
What the GOP officials who are enabling the president’s lies fail to understand is the illogic of his argument, which is that votes cast for him (Trump) were just fine and dandy, but votes cast for his opponent (Biden) were fraudulent? That reasoning makes absolutely no sense. Democrats and independents weren’t the only ones to use mail-in and absentee ballots!

I have a lot of friends on both sides of the political spectrum and I am an independent or unenrolled voter, as non-affiliated voters are called in Massachusetts.
So, as an unenrolled voter and as an American, I pray every day that the GOP will wake up and tell the bully in the White House to stop this crazy talk about martial law or worse: Trump trying to pull a military coup or outlawing any opposition to him at all.
And if that --- God forbid --- should happen, will his supporters, just like the German people in the 1930s, think it’s all hunky-dory as long as they don’t come for them?
Don’t laugh: Enabling repeated lies about voting – the fundamental building block of our democracy -- will lead to the destruction of that  democracy, and by then it will be too late to turn the clock back.