NY Times had an excellent article today - "Trump Turned the Democratic Party Into a Pitiless Machine" nytimes.com - Pelosi trump biden harris

Some excerpts:

"Today’s Republican Party is what political scientists call a “personalist” party: It is built around a person, not an agenda or a coalition. The party is co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. Dissidents like Liz Cheney and Chris Christie and Adam Kinzinger and even former Vice President Mike Pence have been exiled."

"The Trumpist faction is more focused on purging government institutions of the disloyal. “I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” JD Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview. “Replace them with our people".

The above is what dictatorships do, not what a coalition of people serving diverse needs and geographies does.

"This is the formula Democrats have found for maintaining coherence as a political party. They are unified in wanting to use the government to make people’s lives better. They are unified in believing Trump must be stopped. And so it is not quite true that this election is just a contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It is that, but it is also a contest between Donald Trump and the Democratic Party.

This is something the Trump campaign knows — and fears. “I don’t think Joe Biden has a ton of advantages,” one of his campaign managers, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic in March. “But I do think Democrats do.”

And a letter to the editor that sums it all up for me.

"Donald Trump is the worst of us.

- He not only commits serial adultery with playmates and porn stars, but brags that he can do anything he wants to women.

- He not only commits billions in tax fraud, he claims that makes him smart.

- He not only cheats in elections, but he denies and attacks when he loses them.

- He not only failed at the pandemic response, he lied it was even coming.

- He not only dodged the draft, he calls those who didn't suckers and losers.

- He not only hates those who are different from him, but he also mocks them and bullies them to no end.

Utterly self-obsessed and proud of it.

Trump is all of our worst instincts personified. He gave permission for his followers to give in to theirs as well. Many have embraced it...screaming about masks, dehumanizing immigrants, worshiping assault weapons, attacking the Capitol when they are mad, and on and on and on. As a result, this election is indeed about good vs evil. Better angels vs demons. We need Trump to lose the election, but more importantly, to lose his influence over our nation's moral and ethical codes."