Portsmouth Herald
Chuck Douglas: Why not president for life Trump?
Chuck Douglas – January 4, 2023
Using the Peru governance model, former President Donald Trump on Dec. 3 called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” because his fragile ego cannot admit he lost an election. The Constitution Terminator might have inspired President Pedro Castillo of Peru three days later to address his country by telling Peruvians he would dissolve its Congress and then rule by decree until a new constitution was drafted.
Luckily Peruvians declined the honor of a dictatorship, and hours later Castillo was impeached by a vote of 101 to 29 and promptly removed from office.
Donald Trump’s plan for a coup to reinstall him by terminating the federal Constitution is all anyone with a three-digit IQ needs to see that he remains morbidly fixated on the 2020 election.
How is that 7,000,000-vote loss to Joe Biden going to motivate independents to vote for election denier GOP candidates? Apparently not at all. Senate candidates Bolduc, Oz, Walker, etc. won their primary because of Trump’s backing and then blew their election because most people in the country think Joe Biden won, not stole, the 2020 election.
Republicans in New Hampshire need to move on once and for all from our self-proclaimed “greatest president.” The 40% of the voters here and nationally who are not enrolled in either major political party have clearly put him in their rearview mirrors. In Pennsylvania, 58% of independents voted against election denier Mehmet Oz and in our state 54% voted for Maggie Hassan to enable her to win over Don Bolduc.
What is amazing is how the Trump endorsed candidates here and around the country lost when only 44% of the electorate has a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, Biden is unpopular and we have 8% inflation. The dead weight? Donald Trump’s obsession with his loss forced his endorsed candidates to ride the Great Stolen Election bandwagon in the face of no evidence and over 60 court rulings against such fraud claims.
To broaden his appeal among white supremacists, and further alienate most of the rest of the country, is the famous dinner at Mar-a-Lago last month. “I love Hitler,” Kanye West and the “Holocaust-never-happened” Nick Fuentes were actually allowed to have dinner with a presidential candidate who should know better. Last spring at a right-wing conference Nick Fuentes asked the crowd to give a round of applause for Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. In December, Fuentes said the Taliban represented “ideal” government with its policies toward women, who should not be able to vote here either according to Fuentes.
Can you think of any president since Jefferson Davis who would dine with such whackos?
To cap off his broad appeal to haters and rioters, Trump told a group helping to pay for the Jan. 6 rioters’ legal defense that the country “was going communist” and that if reelected he would issue pardons and apologies to those who beat the police and threatened harm to elected officials.
No wonder he does not believe in enforcing riot laws and that he should be re-installed as president after the Constitution is suspended.
If Peru is not quite Trump’s model for governance we can reach back in time to Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti who at age 19 became president for life in 1957. The plus for Baby Doc Duvalier was that you can’t lose elections if you never have them.
Donald Trump should have “terminated” the Constitution when he was still president, and then declared that he was president for life.
Having missed that opportunity, the Republican Party should not give him the chance again to lose and rain havoc down on the ticket of Republicans like he did to the Senate this year.
The anti-Semitic and white nationalist stench of Mar-a-Lago is not the tradition of the party of Lincoln, nor should it become one.
Republicans are not losing elections because of RINOs, but because of Donald Trump. It is time to move on to new faces who believe in our Constitution.
Chuck Douglas is a former judge and New Hampshire 2nd District Republican U.S. congressman.