This election is giving me, and I think the majority of this country, anxiety. I saw a tweet that said, “Waiting for election results is like waiting for a grade on a group project. I know I did my part right, but I’m scared y’all messed it up.” If you’ve ever done a group project, then you know this feeling. I would guess that if you are reading this blog, it is likely you were like me and led the group and ended up doing the most work, which gives you the feeling that you will probably get a good grade. I almost always got good grades, unless you consider Pre-Calculus/Trigonometry or French History. I didn’t do as well in those classes. I’d also put American Literature II in that category, but I made a C in that class because I refused to suck up to the professor. He was a prick and only gave A’s and B’s to people who repeatedly told him how wonderful he was. Anyway, my point is that I am feeling a little better about the election, and as long as the counts are fair, I think Biden might win. 

As I am writing this post, Arizona is worrying me, but Georgia is looking better and better, but Georgia alone will result in a tie. We do not want a tie in the Electoral College. I know most people believe that the Democrats control the House of Representatives, and therefore, the election would go to Biden. However, if the election goes to the House, each state gets one vote, and the delegation decides how their state votes. There are a majority of Republican delegations in the House. While I think it is evident that Biden will win the popular vote by a large margin, I do not trust Republicans to do the right thing and give the election to the winner of the popular vote. It will go along party lines. Since the Senate, who chooses the Vice President, will still be controlled by the Republicans, Mike Pence will be the vice president no matter what happens. I believe that no matter who the House choses, a Republican Senate will vote for Pence. If the Electoral College is a tie, it will be awful.

We are already seeing Donald Trump calling legitimate and legal votes fraudulent; he will not go easily if Biden does get 270 or more electoral votes. He has said as much for months now, and he said as much yesterday in his treasonous speech. His cult followers are already hounding election centers to intimidate election officials into favoring Trump. If it is announced that Biden has the votes in the Electoral College, Trump is likely to call on his cultists to riot and will basically suggest a coup. I know that sounds extreme, but can you expect better of Trump? He has shown us already he cares nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or American institutions. 

As Claire McCaskill said last night on MSNBC, we can only hope that George Bush, the only living former Republican president, and respected Republican leaders such as Bob Dole will have to make a public display of congratulating Joe Biden on his victory. Trump hates Bush, so Bush alone will not accomplish what needs to be done. The country will need many of the spineless Republicans who have propped up Trump to save American democracy, by that I mean Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, and John Thune in the Senate and Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Liz Cheney, and even assholes like Matt Gaetz in the House will have to step up and denounce Trump’s usurpation of the United States government. Will they? Would they finally grow a spine and put country above party? I hope so, but I won’t hold my breath.

My point is that there will have to be Republicans who stand up to Trump. Hopefully, they do care about democracy because it’s obvious that Trump does not. Trump’s actions during this election are causing significant damage to the United States. They undermine his supporters’ faith in the country’s government. They also undermine the credibility of the United States around the world. And they force election officials, journalists, and social media platforms to choose between telling the truth and sounding nonpartisan; it is impossible to do both about Trump’s election claims.

Yesterday was a long day. I worked late yesterday to give a tour to a group of cadets. However, I was ready to go home at lunchtime. I was having pain in my hip, and my tooth was bothering me quite a bit. I was also exhausted from staying up late the night before. I had planned to go into work at 9 am instead of at my usual time of 7:30, which I did but not because I slept late. I had wanted to sleep a little late. On the days I go into the museum, I usually get up at 6 am, so technically, I did sleep a bit later, but only until 6:30. When I woke and looked at the news and saw (expectedly) that no winner had been declared in the presidential race, I just couldn’t go back to sleep. It also didn’t help that it looked like Democrats would not take the Senate. If the South actually cared about integrity and being a decent person, then Republican Senate candidates in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky would have lost.

When I was in college, I came up with a theory that if you were taking an English class and you wrote about sex or religion in an essay, you were almost guaranteed a B on the essay. If you could discuss sex and religion in the same paper, you were pretty well guaranteed an A. After this election, it seems apparent that in the South, if you are homophobic or racist, you will win your election. If you are homophobic and racist, you will win by a landslide in the South. The wildcard appears to be that if you are a southern politician and a crooked asshole, you’ll also win. 

The sheer fact that nearly 50 percent of American voters would rather have a misogynistic, racist, homophobic, lying, cheating, science-denying, criminal as president is alarming. It shows just how awful many people in America are. I believe that Trump did better than expected because Biden’s running mate is a woman of color. Racism in the United States is so inherent that it showed in the results of the 2020 election. The election of Barack Obama led to the racism in the South bubbling to the surface again. Southerners would mostly keep their bigotry to themselves and only talk about it around people they felt “safe” to make racist comments around. People, though, became more brazen about their racism during the Obama presidency. When Trump was elected, it gave voice to racists across the country. It encouraged and emboldened them to be “politically incorrect” and revel in their public displays of hatred.

Trump is a clear and present danger to our democracy — that through demagoguery, he has laid waste to all the aspirations (even if unfulfilled) that we as a country hold dear: e pluribus unum, the American creed, the equality of all people who call this country home. Trump, a selfish autocrat, has thumbed his nose at all of that. Worse, he has emboldened millions of Americans to follow suit. To believe that Americans ignited and exploited by Trump don’t regard their fellow Americans as enemies, that they don’t hate other Americans, and that, after the final results, we won’t end up mad at each other? That is imagining an America that doesn’t exist. Trump has encouraged Americans to offend each other. He has brought out the worst in us to satisfy his own twisted interests. The outcome of the 2020 election will not settle any of this. Trump’s character defects, his disgusting behavior beneath the dignity of the presidency, his contempt for honesty and ethical governance have been on display since he entered the White House in 2017. And millions of Americans love what they see. What should be viewed with alarm is pointed to with pride by his followers. Donald Trump was, is now, and forever will be — along with his disciples — a threat to the nation he does not deserve to lead.

The pandemic had already shown just how selfish and hateful many Americans are. They ignored the science that wearing masks helps protect those around you, and they complained about every effort to battle the pandemic. Americans who voted for Donald Trump cannot call themselves Christian, as they voted to repudiate everything Christ advocated. The racism, misogyny, homophobia, and lack of empathy in the United States is an embarrassment. It also won’t magically go away if Joe Biden wins the election. Those who voted for Trump will not renounce their support for Trump, nor will they suddenly become decent human beings. For the American character to change, it will take at least a generation if it ever happens. 

I still believe that Joe Biden will do a lot to heal this country, but I know many people back in Alabama that will never support a Democrat. Even the miracle that was Doug Jones’ election to the Senate in 2017 was just an anomaly. There were just enough people who voted against a child molester for him to win, but everyone knew it would be short-lived. He would never win reelection as long as the Republican nominee was not a child molester. It was perfectly all right for Jones’ opponent to be a lazy, homophobic crook. I do not see the South changing anytime soon. Yes, there might be inroads in Atlanta, but Atlanta is not the entirety of the South.

I wanted to make one more case against Donald Trump before tomorrow’s election. So, I did a Google search for “Trump’s Most Egregious Offenses.” The results were staggering. There was a complete list of the Trump Administration’s record on LGBTQ+ rights. The list came to 18 pages of text. McSweeney’s, a nonprofit publishing company based in San Francisco, is most notably known for its humor and championing of new writers and publishes novels, books of poetry, and other periodicals, but early in Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the misdeeds coming from the Trump Administration. As of October 30, 2020, their list which they call “Lest We Forget the Horrors: A Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes” consists of a 300-page pdf with 954 “atrocities.” The various collection of misdeeds seems to be never-ending, and they all vary in different approaches. This election year, amid a traumatic global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, it seems ever more critical to remember these horrors and to do all in our power to reverse them.

Instead of trying to list even a small section of the egregious atrocities of Donald Trump, I want to share vice presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris’s closing argument for why LGBTQ+ people should vote for Joe Biden. It’s a piece she wrote for LGBTQ Nation:

More than 50 years ago, a group of LGBTQ+ people at the Stonewall Inn did what so many Americans have done throughout our history—they stood up for equality. It was a turning point in a movement that would continue to march, organize, and vote for the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.

And it’s because of those efforts, through the decades, that, in 2013, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier were united in California’s first same-sex marriage after Proposition 8 was struck down by the courts—a wedding I had the honor of officiating.

But today, after decades of progress, LGBTQ+ equality is once again under attack.

President Donald Trump, Vice President Pence, and Senate Republicans jammed through a Supreme Court nominee who poses a threat to LGBTQ+ equality—just weeks after two other justices suggested reconsidering the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision that made marriage equality the law of the land.

The Trump administration banned transgender Americans willing to risk their lives for our country from serving in the military. They’ve rolled back protections put in place by the Obama-Biden administration against employment discrimination for LGBTQ+ workers. And they opened the door to allowing health care workers to refuse treatment to patients based on their gender identity.

At a time when our country is experiencing the worst public health crisis in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a reckoning on racial injustice, and a changing climate that’s battering our coastlines and setting the West on fire, it’s devastating that LGBTQ+ Americans must also worry about their human rights.

Here’s the good news: we can vote to put an end to the Trump-Pence era of discrimination and fear—and send the most pro-equality administration in history to the White House.

Joe Biden and I believe that every human being should be treated with dignity and respect and be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or who they love. We will reverse the attacks the Trump-Pence administration has made on the LGBTQ+ community. And we won’t stop there—we will advance equality through long-overdue changes.

Right now, half of all LGBTQ+ Americans live in states where their civil rights can be violated. They face discrimination in nearly every aspect of their lives, from housing to starting a family to obtaining a driver’s license with their correct gender on it.

Joe and I will make enacting the Equality Act a top legislative priority in our first 100 days in office. Passing this law will guarantee that LGBTQ+ Americans are protected under existing federal civil rights laws.

We’ll work to protect LGBTQ+ individuals from violence, prioritize the prosecution of hate crimes, and work to end the epidemic of assault against the transgender community, particularly transgender women of color. We’ll do everything in our power to make sure LGBTQ+ youth are safe from bullying, harassment, and sexual assault.

We’ll reverse President Trump’s discriminatory ban on transgender Americans serving in the military, and ensure that every American who is qualified to serve can do so regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. We’ll make sure transgender service members receive the health care they deserve. And we will work to ensure LGBTQ+ individuals have full access to all appropriate health care treatments and resources, including care related to transitioning, such as gender confirmation surgery.

You can trust that Joe will work to support the LGBTQ+ community every single day as president—because that’s what he’s done for years. He supported marriage equality well before most major politicians. He worked with President Obama to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And he knows how much work there is left to do.

As the great civil rights lawyer Pauli Murray once said, “The lesson of American history [is] that human rights are indivisible.” They cannot be advanced for some and ignored for others.

Now is the time to build a country that embraces that truth—a country where every American is treated with dignity and respect, and where equality and justice truly are for all.

VOTE!!!

VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!

BECAUSE IT DOES!

ALL OF OUR LIVES DEPEND ON IT

What if Joe Biden is elected President on November 3, 2020? What can we expect? When he formally announced his entry into the 2020 presidential race, Joe Biden declared he stood for two things: workers who “built this country,” and values that can bridge its divisions. As the U.S. faces challenges from coronavirus to racial inequity, his pitch is to create new economic opportunities for workers, restore environmental protections, healthcare rights, and international alliances. In this quote from a speech recently given in Gettysburg, PA, Biden said:

I’m running as a proud Democrat, but I will govern as an American president. I will work with Democrats and Republicans, and I will work as hard for those who don’t support me as for those who do. That’s the job of a president. It’s a duty of care for everyone.

Biden will not be a president for blue states only, in contrast to Trump’s helping only red states and excluding blue states from federal aid. Biden will be a president for all Americans.

Biden’s approach to tackling coronavirus, the most immediate and obvious challenge facing the country, is to provide free testing for all, and hire 100,000 people to set up a national contact-tracing program. He wants to establish at least ten testing centers in every state, call upon federal agencies to deploy resources, and give firmer national guidance through federal experts. He says all governors should mandate wearing masks. Many voters will see this as an overreach of government authority, but many Americans have shown they are too stupid and selfish to care about their fellow Americans. Some right-wing politicians have even said if elderly Americans die, it’s their time not because people did not take precautions. Americans have shown the government must take more decisive steps to ensure the safety of all Americans.

To address the immediate impact of the coronavirus crisis, Biden has vowed to spend “whatever it takes” to extend loans to small businesses and to increase direct-money payments to families. Among the proposals are an additional $200 in Social Security payments per month, rescinding Trump-era tax cuts, and $10,000 of student loan forgiveness for federal loans which won’t put a dent in my student loans. Still, it would be something. With Biden as president, student loan forgiveness programs are almost guaranteed to be expanded. Biden’s broader economic policies, dubbed his “Build Back Better” plan, try to please two constituencies who traditionally support Democrats: young people and blue-collar workers. He supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. He also wants to invest in green energy arguing boosting green manufacturing helps working-class union workers who perform most of those jobs. There is also a $400 billion pledge to use federal dollars to buy American goods alongside a broader commitment to enforcing “Buy American” laws for new transport projects. His 2020 plan calls for the federal government to invest $300 billion in US-made materials, services, research, and technology.

In the wake of the race protests gripping the country this year, he said he believes racism exists in the U.S. and must be dealt with through comprehensive economic and social programs to support minorities. Part of that is his “build back” program to create business support for minorities through a $30 billion investment fund. On criminal justice, he has moved far from his much-criticized “tough-on-crime” position of the 1990s. Biden now proposes policies to reduce incarceration, address race, gender, and income-based disparities in the justice system, and rehabilitate released prisoners. He would now create a $20 billion grant program to incentivize states to invest in incarceration reduction efforts, eliminate mandatory minimum sentences, decriminalize marijuana and expunge prior cannabis convictions, and end the death penalty. He has rejected calls to defund police saying resources should instead be tied to maintaining standards. He argues that some police funding should be redirected to social services like mental health and calls for a $300 million investment into a community policing program.

Biden has called climate change an existential threat and says he will rally the rest of the world to act more quickly on curbing emissions by rejoining the Paris Climate Accord. The agreement, from which Donald Trump withdrew, committed the U.S. to cut greenhouse gases up to 28 percent by 2025 based on 2005 levels. Though he does not embrace the Green New Deal, he is proposing a $1.7 trillion federal investment in green technologies research some of which overlap with the funding in his economic plan to be spent over the next 10 years. He wants the U.S. to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The investment in a greener America complements his economic plan to create jobs in manufacturing “green energy” products.

As president, Biden says he would focus on national issues first. That said, there is little to suggest Biden’s values on foreign policy have shifted away from multilateralism and engagement on the world stage in opposition to Trump’s isolationist and xenophobic policies. Biden has also promised to repair relationships with U.S. allies particularly within the NATO alliance which Trump has repeatedly threatened to undermine with funding cuts. Biden has said China should be held accountable for unfair environment and trade practices. Still, instead of unilateral tariffs (which are paid for by Americans not the Chinese), he has proposed an international coalition with other democracies which China “can’t afford to ignore.”

Biden says he will expand the Affordable Care Act and implement a plan to ensure an estimated 97 percent of Americans. Although he stops short of the universal health insurance proposal on the wish lists of his more left-wing party members, Biden promises to give all Americans the option to enroll in a public health insurance option similar to Medicare which provides medical benefits to the elderly and lowers the age of eligibility for Medicare itself from 65 to 60 years old. While many on the left advocated for universal healthcare, Biden won the Democratic nomination by promising to provide this public health insurance option. I also believe he will reform some of the most significant excesses of health insurance providers by allowing doctors to decide their patients’ care, Currently, health insurance providers control the health of millions of insured by arbitrarily refusing to pay for more costly procedures and medicines.

In his first 100 days in office, Biden has promised to reverse Trump policies that separate parents from their children at the U.S.-Mexican border, rescind limits on the number of asylum applications, and end the bans on travel from several majority-Muslim countries. He also promises to protect the “Dreamers” and ensure they are eligible for federal student aid. The United States is a nation built on immigrants. It is what makes the U.S. such a diverse and richly multicultural nation. The diversity of the United States is one of its greatest strengths. We need a president like Biden who will encourage diversity and equality in America.

Biden has also endorsed several significant pieces of education policy which have become popular within the party. He is a proponent of an expansion of student loan debt forgiveness programs. Under the Trump administration, those loan forgiveness programs have become non-existent as applications have routinely been rejected for minor issues if people are given a reason at all. Under the Biden plan, individuals making $25,000 or less per year will not owe any payments on their undergraduate federal student loans and will not accrue any interest. If this plan included graduate school student loans, this would have been tremendously helpful to me when I was a teacher making less than $25,000 a year and paying more than half my salary to student loan lenders. Everyone else will pay 5 percent of their discretionary income (income minus taxes and essential spending like housing and food) over $25,000 toward their loans. After 20 years, the remaining loans for people who have responsibly made payments through the program will be 100 percent forgiven.

Additionally, Biden will fix the existing Public Service Loan Forgiveness program by securing passage of the What You Can Do For Your Country Act of 2019. He will also make public colleges and universities tuition-free for all families with incomes below $125,000. He wants to invest in community colleges and training to improve student success and grow a stronger, more prosperous, and more inclusive middle class. By strengthening colleges, he wants to create a reliable pathway to the middle class not an investment that provides limited returns and leaves graduates with mountains of debt they can’t afford. Furthermore, he will provide universal preschool access. These would be paid using money gained from withdrawing the Trump-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Joe Biden believes every human being should be treated with respect and dignity and live without fear no matter who they are or who they love. During the Obama-Biden administration, the United States made unprecedented advancement of protections for LGBTQ+ Americans at the federal level—from the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to Biden’s historic declaration in support of marriage equality on Meet the Press in 2012.

“Who do you love? Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out is what all marriages, at their root, are about.”

 —Joe Biden, “Meet the Press,” May 6, 2012

Donald Trump and Mike Pence have given hate against LGBTQ+ individuals safe harbor and rolled back critical protections for the LGBTQ+ community. By blocking the ability of transgender individuals to openly serve their country, denying LGBTQ+ people access to critical health care, proposing policies allowing federally-funded homeless shelters to turn away transgender people and federally-funded adoption agencies to reject same-sex couples, and failing to address the epidemic of violence against transgender people—particularly transgender women of color—the Trump Administration has led a systematic effort to undo the progress the Obama-Biden administration made.  Hate and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people started long before Trump took office. Defeating them will not solve the problem, but it is an essential first step to continue our march toward equality. 

As President, Biden will stand with the LGBTQ+ community to ensure America finally lives up to the promise on which it was founded: equality for all. He will provide the moral leadership to champion equal rights for all LGBTQ+ people, fight to ensure that our laws and institutions protect and enforce their rights, and advance LGBTQ+ equality globally. Biden will protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, support LGBTQ+ youth, protect LGBTQ+ individuals from violence, expand access to high-quality health care for LGBTQ+ individuals, ensure fair treatment of LGBTQ+ individuals in the criminal justice system, and advance global LGBTQ+ rights and development. If elected president, former Vice President Joe Biden has promised to immediately reverse the transgender military ban and reissue an Obama-era guideline allowing trans students to use the correct bathroom. This would effectively end litigation in the military ban cases and change the complexion of the bathroom cases.

I will repeat what I wrote yesterday: the choice is obvious. Former Vice President Joe Biden is well-suited to be president. An undecided voter can disagree with some of the policies he supports — that’s fine. Undecided voters should weigh their concerns about the unknowns of a Biden presidency against the inevitable dangers of a second Trump term. On the one hand, a tax, a minimum wage, an energy policy you might not like; on the other, the demise of U.S. democracy, prosperity, and global leadership. It shouldn’t be a difficult call. 

If you have not seen Joe Biden’s very moving speech from Gettysburg on October 6, 2020, please watch it.

Election day is next Tuesday, but millions have already voted. I received my ballot in the mail as all registered Vermonters did, but I’ve decided to go to the polls and vote in person on November 3. While there are several crackpot third-party candidates, there are only two real choices: Joe Biden and Donald Trump. If you vote for a second Trump term, you are voting for the continued decline of the United States and for putting democracy in danger. At best, the demise would be gradual — a descent into diminished prosperity, constricted opportunity for your children and grandchildren, waning influence overseas, and the continued erosion of democratic norms at home. This is not a matter of speculation; it is a conclusion based on Trump’s record and promises.

The United States has been a prosperous nation since it emerged from World War I as the world’s greatest creditor nation. We had a setback during the Great Depression, but our military strength during World War II cemented our position as a world leader. The U.S. generates more than 15 percent of the global economy, with just over 4 percent of the world’s population. For decades, the U.S. has been prosperous because we have a predictable rule of law, a professional civil service, a position as a global leader that lets us help set the rules and have the U.S. dollar accepted as the only true international currency, and high, if not world-leading, standard of health care and education. Also, key has been a commitment to fairness and equal opportunity even if we argue about how to turn that commitment into policy. The U.S. has prospered while other developed nations have begun to stagnate. We attract talented, entrepreneurial, and ambitious immigrants from all over the world. Our commitment to freedom has allowed immigrants and native-born alike to contribute to the fullest extent of their abilities.

Under Donald Trump, all of this has gone by the wayside. He replaced the rule of law with presidential whim picking and choosing corporate favorites and twisting the criminal system to favor his friends. At an accelerated pace, he is politicizing, corrupting, and sapping our government’s morale: our foreign service, our health and scientific agencies, our keepers of statistics. Many will hesitate to invest — to build new factories or create new jobs — if law and governmental power become unpredictable and wielded to reward cronies and punish the disfavored.

Trump and his administration’s disregard for the law is unmatched in American history. He has flaunted his contempt for laws like the Constitution’s emoluments clause by refusing to divest himself of his business holdings. He has used the Justice Department as his own personal lawyer and has claimed immunity from lawsuits because of his position. The Constitution established that no American would be above the law; Trump disregards that and does place himself above the law. Republicans across the country, from average voters to members of the Senate, have supported and propped up his illegal behavior creating a mockery of the American judicial system. His lack of paying his fair share of taxes is outrageous and shows the desperate need for tax reform in the United States.

Trump just signed an executive order that overhauls/destroys the civil service system by giving those in power the authority to fire more or less at will as many as tens of thousands of civil service workers from managers to lawyers to economists to, yes, scientists. In 1883, patronage (the practice of all government employees being appointed) was replaced by a professional civil service with the Pendleton Act. If Trump has his way, patronage, and loyalty to him will be the job qualifications for thousands of government jobs. The civil service will cease to exist. No longer will government jobs be based on a merit system. We have already seen how vindictive Trump can be for those whom he sees as disloyal and how he rewards loyalty with positions for which people are wholly unqualified. Just look at Betsy Devos. In Trump’s America, political rivals are traitors who must be prosecuted and jailed. Congressional oversight is an inconvenience that can be ignored and, eventually suppressed. Journalists seeking to report on his administration are enemies of the people. He welcomes foreign interference to help his campaign, undermines confidence in the election, and threatens not to accept its results. If he remains in power, fairly or fraudulently, there is no reason to believe Trump will not act on his authoritarian impulses in a second term. His incompetence in government, though real, will be no protection; he has shown himself, in the past year, increasingly adept at evading the checks and balances we thought the Constitution guaranteed.

Though the United States’ prestige around the world has waxed and waned since the presidency of George W. Bush, our status as a world leader was boosted by the election of Barack Obama. That boost has wholly disappeared under Donald Trump as he has railed against our allies in NATO, criticized the United Nations, and withdrew from the World Health Organization. Instead of being a leader for democracy, Trump has saddled up beside dictators like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. He craves the approval of autocrats who wish our country ill while abandoning and insulting allies; the latter will not stand by and take his abuse for four more years while the former will exploit his gullibility. World leaders openly laugh at him when they are meeting with him. Already the United States finds itself humiliatingly isolated on key issues like relations with Iran. As Trump fulfills long-held ambitions to undermine alliances with Europe, Japan, and South Korea, the United States will be further weakened, China, increasingly dominant, the world ever less stable. We are no longer a world leader, and that status will continue to decline with four more years of a Trump presidency. We will descend into a new era of xenophobia and isolationism which the United States has not seen in over a century.

The United States has some of the most trusted hospitals and prestigious universities in the world. Yet, if Trump is reelected, access to those hospitals and universities will be in jeopardy. If he succeeds in destroying the Affordable Care Act, we will once again find health insurance difficult to find if we have a preexisting condition. I am diabetic, and I saw firsthand how difficult it was for the lawyer I used to work for to find affordable health insurance because she had diabetes. I suffered for many years with migraines without any treatment because it was not covered as a preexisting condition. With my current Botox injections for my migraines costing over $6,000 without insurance, I will never be able to afford them if they are allowed to be denied as a preexisting condition.

Education at colleges and universities is already too expensive. When I looked at attending private universities like Vanderbilt, Tulane, Emory, or Duke when I was in high school, my family and I couldn’t afford any of those schools. Tuition was over $25,000 25 years ago. Now, those schools range from Emory now at over $72,000 a year (room, board, and fees), to Vanderbilt, whose tuition (room, board, and fees) is over $92,000. The university where I work is around $40,000 a year. Even state schools like the University of Alabama at $31,080 (in-state) and $51,424 (out-of-state) are more expensive today than the private universities were back when I was attending college. My alma mater is now $24,992 a year, while it ranged from $2,300 to $2,900 in the four years I was there. We won’t even discuss the higher tuition of graduate schools. Under a second term of Trump, you can expect these prices to go higher and for student debt to expand exponentially.

Immigration will also become harder than ever for people coming to the United States if Trump is reelected. He pretends to object only to undocumented immigration, but he has cut legal immigration in half. The most talented scientists and computer engineers of the next generation are choosing Canada, Australia, China — anywhere but Donald Trump’s America. In Trump’s vision, America is one in which groups are pitted against each other not encouraged to cooperate. States and cities with Democratic-leaning populations are enemy territory. He is contemptuous of any movement for equal justice and friendly to white supremacists. He has named 56 men and women to the nation’s highest courts—the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts. Not a single one is Black.

In Trump’s America, science and truth are treated with contempt. With his incompetent response, the novel coronavirus has claimed more lives here than in any other country, and the pandemic and its accompanying recession could drag on long into a second Trump term. The contempt for science and intellectual pursuits likewise shapes Trump’s utter failure to respond to climate change. The Earth is ailing; the damage from four more years of regression could be irreparable. Trump has proven himself, in the COVID-19 catastrophe, incapable of leading in a crisis. What if the next virus is far more deadly which health experts say is entirely possible? What if the next emergency involves a risk of nuclear war given Trump’s failure to rein in the nuclear programs of Iran or North Korea? Can anyone trust him to manage such a challenge atop an administration from which he has hounded almost all knowledgeable and experienced officials?

Most important to many of us, the Trump administration has been anything but LGBTQ+-friendly. Vice President Mike Pence has a long record of anti-LGBTQ+ lawmaking and rhetoric. LGBTQ+ advocates have already called the Republican Party platform — a holdover from 2016, as the GOP did not write one for 2020 — one of the most anti-LGBTQ+ in the party’s history. A second Trump term could further turn the clock back for LGBTQ+ people. Trans people have been a target of the Trump administration from the beginning. In its first year, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination, and Trump banned trans people from serving in the military. This summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters receiving federal funding to house trans people according to their birth-assigned sex. All LGBTQ+ people have also been under attack. Though marriage equality is the law of the land, the White House has taken steps to limit or undo gay rights in several key policy areas such as lobbying to give religious adoption agencies the right to refuse same-sex couples. Most critical, perhaps, was the administration’s attack on the Affordable Care Act’s LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination protections in a rule released on June 12^th. Though it has been put on hold due to a federal court stay, the rule would allow doctors and insurance companies to refuse care to LGBTQ+ people.

Meanwhile, Trump has nominated three conservative Supreme Court justices during his presidency. Still, in a surprising turn of events, a recent major LGBTQ+ victory threw the administration for a loop: The Supreme Court decided in June that LGBTQ+ people are protected on the basis of sex under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The decision in Bostock v. Clayton County means queer and trans people cannot be fired for being LGBTQ+, and the ruling could end up as precedent for expanding rights into other issue areas such as education and health care. Still, this likely will not stop Trump from trying to chip away at the legal protections LGBTQ+ people currently have. It would be similar to the approach taken by religious conservatives with regard to Roe v. Wade — passing anti-abortion legislation at the state level in the hope that related cases work their way back to the Supreme Court especially now that Amy Coney Barrett has been confirmed. According to activists, Trump and his cronies will likely try to attack across three different fronts in their efforts to chip away at LGBTQ+ rights: by continuing to reshape the courts, by attacking health care access, and by continuing to limit immigration and asylum to LGBTQ+ people fleeing violence in other countries. A second Trump term would mean more anti-LGBTQ+ federal judges appointed, another Supreme Court justice (maybe even two), and an escalation in the legal arguments against trans rights. As of July, 194 of the 792 active federal judges were appointed by Trump, a quarter of the federal judiciary. Many of them were either previously anti-LGBTQ+ activists or have openly expressed anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments.

The choice is obvious. Former vice president Joe Biden is well-suited to be president. An undecided voter can disagree with some of the policies he supports — that’s fine. Undecided voters should weigh their concerns about the unknowns of a Biden presidency against the inevitable dangers of a second Trump term. On the one hand, a tax, a minimum wage, an energy policy you might not like; on the other, the demise of U.S. democracy, prosperity, and global leadership. It shouldn’t be a difficult call.