I hate what Donald Trump has done to America. And I hate what he says he will do if elected for a second term. I don’t hate this deeply damaged human being whose early parental influence taught him to be fearful of ever being a loser and to value money as the penultimate goal in life. As America faces crises on multiple fronts, Trump continues to use language that sparks controversy and highlights the nation’s racial divides. I hate Trump’s penchant of stoking American culture wars.

I abhor how ultra far right Trump sycophants have destroyed the former Republican party in response to his “leadership.”

I lament the loss of significant political bipartisanship.

I detest how the fast-growing racist hate speech in America now includes something new: xenophobic, racist, and homophobic attacks that are punctuated with Donald Trump’s name. The current leading Republican presidential candidate has used terms such as “animal” and “rabid” to describe Black district attorneys who are prosecuting his four indictment cases. He has accused Black prosecutors of being “racist.” It takes one to think he knows one. He has made unsupported claims about their personal lives. And on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump has deployed terms that rhyme with racial slurs as some of his supporters post racist screeds about the same targets.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung has pushed back against the idea that the former president attacks people based on race, saying in an email that Trump “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body and anyone saying otherwise is a racist and bigot themselves.”

Nearly every metric of intolerance in the U.S. has surged over the past seven years from anti-Semitism and Islamophobia to violent hate crimes based on skin color, nationality or sexual orientation. This is bound to increase in response to the horrific Israel/Hamas (not Palestinian) war.

Bill Newman, in his Sept. 19 guest column, quotes a passage from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” where Humpty Dumpty says, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — nothing more nor less.” No one can doubt what Humpty Trumpty means when he claims that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a “degenerate psychopath” who “hates the USA.” Or what he means when he insinuates that America’s top general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley deserves to be put to death for his phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of January 6. Trump said that this was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (That phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.)

Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it incites violence against public officials, but also because it shows just how numb we have grown toward his threats that we have thought are more typical of foreign authoritarian regimes.

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There’s plenty of talk in the American news media about the expansion of oligarchy in Russia and other authoritarian states. But you don’t need to look offshore. Oligarchy is an American phenomenon, and it’s expanding at an exponential rate, while income inequality is surging. That’s according to the most official of official sources when it comes to economic issues: the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Quite beyond differences between policy platforms by Democrats and Republicans — when they elect a new Speaker and create a platform — my question is: How can anyone vote for this man? Trump is not beyond the law. That said, he also is not guilty until judged by judicial process.

Do you need jury determinations to see and know that Trump is guilty of a number of things? We all heard him pressure Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on the phone by saying “I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than [the 11,779-vote margin of defeat] we have, because we won the state.” He could not, and still cannot, accept the election by Joe Biden. Is he guilty?

And we all know that Trump blocked payment of a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package to Ukraine. Why? He was attempting to obtain “quid pro quo cooperation” from Ukrainian president VolodymyrZelensky to coerce him into providing damaging narratives about then presidential candidate Joe Biden. Is he guilty?

It frightens, saddens, and angers me that come November 2024 we may be on the brink of joining the 52 other countries in the world that are ruled by a dictator or an authoritarian regime.

Greenfield resident John Bos finds it difficult to comprehend why so many fellow citizens want to vote for a person who is destroying our struggling democracy. So he writes about it every other Saturday in “Connecting the Dots.” He also is a contributing columnist for “Green Energy Times.” Comments and questions are invited at john01370@gmail.com.