The Great Experiment and Cognitive Tests All Around
“We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak…”
~ Edward R. Murrow
As I watch the news cycle spinning, wobbling, and turning, I’m absolutely dumbstruck by the fact that a man who has been twice impeached, gone bankrupt six times, indicted four times, and charged with 91 felonies is still the front runner for the Republicans for the presidency. There are so many reasons why this guy is so obviously wrong for the job, but it seems no matter what happens, the GOP won’t change their minds on making him their candidate. Usually I would love for them to pick a candidate so ignorant, uneducated, and unethical, but the problem here is there’s a very real chance that he could win. Around 150 million voters backed him in 2020, and most of those people stick with him today. These people who voted for this morally bankrupt narcissist, who gives hushmoney to porn stars for sex while his wife is pregnant freaked out and said Barack Obama was acting unpresidential by wearing a tan suit. Even though it is impossible to convince most Republicans of this, I feel I must point out a couple obvious restrictions that we should have in our political system. Maybe let’s start with some sort of moral clause that says our president shouldn’t give hushmoney to porn stars for sex. I’m just spitballing here, but maybe we should not let a person who has been indicted for criminal acts run for president. I really don’t think that it’s infringing on a person’s freedom of speech to tell them that when they have 91 felony counts in four different criminal investigations they can’t run for the President of the United States.
Shouldn’t it be something everyone could get behind to say that a person who is ordered by the verdict of a jury to pay 90 million dollars to a woman he sexually assaulted can’t run for office? Or maybe don’t let someone be a candidate for office who is under investigation by twenty women accusing him of sexual assault and rape. Or maybe don’t let someone run for office who openly brags about grabbing women by the pussy.
The dude wants to be the leader of the free world, but other than dodging the draft for the Vietnam War, the only foreign policy he seems to have is to encourage Russia to attack our NATO allies, an organization, by the way, that was formed due to the threat of aggression from the Soviet Union. He said the reason he would encourage Russia to invade one of our NATO allies is because “You gotta pay. You got to pay your bills.” He’s saying that many of our allies are not paying some imaginary NATO bill. There is no bill. He fundamentally misunderstands a very integral treaty. The only thing that he can be talking about is an agreement made years before he ran for president the first time. After Russia illegally annexed Crimea, the NATO Heads of State all agreed to commit 2% of each country’s Gross Domestic Product to defense spending in order to make sure their militaries are updated in case of a larger war. Not all of our allies have been able to do this yet, but they all have made progress. No one is in arrears; no one is delinquent on paying some bill for services owed. No, not like the Trump Organization that has been sued over 35,000 times for not paying their bills. Maybe don’t let a man who has tanked so many businesses be in charge of the US Economy? I mean, am I going insane here or is that a bad idea? If you don’t believe me, look at his track record. Remember when he started a pointless trade war with China for no reason that lost thousands of American jobs?
I’m sorry, but I’m having a hard time believing that I have to tell anyone, let alone half the US population, that we should not be voting for the candidate who says he will encourage Russia to attack our allies. Deconstruct this: if Canada doesn’t take money away from other government programs like feeding the poor, fixing their infrastructure, or healthcare programs and put that money into their defense budget, Trump says he will encourage Russia to invade and maybe occupy them. Maybe Canada is an extreme example. Let’s list other NATO allies: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Would it be okay for Russian troops to invade any of those democratic sovereign countries? According to Trump, yes, unless they cough up 2% of their GDP. That’s literal protection money, and in law that’s called extortion. Shouldn’t calling for extorting our allies under threat of Russian invasion be a deal breaker when running for any office?
I watch this guy on the news bragging to his voters that he’s passed cognitive tests and somehow that makes him a stable genius, but I know that these tests are given to victims of head trauma after injuries or patients with a loss of mental acuity due to illness. I know this because after I got back from the Iraq War and wanted to use my VA benefits to get my bachelor’s degree, the VA wanted to make sure they weren’t throwing their money away by sending someone with brain damage to college. The test is not hard. Take it yourself by clicking here. Nikki Haley has taken to distributing this test at her rallies.
I can’t believe this, but I agree with Trump. All politicians who want to run for president should take a cognitive test, and while we’re at it they should take a basic political literacy test as well. Then the results should be shared. Shouldn’t each person running for office know what that office does before they sign up? I don’t believe Trump would know the three branches of government and what they do. I doubt he knows how many branches of government there are or how many Amendments there are in the Bill of Rights and what they do.
I will go further and say that we should not only test our candidates, but we should also test everyone who votes. I love democracy. I really do, but does it really work when people with no idea how the government functions simply vote for their favorite personality? How the hell do we know that a person is up for the job if we don’t know what the job is? Spoiler Alert: bills shouldn’t be written and cabinet leaders should not be appointed or fired through social media posts. I mean, shouldn’t it be common sense to know when you elect complete idiots nothing gets done? We end up in this mess of the cult of personality instead of actually solving society’s problems. This Congress, in the words of Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado, “This will go down as… the least productive Congress since the Great Depression.” He’s right. In 2023, only 27 bills passed. Compare that to the Congress before that where they passed 364 bills. When Congress is really working, they can pass up to six to seven hundred bills.
If we keep electing clowns, we’ll keep turning our political arena into a circus. We are the Land of the Free, but that doesn’t mean we should be free to be ignorant, free to burn down the country so many fought to create, or free to destroy the Great Experiment we call democracy.
Sean Davis 