Reasons I’m voting for the Democrat for president basically no matter what
There are many policies out there that we could discuss or care about, but I don’t need to go into detail or nuance to know who I am voting for. Below, I list the very simple things that make it clear who I need to vote for, and cite scholarly sources.
(Finish reading this paragraph if you want to know the bottom line without reading any more of this article. Or, check out a summary image at the very bottom. As a bottom line, here are two examples pulled from below: (1), if Trump being a serial (child?) rapist would convince you not to vote for him, read here. (2), if Trump threatening democracy, lying about election fraud, trying to cheat the election, or inciting a coup attempt would convince you not to vote for him, I have two videos from non-partisan news sources that do not add commentary: they just share the source videos or event facts. Watch this 10-minute C-SPAN video that shows depositions of former Trump White House officials and other evidence that Trump tried to cheat the election, or watch this 10-minute video that runs through the timeline of events of the violent attack on the Capitol.)
I would be completely dismayed if America allows a candidate with one of these bullet points on their resume to be elected president, let alone all of them.
I’ll share the full list of points below, with references, but in short, we’ve never had a serious candidate for president found guilty of rape, for instance. We’ve never had one accused of raping a 13-year-old with Jeffrey Epstein. We’ve never had one who was impeached, let alone twice impeached. We’ve never given support to someone with a mountain of evidence of mishandling classified documents against him. We’ve never had a candidate who pushed a pressure campaign against local officials to change their states’ votes. I could go on.
As Mitt Romney has said, when he explained he would have happily supported any Republican candidate except Donald Trump, “Some might call me old-fashioned, but for me, I draw the line at sexual assault when I think about who I want to have as president of the United States,” referring to the Jean Carroll cases where Trump was found civilly liable for defamation and rape (this is the first bullet point below).
And, though some people believe Trump because he so repeatedly tells us “it’s all a witch hunt,” critical thinkers will come to the same conclusion as Colin Cowherd from ESPN after Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in the New York business fraud case with hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels:
Donald Trump is now a felon. His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his National Security Adviser, his Trade Advisor, his Foreign Policy Adviser, his campaign fixer and his company CFO. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts. If everybody in your social circle is a felon, I don’t think it’s rigged. I don’t think the world’s against you. And to get people to agree on anything, 34 counts? 0 for 34? That’s a batting slump even the New York Mets could be impressed with. O for 34. When you’re constantly trying to sell me on an America that I don’t see… Trump’s entire gameplan is ‘The country is in free fall.’ Maybe in the Trump-centric neighborhoods it is.
So without further ado, here are the reasons I’m voting for the Democratic candidate for president. I put links to references in case you want more than the summaries.
This one’s easy. Country over party.
Reminder, these are not meant to convince anyone to change an opinion on a policy issue — they are simply meant to show evidence and court cases, each one a specific reason to vote for the Democratic candidate and not for Donald Trump.
- Donald Trump was found liable of rape in the defamation cases with Jean Carroll (first case awarded $5 million in damages; second case awarded $83 million in damages). Around 20 sexual assault accusations have been brought against Donald Trump (see here, here, here, and here).
- Donald Trump was impeached twice.
- Donald Trump has four criminal indictments: in New York, in Georgia, in Florida, and in the District of Columbia.
- In New York, he was unanimously found guilty of 34 felony counts.
This was for falsifying business records to conceal payments to a porn actress (Stormy Daniels) to ensure her silence about an affair they had while Trump’s wife Melania was pregnant. - In Georgia, the case is considered a slam dunk RICO case.
RICO is basically our anti-organized-crime, anti-mob laws. In this case, Trump and his team are accused of a coordinated effort to pressure Georgia state officials, create false electoral vote documents, breach Coffee County election equipment, and harass Fulton County election workers. The case is paused while the court decides whether to disqualify district attorney Fani Willis because of her personal relationship with lead prosecutor Nathan Wade. - In Florida, Trump is indicted on 40+ felony counts related to mishandling classified documents, making false statements, and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Only a small part of gathered evidence is known, but what has been seen by the public is damning. However, Justice Aileen Cannon (appointed by Trump) gets the privilege of presiding over the case, and she considerably delayed the case from going to trial, granting multiple requests by Trump to extend pre-trial motions. In July 2024, she dismissed the case entirely, ruling that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. That ruling is being appealed.
The accusation is that classified documents, including special kinds of Top Secret documents, had been kept at Mar-a-Lago after Trump was no longer president, were not returned, were lost, and were hidden when the FBI went to retrieve them. Documents were found in hidden rooms and blocked off bathrooms, in showers, and in a storage room. Folders for Top Secret documents were found empty. Mar-a-Lago for years has been a place frequented by Russian nationals, including Russian-speaking immigrants using fake identities. (Having worked with documents like this, I can say tongue-in-cheek but also humbly, that any other person might be lucky to actually have a trial before punishment.) - In the District of Columbia, Trump is accused in a federal criminal case of election obstruction.
This includes a plot in which pro-Trump slates of fake electors would be created and vice president Mike Pence would count the fake electors instead of the electors certified by state legislatures. When the time came, Mike Pence refused to count the fake electors and said he would certify the election with the normal electors, despite Trump urging him repeatedly on January 6 to “do the right thing,” hence the gallows at the Capitol with the name “Mike Pence.”
Utah senator Mike Lee and Mark Meadows exchanged a series of text messages referring to the Trump team’s interest in pursuing a fake electors plot. Lee hypothesized in those texts, “If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path. I am working on that as of yesterday.” Cleta Mitchell said it was “actually Mike Lee’s idea.” Mike Lee — in the run-up to his re-election campaign against Evan McMullin — said he was working “14 hour days” assisting Trump and texted Meadows, “Please tell me what I should be saying,” regarding pressure about the fake electors plot. Much of his work was pressure on Pennsylvania and Georgia officials to get slates of fake electors created. Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, emailed 29 Arizona lawmakers, including assembly speaker Russell Bowers and Shawnna Bolick, encouraging them to pick “a clean slate of Electors.”
Stephen Miller described on television that the main purpose of alternate electors was to provide justification to Congress to disallow the results from seven states. The alternate electors could easily be swapped in based on general acceptance of the big lie that there was election fraud, after challenges to state election results, and with the help of Republican Congressmen and Republican majorities in a number of Biden-voting states, especially in gerrymandered states, and a strong majority of conservative judges in the Supreme Court, including the unfairly appointed ones (see the next bullet). The Judge in this case said she will not schedule a trial until the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decides whether Trump is immune from prosecution. - Donald Trump and Republicans in the Senate dishonestly filled the Supreme Court with hardline conservatives.
The Republicans in Congress prevented a vote on Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. They argued a president should not appoint a justice during an election year. Obama’s nomination was made 10-months before the election in 2016, a year before the inauguration. Subsequently, Donald Trump won the presidency and appointed a different nominee. Then, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died less than two months before the 2020 election. Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump fast-tracked a nominee to the Supreme Court. There were an unprecedented 35 days between the nomination and the 2020 election. This secured a strong Republican majority in the Supreme Court, despite no Republican presidential candidate having won the popular vote since 1988 (36 years ago as of the time of this writing; this statement does not count the re-election of George W. Bush who was riding an extreme wave of patriotism from 2002 through 2004 because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in which he set the record for highest approval rating of all time).
The dishonesty does not end there. In the Senate confirmation hearings for each of the Trump-nominated Supreme Court justices, they were pushed hard about topics such as Roe v. Wade and whether a president is immune from prosecution, and they each emphatically said Roe v. Wade is settled law (a 50-year-old Supreme Court decision) and that no one — even the president — is above the law. But, in the first chance they got, they voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and seem to be siding with helping Donald Trump with his immunity rulings. - Many good people have been duped by a cognizant Donald Trump and his team’s lies about the validity of the 2020 presidential election. In fact, there was no meaningful election fraud and more than 50 Trump election fraud cases were lost and thrown out.
Multiple court cases and judges have ruled that Trump and his allies participated in “knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in [states] when seeking to overturn election results in federal court.” He has been found to be an extreme statistical outlier among politicians based on the number of false or misleading statements, including tens of thousands of verified false or misleading claims since 2016. Multiple Trump team members report that Trump is lying about election fraud. For instance, Bill Barr — Trump’s handpicked attorney general — claims there was no fraud, that Trump is aware of that, and that Trump’s team started lying about fraud immediately without checking if there was any evidence. - Many good people have been duped by a cognizant Donald Trump and his team’s lies about the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
A large amount of documents, text messages, right-wing group chats, videos, social media uploads from protesters, police testimony, court deposition, and testimony of Republican officials in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, show that the January 6 attack was violent, destructive, and encouraged by Donald Trump, and that the coup attempt, pressure campaign, and fake electors plot investigation has merit. Watch a 10-minute video showing the timeline of events of the violent attack on the Capitol. Watch a 10-minute summary video of evidence from C-SPAN, mostly statements from former White House officials, that Trump was guilty of attempting to overthrow a valid election. - Fox News repeatedly lied about election fraud through the voting machines in the 2020 election.
Dominion (a company that makes voting machines) sued Fox News for $1.6 billion in damages after the 2020 election. Fox News settled the suit, accepting culpability but not apologizing, and agreeing to pay $800 million. The other major voting machine company, Smartmatic, has sued Fox News for the same reason for $2.7 billion in damages, and is also litigating against Mike Lindell, OAN, and Newsmax. Smartmatic has shown an unwillingness to accept a settlement from Fox News near or lower than the amount Dominion received. Tucker Carlson was let go shortly after the Dominion settlement. - Donald Trump brags about sexually assaulting women.
The Access Hollywood tape is still on the internet — I have actually heard him say, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the *****.” - Donald Trump had regularly partied with Jeffrey Epstein, reports show he has flown on Epstein’s plane numerous times, and Trump said about Epstein in 2002, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” He also worked with youth beauty pageants and known child-courter John Casablancas.
Extreme accusations, like the rape case filed against Trump and Epstein of the rape of a 13-year-old female sex slave that was dropped by the plaintiff after threats to the woman, are described in absolutely chilling detail in court documents (for some gag-inducing details from the court filings for this case, look at section 3 in this article). - Donald Trump had court filings against him and deposition from his second wife, Ivana, that he had violently raped her. She later recanted her statement in a divorce settlement with a confidentiality clause.
- Former Playboy model Karen McDougal brought a case in which she said Tucker Carlson defamed her on his show by saying she extorted President Donald Trump “out of approximately $150,000 in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair.” Fox News’s lawyers argued that there was no actual malice and that viewers arrive with an “appropriate level of skepticism” to his show, or in other words, that everyone watching knows that Carlson is lying, so there is no actual defamation here, and Fox News won with that argument.
(Not only do Fox News’ own lawyers argue in court that no one in their right mind believes what is on their primetime programming is factual, but repeated studies by independent news analysis organizations have shown that out of all major networks, Fox News is the only one that makes you less informed if you watch it than if you watch no news.) - Donald Trump’s racist comments and actions go farther than bucking political correctness to stoking racism from the far-right base. Donald, his father, and the Trump Organization were sued multiple times for housing discrimination and repeated violations of past settlements.
Unfortunately, because our elections often have us voting against someone even more than voting for someone, it’s clear we have a system issue. (Side note: I am passionate about election reform, especially ranked choice voting combined with top-4-non-partisan primaries like how Alaska does it; my big dream is the NPVIC).
But, these evidence against Trump are anomalous: this is not a “both sides do it” kind of problem. Trump is uniquely deplorable. The Republicans in Congress and at Fox News who have shielded Trump and uneducated vast swaths of the American populace merit our disdain for a generation. You truly can buy anything in this world with money.
As such, I — a life-time military-family Republican who grew up worshipping the flag in the South and Midwest — have been since 2016 and will continue to vote for Democrats, run for office, donate, write, and share, until the Trump goes home and his elite protectors in Congress receive their reckoning.
I invite you to also consider taking determined action against Trumpism, even if just for 2024. Country over party. For democracy. For the idea that serial rapists, mobsters, and wannabe-dictators are unworthy of the presidency. This decision is easy.
Interested in a little more? Frank Fox, expert on governments and the creator of the American Heritage course at BYU, has a 7-minute video about why Trump must be defeated, because of his threat to checks and balances and the rule of law, and ultimately, the Constitutional government that protects our freedom.
Also, check out Trump’s connections to Russian money laundering.
For a nice visual summary to help drive the point home:
