Voices: At 86, I have never witnessed an internal threat to democracy as grave as today’s

The consequences: Never before has a former president who is as flawed a candidate as Trump — an individual some have called cognitively challenged and psychologically unstable and who believes in nothing other than himself, his appetites, his instincts and his autocratic ambitions — evidenced, according to major polls, a 50% chance of reelection.

Never before has such an individual commandeered a major American political party, garnered the loyalty of its most radical and/or opportunistic power-players, and forced its moderates to choose between cowardly silence or the termination of their political careers.

Never before could such an individual, if reelected, stand so thoroughly empowered to reject experienced advisors who are faithful to the Constitution — reject “the adults in the room” who might rein in his most authoritarian impulses — and instead appoint loyalists who will do his bidding. In addition those loyalists will enact the fusion of executive-branch dominance, faux-libertarianism and Christian nationalism mapped out in Project 2025.

Never before would such an individual, if reelected, be so thoroughly insulated against criminal indictment and prosecution — all due to the wide-ranging and much criticized presidential-immunity decision rendered by six conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For those of you who like to use the bad faith argument that Democrats fear monger every 4 years. THIS IS NOT NORMAL AND HAS NEVER HAPPENED IN OUR COUNTRY.

VOTE! Our lives literally depend on it!