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Nobody would have been surprised if on Thursday night, August 28, 2020, on the south lawn of the White House had Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party nomination for president with this opening: "I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the Almighty." The fact checkers at The New York Times and at The Washington Post would have nailed him for plagiarizing Adolf Hitler.

Nobody would have been astonished if he had been nabbed on a live mike whispering to Vice President Mike Pence, "If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed." But then he would have been nabbed repeating another Hitler line.

Instead, this most ignorant of American presidents--the one who holds the Bible in the air but has never read a verse--opened with a history lesson and closed with a geography lesson in a script that might have been informative to fourth graders who didn't know anything about the good ol' USA. As he listed the various presidents who occupied the magnificent house behind him, he couldn't refrain from comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln, but in spite of his arrogance, there can be little doubt that few African-Americans will be voting for this racist.

More than 2,000 of the nation's whitest and finest gathered for the celebration that coincided with Coronavirus deaths passing the 180,000 mark. Thankfully, droned Trump, the country wasn't under Joe Biden or the toll or the six million COVID cases would have been significantly higher. Though he mentioned Biden's name 41 times and warned that he would be the destruction of the United States if he were elected, Trump didn't have the gall to blame the 180,000 deaths, the six million cases or even Hurricane Laura devastating Louisiana and claiming lives as he harangued on the ex-Vice President.

But if you were observing the elegant crowd, you wouldn't have thought that a pandemic was ravaging America. Even though the scientists with both Republican and Democratic sympathies have advised their fellow citizens that the three most important precautions they can take to defeat COVID are wearing masks, maintaining a social distance and avoiding large crowds, Trump's gluttonous guests were rejecting all these measures and following Trump's lead that at worse this "hoax" is a bad bout of the flu.

Trump's major theme was law-and-order. He said the social unrest in the cities transpiring under his watch would become the norm under Biden where nobody's person or property would be safe. He didn't make this statement because he would have been echoing Hitler again, but he supports the chaos as a steppingstone to a second term. As Hitler wrote: "The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence."

Employing another Hitler technique--"I use emotion for the many and reason for the few"--Trump launched into a shopping list of monotonous accomplishments. He would merely mention Islamic terrorists or abortion or Iran or China or Jerusalem and the hypocritical and bigoted Christian congregation would leap to their feet applauding wildly and shouting, "Alleluia!"

For 70 minutes, punctuated every two minutes by evoking "Biden!" as if he were the devil, it was Trump preaching that the end of the world was around the corner if he wasn't reelected. If you think the story told in Revelations was terrifying he thundered, then lightning bolts would rain down on every denizen if they dared side with Biden.

"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell and also the other way around," wrote Hitler. "To consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise." 

With death and disease rampant, with unemployment in double digits, with peaceful protesters shot and tear-gassed for implementing their Constitutional rights, with African-Americans murdered by police, with God expressing his revulsion for the nation with hurricanes and other natural disasters, with nearly everyone associated with Trump in jail or awaiting appearances in court, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and the middle class struggling from week to week, Trump hails himself as if he were the reincarnation of George Washington on the cusp of creating a newer and greater America.

Since the Great Depression and WWII, we have never suffered as we are suffering. Trump has not made our nation great. Our country is worse as a result of his incompetence. We are a country in the middle of a bloodless war. A democratically elected dictator must be toppled in the same manner he snared power. We must vote as we have never voted in the past.

Trump will do anything to win. In the words of Hitler: "Obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to but only to be broken." And he added for good measure: "Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice."

We are two Americas. Four more years of Trump and the dire picture he paints under a Biden presidency will be the America that we know under a Trump tyranny.

Nobody has to be told where Hitler led Germany. And nobody should have any doubts where Trump will lead us if we don't heed former First Lady Michelle Obama's words: "If you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this. If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can. And they will if we don't make a change in this election."