Six months from now, we will be voting for a used president. Seems our choice is old or older, decent and not so much, loud and quieter, vulgar and not, democracy or stated dictator, one plan to tear up standards of law and order, the other attempting to keep it.

I have been torn between being honest and keeping comments to myself, as we are already terribly divided, if only by opinion, but also by truth. How will democracy die? Many seem oblivious to the possibility, though we saw how close it got on Jan. 6, only because some plans didn’t get fulfilled. Democracies die slowly, in plain sight, at the hands of elected officials, through the gradual erosion of political norms and institutions.

I pray we leave a stable country for my kids and grandkids. The presumptive GOP nominee declined to say if he’d accept the result of his White House race with President Joe Biden in November, warning if the election was not “honest,” then “you have to fight for the right of the country.”

Trump is pledging mass deportations of undocumented migrants, crackdowns on the bureaucracy and higher education, and on what he called the “communists and criminals” in the Democratic Party. He’s proposing a brand of quasi-autocratic leadership based on personal whim, a desire for retribution, and almost no acknowledgment that the presidency is an office constrained by laws, the Constitution, and the bedrock republican recoil from unbridled executive power.

“We will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump told Time and that he’d be open to firing any U.S. attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone. Trump also said that he’d consider pardoning hundreds of supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn the 2020 election.

He jokes about being a dictator for one day or terminating the Constitution. The former president replied simply, in one of his most revealing but disquieting answers, “I think a lot of people like it.”

POUL TOFTEMARK

Rosburg