Donald Trump Redux: Are We Facing the End of Democracy?

I hate to keep going over the same ground day after day after day, but my friends in the alt-Left community seem obsessed with the idea that a Trump electoral victory in November will usher in an authoritarian political alignment which will end more than two continuous centuries of democratic rule.

The latest such kvetch comes from Ken Burns, who used his commencement address at Brandeis University to describe the November election as “an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives.”

So, we now have a filmmaker who has discovered the word ‘existential’ as it applies to the Trump campaign, and in that regard, Burns joins just about every other alt-Left pundit and noisemaker who wants us to believe that Trump represents an Armageddon-like threat.

Let me try once again to put Trump’s political presence into a proper perspective by relating a brief discussion I had with an old and dear friend in 1984 or 1985.

The friend was Judy Plotkin who was a counsel in the Commerce Department and led the team which created the health warning on cigarettes, an initiative promoted by (believe it or not) Ronald Reagan whose father died of emphysema, and it was Reagan who made the White House smoke-free.