This past week, 13 Russians were charged with fraud, conspiracy, identity theft and other criminal offenses for meddling in the 2016 presidential election. This comes as no surprise to me — seeing as Russian meddling has been suspected for a while now.
The main source of meddling has been cited as cyber-attacks on the Democratic National Committee, as well as the use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to spread propaganda in order to skew the election results.
Even less surprising is the continuous denial from President Trump on Twitter, which is hardly a professional platform to deny the fact that Russian meddling assisted his presidential win.
Is it too much to ask that our president shares his false denials in a press briefing or something at least semi-presidential? Apparently so.
But Trump’s use of Twitter is not the most absurd part in all of this. The fact that he continues to deny something that has been proven through indictment is what really makes me wonder if he has any sort of intelligence at all.
The root of the problem is his ego. He will never accept the fact that he did not win the election solely because he is amazing or acknowledge that the people of America did not actually elect him. The Electoral College did.
In a time when America should be concerned over the meddling of a presidential election that interfered with democracy, Trump cannot get over his huge ego. This terrifies me because this will only encourage Russia to threaten our democracy again.
In addition, our relations with Russia are not the best, so allowing interference will demonstrate its superiority to us, which is not something we can risk. We need to take a strong stance against the nation and show that American democracy is not something to be played with.
If we don’t do that, then what sort of democracy do we have? Rigged elections are something you hear about in dictatorships and countries struggling for freedom. That is what America will become if Trump continues the deny the crimes committed.
Democracy means nothing without a fair election by the people, and right now I do not feel we have that in America.
I would hope most Americans are concerned about Russia limiting our democracy, but unfortunately some people will remain blind to the facts and worship Trump. They read his tweets and believe everything he says, regardless of that fact that he’s basically a pathological liar at this point.
In his tweets, Trump tried to blame Hillary Clinton, as always, for being a bad candidate. It’s not like she won the popular vote or anything. He also stated that any Russian interference had no impact on the election results, even though intelligence chiefs working on the case said they cannot reach a determined conclusion on the impacts of Russian meddling.
Ironically, his next tweet was bashing fake news media, even though from my perspective he looks like the only one spreading fake news. I am curious to know how this is all fake news if the Department of Justice actually indicted 13 Russians. I guess they’re all also liars now.
The bottom line is that Trump needs to acknowledge Russia is attempting to take our democracy from us, and he benefited from it. That would be the first step in taking our democracy back and figuring out how to prevent this from happening again.
I do not live in Russia, so why are we allowing Russia to pick our presidents? If nothing is done, U.S. citizens will have lost the right to a fair election and representation of the people, forgoing the backbone of democracy.
