First of all, we’re not a democracy. The fact anyone can make it to an institution of higher learning without having read the Constitution, the law of our nation, is telling of our current state of public education. The word democracy isn’t mentioned once in the US Constitution, nor has it been amended to be included. A “true democracy” has been known to be nothing more than mob rule since ancient Athens, and our founders we’re well aware of this when writing the constitution for our Constitutional Republic. I’ll agree the two-party system is a failure, but ranked choice voting is an even larger failure that would not serve the interests of safeguarding the people’s rights or promoting efficiency in government. Moreover, the President of the United States is exactly that, the President of the United STATES, not a president of the people who functions as another elected representative. The President is the chief executive of the Federal Government and therefore must protect the interest of all the several States, not simply our more populace ones. A popular vote would take us from prioritizing half a dozen swing states to prioritizing the wants of New York City, LA, Chicago, and Houston over everyone else. The States have different geographical needs, industries, and population densities that are not served by the popular opinion of people who don’t live in them. If anything, we should change the Electoral College to give each state only one electoral vote as that would force every administration to care about every region of the country.

Yes, lets be honest: your assessment of inflation is entirely incorrect. Inflation is caused by the Federal Government printing more US Currency out of thin air and spending more money than we actually have. The more that’s printed the more our money loses its purchasing power. Private industry, even the admittedly greedy corporations, cannot sell things at prices too high people are not willing or even able to buy them.

One of Trump’s few virtues was appointing judges who read the law as written, not interpret it to say whatever is opportune for those whose political power depends on pretending it says what’s contemporarily convenient. The perfect example of this is Biden’s Supreme Court appointee Katanji Brown Jackson. A woman literally chosen due to her race and sex instead of qualifications, and if that weren’t bad enough, openly stated she doesn’t believe in the natural rights the US was founded on (not to mention used to justify fighting the Civil War to abolish slavery) during her confirmation process and is apparently concerned the First Amendment “hamstrings the government” from controlling American’s speech. Imagine that.

To be clear, how would a second DJT presidency itself lead to nationwide abortion bans when Congress writes laws, not the President? What do you mean by cultural battels in the classroom, that children wouldn’t exclusively be taught the overt lies that the US is built by “white supremacy” on “stolen land” or the “all disparities are the result of systemic oppression” nonsense by national union talking heads and that’s a problem for you? By attacks on climate science, you mean getting us back out of the Paris Climate Accord (again) which restricts the US and Europe while openly allowing Earth’s two largest polluters (China and India) to dump as much carbon into the atmosphere as they please? And not sure what you could mean by political use of the military, other than daring to say they should be focused on warfighting and not abandoning our allies and $50 Billion of weapons after deciding to retreat from our longest war. As far as Sate Dept Diplomats, Trump’s foreign policy had a Putin who was in check, a China on notice to not invade Taiwan, and the Abrham Accords signed in the mid-east. Biden’s incompetence has Putin emboldened enough to invade Ukraine, China pushing its boundaries in the South China Sea, and chaos back in the Middle East. And, sorry, but it’s not the “conservative” appointments in federal courts who are a threat to individual rights. By definition, that means they’ll interpret law as written instead of re-interpret as ever changing popular tend desires. It’s the liberal “living document” court appointees who believe they can unilaterally decide by judicial fiat that what was an individual right is now either a privilege or simply nonexistent because “we live in different times now” or some other slogan.

Trump isn’t any graver of a threat expanding or abusing executive power than any demagogue we’ve had in that office in the last half century. The only thing that makes him different is he isn’t a career bureaucrat who pandered to the corporate media for support, but instead beat career bureaucrats at their own game and told the media they were manipulators to their faces. If you’d like to compare Trump’s actual transgressions while in office vs each sitting president back to LBJ I’d love to. Too many people who believe only what the bias media they consume tells them to believe need some perspective.

Are you an agitprop writer for NPR? What evidence do you have that “Bottom line: a vote for Trump is a vote for absolute power in the hands of very few who empower a minority to act outside the bounds of a civil society; that is not democracy; it is a monarchy at best, a corporate oligarchical dictatorship at worst.”? I’d seriously love to see it, and contrast it against the judicial activism, lawfare, and open disregard for constitutional rule of law and individual rights, of the modern Democratic Party pushing its burn it to the ground so we can re-build our neo-socialist technocracy in its place agenda.