The former standard bearers of the Republican Party are not present at Trump's party's convention.

Skin graft in my right ear has kept my right ear bandaged since surgery on May 30th - my follow-up after skin graft requires wound care for 3 months (for me: that's Memorial Day to Labor Day).          
Donald Trump is now wearing a bandage on his right ear as are his sycophants.      
I am now stopped on the street by friends and neighbors who say they hadn't figured me to be a Trumper.

  "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?"

   "...ordinary people doing extraordinary things."      
    He stepped aside to "unite his party."  
    The fight for the "soul of our country" continues.        
    "History is in (our) hands."

    Onward!

Lest Republicans forget, October 7, 2016, just one month before the 2016 presidential election, the release of the Access Hollywood tape provoked strong reactions by media figures and politicians across the political spectrum.Statements from Republican officials varied from strong disapproval to withdrawal of support for Trump's campaign  to calling for his withdrawal from the ticket.

I had not been able to bring myself to watch "Hillbilly Elegy" until now when JD Vance is so much in the news. My daughter went to The Ohio State for graduate school so I am familiar with the campus and the drive south in Indiana and then east to Columbus. Two of my grandsons were born in Columbus - the "heart of it all" was familiar stomping grounds.

I remember JD's interviews when his memoir was released in 2016. JD caught my interest, my ear was cocked for news about him. His expressed commitment to "his people" makes his transition from a never-Trumper to Trump's running mate in 2024 more than disappointing.

I have now watched "Hillbilly Elegy". I understand why a young man with his background would be doing 'thought experiments' about real life situations. It is likely JD Vance is suffering PTSD from his life experience growing up. Trump put his thumb on the scale in the Ohio Senate election when Rob Portman retired in 2022. JD had passed on support to challenge Sherrod Brown in the 2018 Ohio Senate election. I see in JD's marriage to Usha a desire to create a strong, loving family. I hope JD and Usha find their way out of MAGA before "everything Trump touches dies" comes to pass in their lives... Who knows? maybe their kids will (fulfill their role as children and) ask their parents why they're so 'weird.'        
Hopefully Kamala will be elected and JD can extricate himself and his family from MAGA World.

          Euphoria fades.

              The New York Times

  He is dangerous in word, deed, and action.

           He puts self over country.

        He loathes the laws we live by.

                      OPINION

 DONALD  TRUMP IS UNFIT TO LEAD          
            by the Editorial Board

Next week, for the third time in eight years, Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party's candidate for president of the United States. A once great political party now  serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great.

It is a chilling choice against this national moment. For more than two decades, large majorities of Americans have said they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and the post-Covid era of stubborn inflation, high interest rates, social division and political stagnation has left many voters even more frustrated and despondent.

The Republican Party once pursued electoral power in service to solutions for such problems, to building "the shining city on a hill," as Ronald Reagan liked to say. Its vision of the United States - embodied in principled public servants like George H.W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney - was rooted in the values of freedom, sacrifice, individual responsibility, and the common good. The party's conception of those values was reflected in its longstanding conservative policy agenda, and today many Republicans set aside their concerns about Mr. Trump because of his positions on immigration, trade, and taxes. But the stakes of this election are not fundamentally about policy disagreements. The stakes are more foundational: what qualities matter most in America's president and commander in chief. 

Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the American people. Instead of cogent vision doe the country's future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the evers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses, and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.

He is, quite simply, unfit to lead.

The Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate about whether President Biden is the right person to carry the party's nomination into the election, given widespread concerns among voters about his age-related fitness. This debate is so intense because of legitimate concerns that Mr. Trump may present a danger to the country, its strength. security, and national character - and that a compelling Democratic alternative is the only thing that would prevent his return to power. It is a national tragedy that the Republicans have failed to have a similar debate about the manifest moral and temperamental unfitness of their standard-bearer,instead setting aside their longstanding values, closing ranks and choosing to overlook what those who worked most closely with the former president have described as his systematic dishonesty, corruption, cruelty, and incompetence.

That task now falls to the American people. We urge voters to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it. The stakes and significance of the presidency demand a person who has essential qualities and values to earn our trust, and on each one, Donald Trump fails.

             MORAL  FITNESS  MATTERS

Presidents are confronted daily with challenges that require not just strength and convictionbut also honesty, humility. selflessness, fortitude, and the perspective that comes from sund moral judgment.

If Mr. Trump has these qualities, Americans have never seen them in action on behalf of the nation's interests.  His words and actions demonstrate a disregard for basic right and wrong and a clear lack of moral fitness for the responsibilities of the presidency.

He lies blatantly and maliciously, embraces racists, abuses women, and has a schoolyard bully's instinct to target society's most vulnerable. He has delighted in coarsening and polarizing the town square with ever more divisive and incendiary language. Mr. Trump is a man who craves validation and vindication, so much that he would prefer a hostile leader's lies to his own intelligence agencies' truths and would shake down a vulnerable ally for short-term political advantage. His handling of everything from routine affairs to major crises was undermined by his blundering combination of impulsiveness, insecurity, and unstudied certainty.

This record shows what can happen to a country led by such a person: America's image, credibility, and cohesion were relentlessly undermined by Mr. Trump during his term.

None of his wrongful actions are so obviously discrediting as his determined and systematic attempts to undermine the integrity of elections - the most basic element of any democracy - an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump incited a mob to violence with hateful lies, then stood by for hours as hundreds of his supporters took his word and stormed the Capitol with the aim of terrorizing members of Congress into keeping him in office. He praised these insurrectionists and called them patriots; today he gives them a starring role at campaign rallies, playing a rendition of the national anthem sung by inmates involved with Jan. 6, and he has promised to consider pardoning the rioters if re-elected. He continues to wrong the country and its voters by lying about the 2020 election, branding it stolen, despite the courts, the Justice Department, and Republican state officials disputing him. No man fit for the presidency would flog such pernicious and destructive lies about democratic norms and values, but the Trumpian hunger for vindication and retribution has no moral center.

To vest such a person with the vast powers of the presidency is to endanger American interests and security at home as well as abroad. The nation's commander in chief must uphold the oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution." It is the closest thing that this secular nation has to a sacred trust. The president has several duties and powers that are his alone: He has the sole authority to launch a nuclear weapon. He has the authority to send American troops into harm's way and to authorize the use of lethal force against individual's and other nations. Americans who serve in the military also take an oath to defend the Constitution, and they rely on their commander in chief to take that oath as seriously as they do.

Mr. Trump has shown, repeatedly, that he does not. On numerous occasions, he asked his defense secretary and commanders in the American armed forces to violate that oath. On other occasions, he demanded that members of the military violate norms that preserve the dignity of the armed services and protect the military from being used for political purposes. They largely refused these illegal and immoral orders, as the oath requires.

The lack of moral grounding undermines Mr. Trump even in areas where voters view him as stronger and trust him more than Mr. Biden, like immigration and crime. Veering into a kind of brutal of brutal excess that is, at best, immoral and, at worst, unconstitutional, he has said that undocumented immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country," and his advisers say he would aim to round them up in mass detention camps and end birthright citizenship. He has indicated that, if faced with episodes of rioting or crime surges, he would unilaterally send troops into American cities. He has asked aides if the United States could shoot migrants below the waist to slow them down, and he has said that he would use the aaainsurrection Act to deploy the military against protesters.

During his time in office, none of those things happened because there were enough people in military leadership with the moral fitness to say "no" to such illegal orders. But there are good reasons to worry about whether that would happen again, as Mr. Trump works harder to surround himself with people who enable rather than check his most insidious impulses.

The Supreme Court, with its ruling on July 1 granting presidents "absolute immunity" for official acts, has removed an obstacle to Mr. Trump's worst impulses: the threat of legal consequences. What remains is his own sense of right and wrong. Our country's future is too precious to rely on such a broken moral compass.

            PRINCIPLED  LEADERSHIP  MATTERS

Republican presidents and presidential candidates have used their leadership at critical moments to set a tone for society to live up to. Mr. Reagan faced down totalitarianism in the 1980s, appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court and worked with Democrats on bipartisan tax and immigration reforms. George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act and decisively defended an ally, Kuwait, against Iraqi aggression. George W. Bush, for all his failures after Sept.11, did not stoke hate against or demonize Muslims or Islam.

As a candidate during the 2008 race, Mr. McCain spoke out when his fellow conservatives spread lies about his opponent, Barack Obama. Mr. Romney was willing to sacrifice his standing and influence in the party he once represented as a presidential nominee, by boldly calling out Mr. Trump's failings and voting for his removal from office.

These acts of leadership are what it means to put country first, to think beyond oneself.

Mr. Trump has demonstrated contempt for these American ideals. He admires autocrats...He believes in the strongman model of power - a leader who makes things happen by demanding it, compelling agreement through force of will or personality. In reality, a strongman rules through fear and the unprincipled use of political might for self-serving ends, imposing poorly conceived policies that smother innovation, entrepreneurship, ideas, and hope.

During his four years in office, Mr. Trump tried to govern the United States as a strongman would, issuing orders or making decrees on Twitter. He announced sudden changes in policy - on who can serve in the military, on trade policy, on how the United States deals with North Korea or Russia - without consulting experts on his staff about how these changes would affect America. Indeed, nowhere did he put his political or personal interests above the national interest more tragically than during the pandemic, when he faked his way through a crisis by touting conspiracy theories and pseudoscience while ignoring the advice of his own experts and resisting basic safety measures that would have saved lives.

He took a similar approach to America's strategic relationships abroad. Mr. Trump lost the trust of America's longstanding allies, especially in NATO, leaving Europe less secure and emboldening the far right and authoritarian leaders in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, leaving that country, already a threat to the world, more dangerous, thanks to a revived program that has achieved near-weapons-grade uranium.

In a second term, his willingness to appease Mr. Putin would leave Ukraine's future as a democratic and independent country in doubt. Mr. Trump implies that he could single-handedly end the catastrophic war in Gaza but has no real plan. He has suggested that in a second term he'd increase tariffs on Chinese goods to 60 percent or higher and that he would put a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods, moves that would raise prices for American consumers and reduce innovation by allowing U.S. industries to rely on protectionism instead.

The worst of the Trump administration's policies were often blocked by Congress, by court challenges, and by the objections of honorable public servants who stepped in to thwart his demands when they were irresponsible or did not follow the law. When Mr. Trump wanted an end to Obamacare, a single Republican senator, Mr. McCain, saved it, preserving health care for millions of Americans. Mr. Trump demanded that James Comey, his F.B.I. director, pledge loyalty to him and end an investigation into a political ally; Mr. Comey refused. Scientists and public health officials called out and corrected his misinformation about climate science and Covid. The Supreme Court sided against the Trump administration more times than any other president since at least Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A second Trump administration would be different. He intends to fill his administration with sycophants, those who have shown themselves willing to obey Mr. Trump's demands or those who lack the strength to stand up to him. He wants to remove those who would be obstacles to his agenda, by enacting an order to make it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with those more loyal to him.

This means not only that Americans would lose the benefit of their expertise but also that America would be governed in a climate of fear, in which government employees must serve the interests of the president rather than the public. All cabinet secretaries follow a president's lead, but Mr. Trump envisions a nation in which public service as Americans understand it would cease to exist - where individual civil servants and departments could no longer make independent decisions and where research by scientists and public health experts and investigations by the Justice Department and others in federal law enforcement would be more malleable to the demands of the White House.

Another term under Mr. Trump's leadership would risk doing permanent damage to our government. As Mr. Comey, a longtime Republican, wrote in a 2019 guest essay for Times Opinion, "Accomplished people lacking inner strength can't resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from." Very few who serve under him can avoid this fate "because Mr, Trump eats your soul in small bites," Mr. Comey wrote. "Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further comromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul." America will get nowhere  with a strongman. It needs a strong leader.

                CHARACTER  MATTERS

Character is the quality that gives a leader credibility, authority, and influence. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump's petty attacks on his opponents and their families led many Republicans to conclude that he lacked such character. Other Republicans, including those who supported the former president's policies in office, say they can no longer in good conscience back him for the presidency. "It's a job that requires the kind of character he just doesn't have," Paul Ryan, a former Republican House speaker, said of Mr. Trump in May.

Those who know Mr. Trump's character best - the people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House - have expressed grave doubts about his fitness for office.

His former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, described Mr. Trump as "a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law." Bill Barr, whom Mr. Trump appointed as attorney general, said of him, "He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country's interest." James Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general who served as defense secretary, said, "Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people - does not even pretend to try."

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump's vice president, has disavowed him. No other vice president in modern American history has done this. "I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States," Mr. Pence has said. "And anyone who asked someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again."

These are hardly exceptions. In any other American administration, a single cabinet-level defection is rare. But an unprecedented number of Mr. Trump's appointees have publicly criticized his leadership, opposed his 2024 presidential candidacy or ducked questions about his fitness for a second term. More than a dozen of his most senior appointees - those he chose to work alongside him and saw his performance most closely - have spoken out against him, serving as witnesses about the kind of leader he is.

There are many ways to judge leaders' character; one is to see whether they accept responsibility for their actions. As a general rule, Mr. Trump abhors accountability. If he loses, the election is rigged. If he is convicted, it's because the judges are out to get him. If he doesn't get his way in a deal, as happened multiple times with Congress in his term, he shuts down the government or threatens to.

Americans do not expect their presidents to be perfect; many of them have exhibited hubris, self-regard, arrogance, and other character flaws. But the American system of government is more than just the president: It is a system of checks and balances, and it relies on everyone in government to intervene when a president's personal failings might threaten the common good.

Mr. Trump tested those limits as president, and little has changed about him in the four years since he lost re-election. He tries to intimidate anyone with the temerity to testify as a witness against him. He attacks the integrity of judges who are doing their duty to hold him accountable to the law. He mocks those he dislikes and lies about those who oppose him and targets Republicans for defeat if they fail to bend the knee.

It may be tempting for Americans to believe that a second Trump presidency would be much like the first, with the rest of government steeled to protect the country and resist his worst impulses. But the strongman needs others to be weak, and Mr. Trump is surrounding himself with yes men.

The American public has a right to demand more from their president and those who would serve under him.

      A  PRESIDENT'S  WORDS  MATTER

                             and

         THE RULE OF LAW MATTERS

              will follow in a later post.

Today is JD Vance's 40th birthday:          
Happy Birthday, JD.       

See below to better understand why I follow the "widely reviled Republican vice presidential nominee."

As to JD's name changes:

JD Vance was born August 2, 1984 and named James Donald Bowman by his parents Beverly Carol (nee Vance) and Donald Ray Bowman; his parents separated when he was a toddler.

JD was adopted by Bob Hamel, his mother's third (one of five) husbands.          
His mother changed his name to James David Hamel to remove his birth father's name and preserve his nickname, JD.        
Bob Hamel's departure further complicated the web of family names JD lived with.

JD's mother was in multiple relationships and marriages.        
JD experienced a "revolving door of father figures": he longed for the American dream and a happy family.

Following an incident when his mother was arrested, JD went to live with his grandparents; he used their last name and identified as JD Vance.

In 2013, before law school graduation, JD legally changed his surname to his maternal grandparents' surname of Vance.

In 2024 he clarified his preference for the stylization of his initials without the periods.

Hopefully JD will continue to clarify his positions on taxes, the minimum wage, unionization, and child poverty, and make sure people don't have their town poisoned because they happen to live next to a railway line.

Janis Kliphardt Emery wrote:

My hope: that Tim Walz personally challenges JD for latching onto Trump in pursuit of the "American Dream." There are authentic paths to achieve it.

The New York Times Op-Ed continued:       

                      A  PRESIDENT'S  WORDS  MATTER

When America saw white nationalists and neo-Nazis march through the streets of Charlottsville, VA, in 2017 and activists were rallying against racism, Mr. Trump spoke of "very fine people on both sides." When he was pressed about the white supremacist Proud Boys during a 2020 debate, Mr. Trump told them to "stand back and stand by," a request that, records show, they took literally in deciding to storm Congress. This winter, the former president urged Iowans to vote for him and score a victory over their fellow Americans - "all of the liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps." And in a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire, he used the word "vermin," a term he has deployed to describe both immigrants and political opponents.

What a president says reflects on the United States and the kind of society we aspire to be.

In 2022 this board raised an urgent alarm about the rising threat of political violence in the United States and what Americans could do to stop it. At the time, Mr. Trump was preparing to declare his intention to run for president again, and the Republican Party was in the middle of a fight for control, between Trumpists and those who were ready to move on from his destructive leadership. This struggle within the party has consequences for all Americans. "A healthy democracy requires both political parties to be fully committed to the rule of law and not to entertain or even tacitly encourage violence or violent speech," we wrote.

A large faction of one party in our country fails that test, and that faction, Mr. Trump's MAGA extremists, now controls the party and its levers of power. There are many reasons his conquest of the Republican Party is bad for American democracy, but one of the most significant is that those extremists have often embraced violent speech or the belief in using violence to achieve their political goals. This belief led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and it has resulted in a rising number of threats against judges, elected officials, and prosecutors.

This threat cannot be separated from Mr. Trump's use of language to encourage violence, to dehumanize groups of people and to spread lies. A study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, released in October 2022, came to the conclusion that MAGA Republicans (as opposed to those who identified themselves as traditional Republicans) "are more likely to hold extreme and racist beliefs, to endorse political violence, to see such violence as likely to occur and to predict that they will be armed under circumstances in which they consider political violence to be justified."

The Republican Party had an opportunity to renounce Trumpism; it has submitted to it. Republican leaders have had many opportunities to repudiate his violent discourse and make clear that it should have no place in political life; they failed to. Sizable numbers of voters in Republican primaries abandoned Mr. Trump for other candidates, and independent, and undecided voters have said that Mr. Trump's language has alienated them from his candidacy.

But with his nomination b y his party all but assured, Mr. Trump has become even more reckless in employing extreme and violent speech, such as his references to executing generals who raise questions about his actions. He has argued, before the Supreme Court, that he should have the right to assassinate a political rival and face no consequences.

                     THE RULE OF LAW MATTERS

The danger from these foundational failings - of morals and character, of principled leadership and rhetorical excess - is never clearer than in Mr. Trump's disregard for rule of law, his willingness to do long-term damage to the integrity of America's systems for short-term personal gain.

As we've noted, Mr. Trump's disregard for democracy was most evident in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to encourage violence to stop the peaceful transfer of power. What stood in his way were the many patriotic Americans, at every level of government, who rejected his efforts to bully them into complying with his demands to change eledtion results. Instead, they followed the rules and followed the law. This respect for the rule of law, not the rule of men, is what has allowed American democracy to survive for more than 200 years.

In the four years since losing the election, Mr. Trump has become only more determined to subvert the rule of law, because his whole theory of Trumpism boils down to doing whatever he wants without consequence. Americans are seeing this unfold as Mr. Trump attempts to fight off numerous criminal charges. Not content to work within the law to defend himself, he is instead turning to sympathetic judges - including two Supreme Court justices with apparent conflicts over the 2020 election and Jan.6-related litigation. The playbook: delay federal prosecution until he can win election and end those legal cases. His vision of government is one that does what he wants, rather than a government that operates according to the rule of law as prescribed by the Constitution, the courts, and Congress.

As divided as America is, people across the political spectrum generally recoil from rigged rules, favortism, self-dealing, and abuse of power. Our country has been so stable for so long in part because most Americans and most American leaders follow the rules or face the consequences.

So much in the past two decades has tested norms in our society - the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, the failures that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed, the pandemic, and all the fractures and inequities that it revealed. We need a recommitment to the rule of law and the values of fair play. This election is a moment for Americans to decide whether he will keep striving for those ideals.

Mr. Trump rejects them. If he is re-elected, America will face a new and precarious future, one that it may not be prepared for. It is a future in which intelligence agencies would be judged not according to whether they preserved national security but by whether they served Mr. Trump's political agenda. It means that prosecutors and law enforcement officials would be judged not according to whether they follow the law to keep Americans safe but by whether they obey his demands to "go after" political enemies. It means that public servants would be judged not according to their dedication or skill but by whether they show sufficient loyalty to him and his MAGA agenda.

Even if Mr. Trump's vague policy agenda would not be fulfilled, he could rule by fear. The lesson of other countries shows that when a bureaucracy is politicized or pressured, the best public servants will run for the exits.

This is what has already happened in Mr. Trump's Republican Party, with principled leaders and officials retiring, quitting, or facing ouster. In a second term, he intends to do that to the whole of government.

     --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Election Day is less than four months away. The case against Mr. Trump is extensive, and this board urges Americans to perform a simple act of civic duty in an election year: Listen to what Mr. Trump is saying, pay attention to what he did as president and allow yourself to truly inhabit what he has promised to do if returned to office.

Voters frustrated by inflation and immigration or attracted by the force of Mr Trump's personality should pause and take note of his words and promises. They have little to do with unity and healing and a lot to do with making the divisions and anger in our society wider and more intense than they already are.

The Republican Party has made its choice; soon all Americans will be able to make their own choice. What would Mr. Trump do in a second term? He has told Americans who he is and shown them what kind of leader he would be.

When someone fails so many foundational tests, you don't give him the most important job in the world.

"Hey @ JDVANCE, did you forget what the [United States Marine Corps] taught you about respect? Tim Walz spent DECADES in uniform. You both deserve to be thanked for your service. Don't become  [former President] Donald Trump. He calls veterans suckers and losers and that is beneath those of us who have actually served."  -- Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz), a retired Navy captain, posted on social platform X.

Scott Kelly, Mark Kelly's twin brother, posted @JDVANCE and @GovTimWalz:

"You know what really bothers me @JDVANCE, is when you attack a fellow veterans military service. I respect your service and the service of @GovTimWalz and all of those honorably discharged. He was eligible for retirement after 24 years and submitted his retirement paperwork before his unit received orders (or even warning orders) to deploy and then he continued his service as a member of congress. If they needed him to stay in his unit there is a mechanism called, "stop-loss." Look it up. As a corporal with 4yrs of service, I highly doubt the USMC, "asked," you to go to Iraq. They most likely, "ordered" you to go to Iraq and had you refused, you would have been thrown in the brig, Release your military record to prove the USMC, "asked" you to go. "Raise your hand if you want to go to Iraq." It's laughable to those of us who have served. If you win, you are next in line to be Commander in Chief and need to earn the respect of all who serve, and this is not how you do it".

  a note to JD Vance:

  Take a good, hard look at your life,

  Search your head and your heart.

  Get your facts straight.

  Do not spread rumors.

  Take time to revise your script.

  Do not embarrass yourself for Trump.

  Be true to yourself.

  "Everything Trump Touches Dies"

  Be as good a dad as you say Usha is a mom.

     Hope,  
     the fundamental building block of life.

   Working families must be able to thrive    
    for our nation to thrive.

CHICAGO (The Borowitz Report)---In the latest sign that Kamala Harris is expanding her coalition, on Wednesday Melania Trump announced that she will speak on the final night of the Democratic National Convention.

Explaining her decision to speak, Mrs. Trump said, "None of us can stand another four years of Donald Trump."

Indicating that she planned to steer clear of the personal attacks that have typified the Republican campaign, she said, "When they go worst, we go best."

 Geoff Duncan to Republicans:      
     "If you vote for Kamala in 2024,        
                   you're not a Democrat,      
                               you're a patriot.

The choice is the contrast:          
"the privilege and pride of being an American."

"Democracy is the bedrock that separates us from tyranny."              
-- Adam Kinzinger