Will the midterm elections be held in November? Or suspended in the name of “national security” by our wannabe strongman president? I am no longer sure of the answer.

We have a president who plans to stage a massive military parade (without tanks) in our nation’s capital at election time, not by citizen soldiers but by paid professionals.

We have a president who, since his all-expenses-paid visit to Russia in 1987, has become ever more deeply enmeshed in the KGB/FSB nets thrown around him, including vast amounts of borrowed money and real estate investments in Trump Tower and other safe houses around the world for Eurasian organized crime use and Trump’s profit.

We have a planned presidential visit from Moscow by the case officer of our Siberian candidate in the White House to offer more secret instructions to the fawning, cringing yes-man of Helsinki. Pull us out of NATO? Bomb Teheran? Pay off his debts to Putin and his Russian oligarchs?

We have mounting evidence of a massive cyberwar and disinformation campaign by the Russian government to interfere in our elections again. Count on them in November, without presidential objection. We are under attack.

We have special prosecutor indictments against dozens of Russian and American citizens who conspired with the Trump campaign in 2016 in the Russian interest. For Putin, the campaign worked. Chaos and civil division rule our democracy.

We have a president who daily vilifies our free press, guaranteed rights under the Constitution, as “fake news” or as the “enemy of the people,” a phrase (from Ibsen) favored by Stalin for executing millions in the Soviet Union during his purges.

We have an authoritarian president who fawns over other authoritarian presidents worldwide— Duarte, Erdogan, North Korea’s “little rocket man” and (of course), Putin, his debtholder. Dictators rock in Trump-land, citizens should just shut up and salute them.

We have a cowardly and cowed Republican Congress whose popularity ratings are even lower than the President, as well they should be.

And now we have a Nixonian enemies list of distinguished former government officials who have dared to criticize the strongman in the White House. Revoke their security clearances before they write something more critical!

All of this goes back to the witch hunt of the McCarthy era in the 1950s, when Trump’s favorite family mob attorney, Roy Cohn, helped ruin the lives of suspected “communists” in government.

The hoaxes today are not Bob Mueller’s but our president’s. Think P.T.Barnum, the Wizard of Oz and Tailgunner Joe. The fog of untruth from the White House daily tweetstorm is a Long Con and we are the suckers, marks and losers. The “stable genius” rules.

Never mind the prostitutes, Playboy bunnies, tapes, endless lies and deceptions of a psychopathic narcissist and womanizer. The Republic is being dismantled before our eyes. Our elected representatives in Washington seem helpless to prevent it. The plan? Get rid of regulations, government agencies and laws, then revoke citizenship and first-amendment rights of free speech. Immigrants, go home!

Ben Franklin’s 1787 warning to a lady friend that we have a republic only if you, as citizens, can keep it, seems ever more germane. So please vote, if you can, in November. I hope that you can. I’m no longer so sure.

Robert C. Williams is a retired Russian historian living in Topsham.