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CHOMSKY: “He’s psychologically incapable of losing. Certainly, if he loses, he leaves the White House, he may be facing serious legal problems. Now he has immunity, but there’s — you know, there’s a whole swamp around him. It’s being — he’s tried to keep it from being investigated, he fired all the inspectors general when they were beginning to investigate it. The federal attorney for the Southern District of New York, that’s Wall Street and so on, the most important, started looking into it, fired him, replaced him with a flack from a private equity industry. There’s nothing he would not do to try to maintain office, virtually nothing you can think of. This is a major crisis. There’s been one or other of parliamentary democracy for 350 years in England, 250 years here, and nothing like this has happened before. We’re dealing with a figure who’s out of the political spectrum for functioning democracies and has a political party behind him which by now has just turned into cowardly sycophants, they’re terrified to cross His Imperial Majesty. He’s got a popular base of heavily armed, angry white supremacists, militias. There’s no telling what he would do. I think the country is before — by November maybe a different country and a different world given U.S. power.
But that’s kind of the immediate issue. The reason why this is the most important election in history has nothing to do with this. Four more years of Trump’s climate policies and nuclear policies might simply doom the human species, literally. We don’t have a lot of time to deal with the environmental crisis. It’s very serious. Every prediction that’s been made by scientists has been too conservative. Each time it comes out worse. I won’t run through the details, but it’s a major catastrophe looming. We have some time to deal with it. Four more years of Trump might — will take us to irreversible tipping points. At the very least it will make it much harder to confront this growing crisis. There’s no stopping the polar ice caps from — ice sheets from melting, the Amazon forest from being destroyed. Large parts of the world might become simply unlivable. We’re talking about potential sea rises of maybe one or two feet by the end of the century, much more later. This is all totally catastrophic. You can’t — you can’t conceive of how human society can survive in an organized way.
At the same time, Trump is dedicated to destroying the arms control regime. Last August he terminated the Reagan-Gorbachev INF Treaty which helped control the potential for nuclear war growing from a European conflict. Now he’s dismantled the Open Skies Treaty that goes back to Eisenhower. That’s gone. He’s imposed frivolous demand to try to delay negotiations on the New START Treaty, which the Russians have been pleading for for a long time. This is due for renewal in a few months, may already be too late to renegotiate it, the last of the arms control treaties. He’s now threatening to carry out nuclear weapons tests that would — that would undermine the comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, almost 30 years. The United States never ratified it, but it’s lived up to it.
All of this opens the door wider for other countries to react the same way. It’s — the arms industry is of course euphoric, they’re getting huge new contracts to develop major weapons to destroy all of us. This encourages others to do the same. So there are new contracts down the road for hopeless means to try to defend ourselves against the monstrosities that we’re helping to construct. This is Trump racing towards this, apparently enjoying it, to kind of — you can’t describe it in normal — the term you, ‘sociopath,’ is perfectly accurate. Whether this could be contained within the constitutional structure the United States, we don’t know. Something similar to this happened in the United Kingdom a couple of months ago. Boris Johnson, prime minister, closed the Parliament so that he could ram through his version of Brexit. This was regarded by British legal experts as the worst crisis in 350 years. Well, in Britain the Supreme Court nullified it. That’s unlikely to happen here.
I might say that there’s another country that’s trying to mimic the United States — Brazil, with another ridiculous dictator, Jair Bolsonaro, who’s trying to be a clone of Trump. He was being investigated by — he and his family were involved in all kinds of sordid criminal activities, came under investigation. He fired the investigators, but that was blocked by the courts in Brazil. Not here. When Trump fired them all, purged the executive, nothing from the courts, nothing from the Republicans in Congress. Brazil at least has a thin barrier to another military dictatorship. The United States is in worse shape. This is pretty serious. There has been nothing like it. There’s no precedents that have any real relevance.”
