I've never seen a president run against the concept of an election before...

 I am 43 years old. I've lived through dirty campaigns with negative ads (hello, Willie Horton). I have seen contentious elections (hello, Florida in 2000). I have seen scandals that were huge, but with underwhelming consequences for those involved (hello, Iran-Contra). I have seen almost nothings of scandal become our national obsession for their salaciousness (hello, Bill Clinton).  I follow politics as well as governance (there is a difference) and I thought I'd seen almost every political ploy that our country would stand for be used.

I have seen candidates run against their opponents. It's rare for them to just do that, but it happens if they think that their opponent is unpopular enough. I have seen people run against a candidate's family. Billy Carter and Bill Clinton have both been run against when their family ran for the presidency. However, if one has family members that are already part of their corrupt administration, I suppose that this is the kind of idea that only a desperate, losing campaign might try. I've seen people run against a candidate's policies, though if you have run an administration with wildly unpopular policies, that's probably stupid. I have seen people run by smearing the competence of their opponent, but if you've allowed almost 300,000 American citizens to die through your ineptitude, this would be the height of idiocy. However, I have never seen a candidate run against the very legitimacy of the election itself, until now.

Donald Trump seems offended by the very thought of being forced to run for president again. He seems to think that he just deserves the office, because he won once in 2016, and so that should be enough for him to hold it for life. I've heard people like Roger Stone say that Trump should declare martial law if he loses. This is not the behavior of an American President. This is the exact behavior of a tin-pot dictator of a banana republic. 

And all of this would be not fine, but something I could swallow, if it weren't for the fact that despite running against the idea of democracy itself, the fact of his corrupt and criminal behavior, the utter tragedy of his inept refusal to deal with a staggering pandemic, the sewer he's made of our national discourse, the often petty abuses of power to inflate his own ego, the eager embrace of dangerous groups invested in ugly white supremacy - despite all of that, this would be tyrant still somehow has the approval of 40% of Americans. Are we that morally degraded that we're not willing to wholly reject this sort of behavior? Are we that eager to surrender our democracy and the rule of law to a weak person's idea of a strong man? 

I hope we're better than that. I hope that we wholly reject this madman. I hope that we prove that we are in November by so resoundingly rejecting this dangerous and anti-American administration that there is no question that he should try to contest his defeat. Because if we don't, then we are not the nation we think we are.