Trudy Rubin: Trump wants to undermine America's free and fair elections -- and the world is watching

Here's the most depressing aspect of this election: Half the country is ready to vote for a man who opposes the basic principle on which this nation was founded — the right to a free and fair vote.

Donald Trump has not only sold his MAGA followers on the Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential race, but he has convinced them that the only fair election is one he wins. His endless, groundless lies about voter fraud have soured many Americans' belief in our electoral system.

In stark contrast, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and other citizens of former Soviet republics are still fighting and dying for free elections. They are struggling against Vladimir Putin, who wants to restore Soviet-style control over their countries. The Russian leader imprisoned and murdered his own leading opponent, Alexei Navalny, who tried to organize a genuine opposition party.

Yet, Trump brags of his friendship with Putin, and has convinced many MAGA Republicans that this killer is a good guy. The idea of fighting for basic democratic principles, like the right to vote freely no matter how tough the odds, never enters Trump's head. For him, international relations are only about who profits and who pays up.

Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on a podcast last week for the Russian invasion of Ukraine — a line he was probably fed by Putin in one of their many phone conversations. "That war's a loser," he told the host, claiming Zelenskyy should have settled with Putin before the war started.

In other words, Ukrainians should have surrendered their freedom voluntarily to a cold-blooded monster whom Trump admires for his machismo, and who imprisons any dissident calling for a free vote.

Trump falsely claimed the Ukrainian leader was only in it for the money he milked from the United States. In other words, the pied piper of MAGA couldn't imagine any other motive for Zelenskyy's heroic struggle than personal financial gain. It would never occur to the GOP candidate that Ukrainians believe in their freedom — and voting rights — so firmly that they are willing to fight back against terrible odds.

If Trump had been alive when the Revolutionary War began, he would have likely labeled George Washington a loser for taking on the British empire. If he had been on the Ukrainian front lines and met the lawyers, accountants, teachers, and journalists who volunteered right after Russia's invasion — and who say they will fight to the end for their independence — he would have called them losers, too.

Americans seem to have forgotten, or never learned, about life behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, and the struggles by Russians and East and Central Europeans for the voting rights we take for granted.

I visited those countries and wrote of those struggles in the 1980s, and about the pro-democracy leaders who were imprisoned or murdered. When the Iron Curtain parted in 1989, and the Czechoslovak dissident Václav Havel went from prison to elected president, he spoke about the fight for democracy to the U.S. Congress in February of 1990. At that time, the legislators cheered wildly. They were proud of being a democratic role model for ex-communist countries, at least in free and fair elections.

Today, cowed Republican lawmakers who know Trump lost in 2020 and inspired an insurrection mumble or change the subject when asked if Joe Biden won that election. Yale-educated lawyer and MAGA vice presidential candidate JD Vance is so anxious not to anger his running mate that his response to the question is no.

Rather than serve as a role model for freedom seekers whom dictators seek to silence, the U.S. has reached the point where we must now turn to them as role models. Should autocrat-wannabe Trump win, those Americans who still value democracy should stop talking about moving to Canada. Instead, they should look for inspiration from political dissidents abroad who fight on in circumstances much more dangerous than ours.

One of those brave dissidents, who spoke recently at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, is Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who would have won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus had it not been rigged by its Putin-friendly dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.

A soft-spoken former English teacher and homemaker, she made the decision to run after her husband — a famous blogger and promising candidate — was thrown into jail.

Hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy Belarusians demonstrated massively against the stolen election. But Putin helped Lukashenko crush the rebellion, and tens of thousands were imprisoned or fled into exile. A former Soviet republic, Belarus borders Ukraine and Russia and has essentially been taken over by Putin, who moved Russian troops and nuclear weapons into the country.

Tsikhanouskaya was forced to flee with her two young children into exile in neighboring Lithuania, where she runs the Belarusian opposition movement. "Our goal is to hold free and fair elections," she told Penn students. She admitted the struggle was difficult, but insisted it was not hopeless, no matter how long it took.

She was asked by a student: "Should American youth be cynical and pessimistic about democracy, or passionate in its defense?"

Her reply: "I think we shouldn't be cynical or pessimistic about anything. We just must do what's right. And defending democracy is the right thing to do.

"When you live in democracy, you take such things for granted. Believe me, democracy is so easy to lose, and so hard to get back. We Belarusians know it so well. Please stand with those who fight for democracy."

Another student asked her: "Does Trump make you nervous?" Her reply: "You are a happy people not to know who will be elected. In a democracy, one person can't change everything."

She added: "I want to believe the election won't change policies toward Ukraine or Belarus. If you stop assistance, it will be a defeat of the whole democratic world."

And here I believe is the double message that worried Americans should take from a heroine such as Tsikhanouskaya: Be passionate in the defense of democracy, at home. If democracy is badly wounded in November by a GOP candidate who envies Putin, do not abandon that defense. The path may not yet be clear, but neither is the struggle for Belarus — yet Tsikhanouskaya fights on.

At the same time, stand with those who support democracy, including Belarusian exiles and the people of Ukraine. "Putin wants Ukraine to fail. He wants to show that liberal democracy is a failure, not just in Eastern Europe but in Western Europe and the USA," Tsikhanouskaya told me when I interviewed her in Vilnius, Lithuania, just before Russia invaded Ukraine.

The 2024 election will test whether America's defense of democracy is as passionate as hers.

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