This is my weekly op/ed running in newspapers in the very red congressional district (VA-06) in which I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012— not elected, of course, in that 2:1 Republican region that includes the Shenandoah Valley. It is running under the title, Now We All See It, or Do We?
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Very recently, someone who voted for Trump publicly admonished me to admit that I’d been wrong in fearing Trump’s election would threaten the survival of American democracy.
I wonder whether he’s changed his mind, after this blizzard of Trump’s actions assaulting the American system of government.
Blatant Usurpation of Powers
After all, anyone paying attention should know by now that Trump had hardly completed taking his oath to see that “the laws are faithfully executed” before he and his minions unleashed an unprecedented barrage of illegal and unconstitutional actions. (Legal experts and even Republican-appointed judges have been scathing in characterizing the Trump/Musk violations of the law as blatant.)
This “shock and awe” series of illegal acts has included:
- Declaring part of the Constitution nullified by presidential fiat (birthright citizenship);
- Usurping the power the Constitution grants Congress to determine what gets funded and what does not;
- Firing Inspectors-General – important protections against corruption and abuse of power -- in an illegal manner;
- Punishing FBI personnel for doing their jobs on legitimate cases, and turning the FBI and the Justice Department into weapons for the President to wield.
- Terminating agencies and programs that the President has no authority to terminate.
- Trampling over the Civil Service Act, with its long-established laws to assure that federal agencies serve the people rather than acting as political partisans.
- Unleashing unelected individuals (e.g. Elon Musk) to act as his agents unrestrained by law.
[Were there no word-count limitations, I’d have added here a sentence about Trump’s again pardoning his “accomplices” in crime, releasing all those who committed violent crimes to help his 1/6 coup attempt, putting them back on the streets to bolster Trump’s ability to threaten his opponents with political violence. His “brown shirts.”]
It would be difficult to draw more vividly a strategy for gathering into the hands of the American President the kinds of powers that dictators wield. With his barrage of power-grabbing actions, Trump has been attacking the constitutional system of checks and balances, the division of powers, and most essentially, the Rule of Law. And substituting a more dictatorial set-up of power, where the man on top wields unchecked power.
Does the fellow, who came forward to dismiss my concerns as misguided alarmism, now see that vivid picture of a President usurping powers the Constitution denies the President?
How many Trump supporters would regret their vote if they saw how Trump is overthrowing the government of the United States? (A “coup,” observers are calling it.)
How many don’t care whether Fascism replaces Democracy, and would only have Buyer’s Remorse after Trump’s way of using his dictatorial powers had hurt them personally?
Ignorance or Apathy Revisited
The famous Greek philosopher, Socrates, claimed that “evil” is always the result of “ignorance.”
I’m unconvinced. Is there something that cruel people don’t know that makes them cruel?
And with the Trump supporters, so much ignorance has seemed “willful.” A person would have to work at not knowing that Trump was always lying about the “Big Steal,” or at believing that Trump had not committed serious crimes and not recognizing that the prosecutions of Trump were righteous and necessary.
Likewise, now, it would take a desire not to know to be ignorant of how, since the Inauguration, Trump has been taking a wrecking ball to our constitutional order.
About “willful ignorance,” I’d ask Socrates: When “ignorance” is an act of “will,” how is the “evil” of that “will” to be explained by ignorance?
Which reminds me of that old joke about “What’s worse, ignorance or apathy?” (The punch line is, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”)
How many of the people who voted for Trump do know that Trump is working to replace Democracy with Fascism, but welcome that because they actually want an authoritarian regime?
One could make a case that preferring Dictatorship over Democracy is the product of ignorance. People should know what history shows: People fare a lot better under Democracy than under Dictatorship.
People who expect the Dictator will be good for them, don’t know that authoritarian regimes -- Putin’s, and Stalin’s, and Hitler’s – have brought great suffering to their populations, to their supporters as well as their opponents.
American “civics” education is even weaker than it used to be, and who knows how many Americans have no idea how many of the blessings of being an American have depended on the systems that Trump is tearing down?
(People are born ignorant of the nightmares in history that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution had firmly in their minds as they crafted a set of protections that has enabled us to be a free people.)
I’ll be interested to see, but I am betting against any widespread regret.
Voting for Trump last November already required some combination of not seeing what’s right in front of their eyes, and not caring about the attack on the Rule of Law that Trump has long been blatantly waging.
If people would vote for Trump after all he’d shown before, their allegiance will probably survive even the most flagrant Trump embrace of out-and-out dictatorship.
Do the People Still Matter?
Finally, there’s the scary question: does the opinion of the people still matter?
Trump will never have to face the voters again: if we still have elections, the Constitution will not allow him another turn; and if he declares himself “President for Life” (like two dictators he admires—Putin of Russia, and Xi of China), voters will be irrelevant.