America is more than just the territory between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and the Canadian and Mexican borders. At its best, it is our democratic ideals and aspirations, our rule of law system of governance, and our free and fair elections that make us what and who we are. It’s our dedication to liberty and the rights of the individual, fair play, and justice for all.
These principles are enshrined in our Constitution and codified in our laws, and many thousands of Americans have fought, bled, and died for these values both at home, and around the world. Obviously, America has never been even remotely perfect, but we have always aspired not only to geopolitical power, like other nations, but also to upholding these bedrock ideas and beliefs.
Indeed, the reason the United States became a global superpower, the most powerful nation in world history, was not just our awesome military might, but rather these sacrosanct ideas, and our history of fighting for them here and abroad. It’s what American soldiers fought and died for on the European battlefields and in the bloodlands during the Second World War, to roll back the scourge of German Fascism, and in Asia against Japanese militarism, two systems diametrically opposed to ours, and which left a trail of endless human suffering in their wake.
After that, we fought the Cold War. We didn’t prevail in that twilight struggle against the Soviet Union because of our tanks, aircraft carriers, and nuclear ICBM’s, no matter how many we churned out. We won that war, a contest of ideas if ever there was one, because, ultimately, our democratic political system was vastly superior to Soviet totalitarianism. Regardless of the social justice veneer the Kremlin placed over their “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the real battle was never between Marxism/communism and capitalism, but rather between autocracy and democratic freedom. Between the rule of law, and the rule of the gun.
Unsurprisingly, political pluralism and freedom won out, both in the realm of ideas and hard power, creating a far more successful and economically productive society. This is why English is the world’s predominant language today, used to conduct business and politics everywhere, along with our currency and culture. It’s why we have devoted friends and allies all over the world, who look to Washington for leadership and support in an extraordinarily dangerous world. It’s why right now, men and women are fighting and dying by the tens of thousands on Ukrainian battlefields for even a chance to become our allies in NATO, and to throw off the last revanchist spasm of Moscow’s vicious imperial grasp, degraded but still very much alive and kicking.
Ideas are worth fighting for, perhaps the only things worth fighting for.
But if America is an idea, we have now come face to face with its antithesis. Since the beginning of his rise, Donald Trump has targeted and attacked our most basic national identity, savaging everything we stand for and reducing America to its ugliest and most squalid components. He has nurtured our basest instincts, and reveled in the chaos and dysfunction he’s wrought.
Moreover, it’s hardly a surprise that the one man who most yearns to undo the Cold War and resurrect the Russian empire, Vladimir Putin, is also the person who helped Trump achieve power by interfering in the 2016 election, and who remains Trump’s most important political ally and benefactor. It makes perfect sense.
Just like Putin, Donald Trump’s at war with America.
Trump’s at war with our political system, waging a multi-front campaign to shatter our vibrant, if imperfect, democracy, and turn it into an authoritarian cult of personality devoted only to himself and his enrichment. This is a battle he’s already long since won in the Republican Party, which lies supine on the floor of American politics, like a beaten dog terrified of its master.
He’s at war with our justice system, which is belatedly attempting to hold him to account for his laundry list of crimes, crimes often committed publicly in the full light of day, and with facts that are all but indisputable.
He’s at war with our democracy, having lost a free and fair election; instead of conceding that reality, he cynically concocted the lie that he was deprived of his victory by voter fraud, resulting in an assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, in what was a violent coup d’etat carried out in front of the entire world. Behind the scenes, it’s clear he tried and failed, by inches, to exploit other avenues to keep himself in power illegally and indefinitely, despite the clear will of American voters. Meanwhile, his Big Lie continues to galvanize his millions of supporters, even as it poisons confidence in our electoral system.
Almost every single senior Republican member of his cabinet has turned against him, warning of the danger he represents to the country. His former AG Bill Barr has warned that he “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” and said that his actions around the last election were “despicable” and “nauseating.” His former national security adviser John Bolton recently said Trump would almost certainly give a gift to Putin and leave NATO. His Chief of Staff John Kelly, who once heard him speak fondly of Adolf Hitler, and denigrate American combat casualties as “suckers” and “losers,” summed it up by saying that Trump “has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.”
Apparently, to be near Trump is to loathe him, viscerally.
While his actions speak far louder than any words ever could, he’s also unambiguously clear about what he does and doesn’t stand for when he speaks. He recently warned of a “bloodbath” if he’s not reelected, claims immigrants are “vermin” or “not human,” and warned they’re “poisoning the blood of America,” an old trope literally straight out of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. What he fails to mention is that America is a nation of immigrants, including his own family and wives.
Obviously, his hypocrisy knows no bounds, his cruelty no limits.
More to the point, he’s avowedly racist, sexist, and homophobic, feting America’s foulest white nationalists and antisemites at Mar-a-Lago, and spewing a litany of hate and savagery wherever he goes. Apparently, he believes Hitler “did some good things,” even as his unhinged rhetoric increasingly resembles that of the Nazi Fuhrer.
Indeed, Trump’s a right-wing demagogue and hate-monger in that same vile tradition, an ethnic entrepreneur selling cruelty and poison to aggrieved white Americans so that they might hate other Americans different from themselves. If the word fascist has any meaning at all, Donald Trump is a shining example, despite endless quibbling among literary pundits over whether or not he quite fits the exact definition.
He’s relentless, and he’s not going away. He’s a cancer on this country in every imaginable way, a sociopath bent on dictatorship, something he has actually admitted publicly, coyly remarking that he would “only be a dictator on day one.” He launched his latest campaign in Waco, Texas, home of the infamous siege on the Branch Davidian compound, and a North Star for the far right’s dark, conspiratorial, racist, anti-government narrative about this country. That was no accident; Trump was declaring war on this country that rejected him.
Who can say how this election will end?
Recently, as his trial date has been set in the one criminal case that seems likely to go to trial before the election in Manhattan, on charges of falsifying business records to cover up his hush money payments to the pornstar he had an affair with prior to the 2016 election, Trump began attacking the judge’s daughter. Judge Juan Merchan recently issued a gag order, but didn’t include himself or DA Alvin Bragg in that order; Trump swiftly exploited that loophole and began lacerating the jurist’s daughter on Truth Social, even posting several pictures of her online.
This is a man at war with the rule of law itself.
Incredibly, this is also the Republican nominee for president, attacking judges and prosecutors and the FBI, attacking anyone who stands in the way of what he wants. And what Trump wants is what he’s always wanted and what all dictators want: absolute, untrammeled power, to be accountable to no one and nothing but himself. He wants to subvert our criminal justice system, our military, law enforcement, and our democracy for personal wealth and power, to return himself to the White house permanently, to serve himself alone.
Unbelievably, Trump is beating Biden in the polls right now. If the election were held today, it’s likely he’d win. This is perhaps less inexplicable than it might seem, given that Trump’s no mere aberration. There’s a long history of right-wing populists in American politics.
Incidentally, America First was originally the name of Charles Lindbergh’s political movement in the run-up to WWII preaching isolationism, antisemitism, and friendliness to Hitler, an organization formed as the British were on the verge of annihilation at Dunkirk. They were some of FDR’s bitterest political opponents, and they falsely accused him of trying to sneak Soviet communism into the U.S. in the form of the New Deal.
Of course, there have been plenty of examples of this kind of thing, from the John Birch Society to the KKK, and no shortage of violent right-wing extremists in America. But never have they gained this much political power, this kind of mass movement. Never have they captured one of our two major political parties in our two-party system. Never have they been so openly and unapologetically antidemocratic. The closest this strain of politics ever got to the White House was Barry Goldwater’s failed bid, and that wasn’t even close. This will be.
America has reached a crucial turning point.
Donald Trump has leveraged his political movement into a potent weapon to attack and destroy American democracy from within, and he’s getting away with it. The idea that he’s attacking the family members of judges as a defendant in his criminal cases tells you quite a bit about the limitless impunity he feels he has right now.
It’s a dark portent, indeed.
As always, Trump’s impulse to criminality and violence has escalated the more he’s been able to get away with. First, he merely bribed and blackmailed to get what he wanted. Later, he called on armies of right-wing paramilitaries to support his illegal seizure of power, telling them to show up at the U.S. Capitol to “fight like hell.” He has opened the aperture of what is possible in America, introducing political violence, deceit, brutality, hatred, and open authoritarianism into our lives.
At this point, he is utterly unrestrained.
And we seem helpless in the face of this threat, as Trump uses our democratic norms against us, claiming his calls to violence, his threats, and his lies are merely an expression of his First Amendment rights. As Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels noted long ago, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.”
Indeed, our democracy is showing its extreme vulnerability to what is effectively a fascist insurgency. Our Trump-installed Supreme Court has effectively frozen the two strongest criminal cases against Trump, as they consider his absurd argument that he’s absolutely immune from prosecution, essentially above the law. They also ruled unanimously against Colorado’s effort to apply the constitutional ban on insurrectionist oath-breakers seeking high office, a ruling that drew widespread ridicule from constitutional lawyers. We can expect this SCOTUS to continue obstructing justice and protecting Trump, as they shatter what’s left of their dwindling political legitimacy.
Ultimately, it’s going to be up to the American people, a large portion of whom are radicalized, heavily indoctrinated, and entirely ready to dispense with democracy. Trump goes on trial in Manhattan in two weeks to face a jury, in what will be a surreal legal saga that could easily go either way. If that prosecution fails, it could become the fuel he needs to put him back in the White House, a nightmare scenario that’s entirely plausible.
Our system is blinking bright red. Our democracy is an existential fight for its life, as we stand at the brink of a right-wing dictatorship helmed by a man who believes he is above the law. It’s time to appreciate the gravity of this moment, seven months out from an election that could obliterate our way of life. It’s difficult to overstate the peril of our situation, nor how precarious a position we’re in right now. If Trump wins reelection, there won’t be any coming back from that. It’s time to wake up.
Yes. All that and more. About 30 years ago I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup truck that said "I love my country. I hate my government." We talked about it. Sure enough. His great grand father was born in Mississippi. It was madness to think the Confederacy could be defeated in battle and brought back into the Union at gun point and then there would be no follow up.