Danger ahead

Back in 2016, when charlatan human being Donald Trump was elected this country's 45th president, I was sorely disappointed, but I still held aloft an ounce of optimism.

I thought Trump, a novice politician with little or no moral character, much less political wisdom, could grow into the job.

Friends with cooler heads told us to be patient, that we will get through this.

We barely did. 

Trump, who said that he and only he could stop the American carnage (American carnage was news to me) and drain the swamp festering in Washington DC, promptly set about not building a wall at the southern border with Mexico (a broken promise); using separation of children from their families as national policy to halt the influx of immigration of brown-skinned people who might also be seeking asylum; the attempted dismantling of a NATO that has helped rebuild global (and American) security since World War II; ignoring the devastation of a ghastly pandemic that eventually killed more than a million Americans, advising people to forsake life-saving vaccinations for Clorox, internal lights or horse medicine.

The evidence is all there in audio and visual for all of us to see.

The American carnage turned out to be projection and confession. You know, where projection and confession are the underlying foundation of a Republican Party that has become a clown-worshiping cult.

And now, Trump is preparing to run for a second term, even in the face of at least two, and possibly four, indictments for stealing government secrets, voter fraud and inciting insurrectionists to storm the Capitol while Congress was in session. This is not to neglect a Federal Judge, Lewis Kaplan, who in reviewing the defamation case of E. Jean Carroll, declared this past week that Trump did indeed commit rape against the writer.

Earlier this week, several former Trump administration workers unveiled plans for what a 2025 Trump administration might look like (see here). The agenda includes expanding the powers of the executive branch to give the president more power.

That's called authoritarianism. It's called Fascism. It's called Mussolini. It's called Hitler. It's called Trumpism.

It's not called democracy, at least, not in the sense of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or George Washington. There's a reason the Founders didn't give the president absolute powers. Indeed, they could have built our political system around that concept, but they did not. The wisdom of the 1700's is immense and majestic. Why mess with it?

The concept of American democracy is based on the power belonging to the people, and it's the people who are given an avenue to that power through checks and balances in the government they created.

By restricting those checks and balances – or even eliminating them – we open the door to a political system that exploits grievance, retribution and revenge against its political enemies while disguising those actions as policy good for the country. We already saw that on display in the separation of families at the border. We see that when Trump declares that the press is the enemy of the people. We see that with white Republican men attempting to rewrite African-American history books in Florida middle schools, suggesting that slavery was beneficial to African-American society instead of being the basest of human indignity.

Trump was correct about American carnage, but only when you realize it's his carnage that we're dealing with.

The 2024 election is less than 16 months away. It's the time we have left to ponder whether we want to continue with the democracy of our Founders, or something else entirely, something very dangerous indeed.