Trump has unloosed a torrent of destructive time bombs into our society, and has given us a legacy of chaos operating not for our interest or to improve our lives, but only his.
Congress is dysfunctional, and will be a basket case after the mid-terms. The judiciary has lost it, not only the train wreck at the Supreme Court but many of the lower courts, including our favorite compromised judge Aileen Cannon, who doesn’t know up from down. How can we have confidence in these people and thus in our government.
Rights are being taken away from us, like abortion, and so are national security documents, like Mar-a-Lago. You don’t have to be a genius to know that our legal and governmental system are disintegrating. At some cortical level, even the walking dead cult people know it. They don’t admit it, they can’t admit it, but certainly they must know it.
“The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government”. That’s a quote from George Washington inscribed on the courthouse at Foley Square. It means we need to have public confidence in our government or it will surely fail. Trump’s tragedy is that he has taken that confidence away from us. Ask anyone, and they tell you they are not confident.
We also have to buy into the social compact and find compassion and connection with our fellow citizens. For most of our history we’ve had that, but it seems clear that we don’t have it now. Instead, we have racism, hatred, bigotry and divisiveness. Trump exacerbated this at Charlottesville, and it now echos horizontally, vertically and long-term across the country.
He has politicized everything, from immigration to medicine and personal health, to science and climate change, to poverty and housing, to social and educational programs, to women’s rights, to gun control and violence, and politics in general. He has done this not to serve the public good, but to create chaos and enhance his power and serve his own interest.
He has lied to the people thousands of times, he has enlisted acolytes to repeat his lies, he has demanded that public officials life for him, and he has created a media that spreads his lies and propaganda. These are out of the autocratic playbook. He has done this not to serve the public good, but to dismember our democracy and representative government.
Now the point. If you watched Trump over his term in office you would have noticed his daily efforts to undermine anyone who criticized or called him out, in fact anyone who wasn’t loyal to him. Shakespeare said the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers, but learning from other autocrats, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. Putin, for Trump it’s rather about controlling the media.
More than anyone who has occupied the office, Trump has damaged the First Amendment, freedom of speech (and separation of church and state, too). That right is not what is was. Abortion surely is not what it was. Step by step, Trump and his MAGAs have been bent on reducing and terminating our personal, civil, human and political rights in this country.
Clearly, there’s more to come. When the MAGAs take both houses in November, we will see a further degradation of those rights, a degradation that will be confirmed by the train wreck in the courts and state legislatures. We think a GOP win this year is only a distant mirror, that it will not affect our rights and daily lives, but think again. Think Germany 1933 or Putin 2022.
Think what a loss of the rule of law and the protections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights will mean to you, what a loss of moral, compassionate, responsive, representative government will mean to you. Think instead of what incompetence and corruption, with indefensible pardons and a shameless wealth divide, will mean to you. Yes, pity us all.
The stakes are higher than we think, and will affect every single one of us.
Stay tuned, stay informed, stay concerned.
ThinkTech
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