August 24, 2017
Once again, Trump’s actions render us speechless. One week after he doubled down on the false equivalence between violent white supremacists and those protesting them, Trump flew into Phoenix, over the objections of its mayor, to hold a rally for his devoted supporters. We have become inured to the pathetic need of this toxic narcissist for constant validation from his devoted supporters. We cynically recognize that by “campaigning” this early in his tenure, Trump is raising funds that can be used to pay for his legal defense against the obstruction of justice and other charges that are sure to come. Yet, while we can admit that it is hardly shocking when an indecent man behaves indecently, it is shocking, in the aftermath of Charlottesville, to see the extent to which his supporters will contort themselves to hear things that Trump clearly did not say. Most of us heard a sitting President rebuke two sitting Senators from his own party, including one fighting terminal brain cancer. We heard him excoriate journalists of enemies of the people.
According to the rally attendees quoted by The Washington Post journalists covering the rally, Trump is president who loves this country and wants to unite us! We can only surmise that their concept of “America” does not include Latinos (whether immigrants or citizens). How could it, when Trump hints that he will pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a vicious racist who was prosecuted, not for “doing his job,” as Trump claimed, but for relentless racial profiling of the Latino residents of Maricopa County, in direct defiance of a court order?
Clearly, their concept of America does not include respecting our Constitution. How could it when they loudly cheered a president who lashed out at the media as “very dishonest people” who were “trying to take away our history and our heritage?” It should be noted that the history and heritage Trump was referring to here was of the treasonous members of the Confederacy. We can only suppose that the America that those attending the Phoenix rally envision does not include a First Amendment to our Constitution which states that Congress “shall make no law…abridging freedom of speech, or of the press,” because our founders, deeply flawed though they were, understood that a free press was essential to the functioning of a representative democracy.
After Tuesday, we have no choice but to acknowledge that this President and his enthusiastic supporters represent a clear and present danger to the safety and security of all of us who believe in a pluralistic society with liberty and justice for all people. Trump is a thin-skinned racist who personalizes every disagreement and governs accordingly. He is incapable of leaving any slight unanswered, no matter how petty. It is difficult to overestimate how dangerous those qualities are in a president. Tuesday night’s rally showed that Trump is eager to lead his supporters into frenzied hatred of his perceived enemies and tragically, many of them are eager to follow.
History has clear lessons for us on what is at the end of this road. We know that people of color and Jewish people may be the first targets, but we will not be the last. We have an opportunity now, before it is too late, to use legal methods at our disposal to rid our republic of the threat that Trump poses to us all. Any person in Congress who is not seriously evaluating using impeachment or the 25th Amendment to end this plague on our democracy is clearly signaling the kind of America they want. As for the rest of us, if you aren’t scared, you aren’t paying attention.