August 7, 2018
Over the last few days, the press has been unable to resist spending an inordinate amount of time covering Trump’s racist insults of LeBron James and Don Lemon. It makes sense because that story has everything that the media feeds on — celebrity, race and an attack on one of their own. In doing so,though, they unwittingly aid Trump in his efforts to fan the flames of bigotry in order to distract from the mounting evidence that not only his campaign manager, but his son, Don Jr., may be guilty of several felonies. On Sunday, Trump admitted by tweet that the purpose of the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting was to obtain opposition research on Hillary Clinton, but claimed it was completely legal (Source: “The Double Damage of The President’s Trump Tower Admission,” by David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 8/6/18).
Unfortunately for Don Jr., despite what bloated bobblehead Rudy Guiliani says, conspiracy to defraud the United States is a felony (18 U.S.C. 371) and a strong case can be made that conspiring with Russia to violate campaign finance laws is such a conspiracy. It is a crime for a foreign national to contribute to a political campaign (52 U.S.C. 30121) and although campaign finance violations are often enforced civilly, the “Department of Justice has concurrent criminal jurisdiction,” (Source: “Yes. Violating Certain Campaign Finance Laws is Criminal,” by Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, BillMoyers.com, 7/13/17).
Trump’s tweet merely confirmed what we already knew. This entire administration, to a person, is replete with avaricious monsters who find sick joy in finding new ways to inflict pain and suffering on everyday Americans, with a particular emphasis on hurting people of color. Just today, the EPA issued a new rule allowing builders to use asbestos, a known carcinogen, in building materials, despite the fact that it has been banned for decades in countries around the world! We learned that today that Treasury Secretary Wilbur Ross stole $120 million dollars from investors and business associates. Most horrific of all, 500 children remain separated from their parents, in facilities where they are vulnerable to sexual assault or the forced administration of psychotropic drugs (Source: “Trump administration must stop giving psychotropic drugs to migrant children without consent, Judge rules,” by Samantha Schmidt, The Washington Post, 7/31/18).
The scale of depravity is mind boggling, but the truth is that we are in a crisis of our own making. The monsters who built this Grand Guignol were put into power by us. Every one of us who selfishly voted to lower our taxes, without considering whether those who would lower our taxes were motivated by any concern for the public good, put them in power. Every one of us who didn’t bother to vote because “both parties are the same,” put them in power. Every one of us who failed to vote in state or local elections and ceded control to power mad racists who gerrymandered the Republicans into wildly disproportionate power and engineered the electoral machinery to disenfranchise as many Black and Latinx voters as possible, put them in power.
Finding our way out of this morass will not be easy and it will not be quick. Voting for Democrats, up and down the ballot in every election is necessary, but not sufficient. When Democrats regain power, we must insist on passing legislation mandating automatic voter registration; making Election Day a federal holiday and mandating early voting nationwide. We must codify nonpartisan redistricting to eliminate the possibility of minority rule and we must take on the Electoral College, that vestige of slavery that distorts the power of sparsely populated states in our presidential elections.
What we require is nothing less than a paradigm shift. It matters who those Democrats are and what they do once they’re elected. The face of power must look more like America. We must elect Democrats like Stacey Abrams, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who envision a moral government structured to provide ladders of opportunity for all of us, who believe that healthcare is a human right and that affordable housing and quality public education from kindergarten through college are critical policy goals for government worth taxing the wealthiest among us to pay for them. We need to face the fact that our own biases, greed and complacency got us into this mess. They sure as hell won’t get us out.