Unaccountable
Trump's impunity threatens world order along with our democracy.
I think scholars who study this dark time in American history will discern a recurring theme in much of the journalism produced today. Albeit between the lines, a conundrum echoes from the commentaries and analyses, even from some of the straight news stories: How can any rational person continue to support this man?
Granted, I could be projecting my own obsession with that mystery onto what I’m reading, but I’m confident I’m not the only one asking, especially in the wake of the past two weeks.
Clothing his criminality with officiousness, the president takes full advantage of the Roberts court’s gift of immunity. Apparently the unitary executive theory involves the rejection of our 250-year commitment to being a nation of laws and not of men.
And if not the high court, one asks, Where are the Republicans in Congress?
Even now, they cower in corners or hustle to rationalize their embrace of whatever he whims. The Felon managed to cow the Senate as well, assuring his mood swings alone will determine who gets bombed, blown out of the water or robbed of their territory and resources. He alone determines who stays in America and who must go.
Having forced regime change in Venezuela with Maduro’s capture Jan. 3 — reassuring any Americans who still believe him that taking the country’s oil won’t involve such cumbersome and costly responsibilities as keeping the lights on, much less keeping the peace — our criminal president was happily flaunting his power when his victory lap was interrupted, four days later, on Jan. 7.
On that day a masked federal agent murdered 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good of Minneapolis after she dropped her child at daycare and stopped on her way home to help her neighbors resist the ICE agents who were swarming through the neighborhood.
Her senseless death at the hands of a thug who was itching to pull the trigger left the president and his henchmen unmoved.
Kristi “Heinrich Müller” Noem was her cold, soulless self, assuring her boss his secret police did nothing wrong and that the ICE surge would not abate. Stephen Miller got the message out to his masked Brownshirts: You have “immunity to perform your duties.”
Our criminal president isn’t just flaunting his impunity. He is taking pains to rub it in the world’s face, determined to persuade us we’re powerless to stop him.
And stop him we must.
He tells our allies of 80 years — his lifetime — that while they depend on us, we don’t need them. He’s profoundly wrong about that, of course, and his designs on Greenland are … well, they’re insane.
More Americans appear to be discovering tyranny is uglier in real life than it is on the page of a history book or an evening news report from some faraway place. A new Gallup survey shows a record high 45% of Americans now identify as independents.
“Meanwhile, equal shares of U.S. adults — 27% each — identified as either Democrats or Republicans,” the report says.
Given what’s going on in the world, I don’t give a tinker’s damn about party politics, but I’m going to be beat the drum as hard as I can for the Democratic Party because it is NOT America’s Republican Party.
I’ve considered the GOP a national disgrace since the U.S. Senate acquitted Trump after his first impeachment. From that point forward, it has been Donald Trump’s party.
It has now become an international disgrace, the champion of a would-be tyrant who is prepared to throw away a key source of the power he revels in: our alliances with the free world. It’s fascism he desires, no more complicated than unquestioning support for himself.
Or else.
Perhaps some of those new “independents” are fleeing the taint of this Nazi garbage.