As Democrats in Nevada today choose which candidate to run for president in November, there will be no choosing for Republicans. They have one “choice” and it has been made for them. Republican Party leaders there cancelled their presidential caucus last September. A star with Donald Trump’s name is embedded in the pavement outside the doors of the Nevada Republican Party headquarters. He didn’t exactly pee on the doorposts, but he’s marked his territory well.
It is not the only mark Trump has left on this country. Even now, the man who once tried to extract a pledge of personal loyalty from head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has White House agents seeking out and eliminating appointees suspected of insufficient loyalty:
Johnny McEntee, Trump’s former personal aide who now leads the effort as director of presidential personnel, has begun combing through various agencies with a mandate from the president to oust or sideline political appointees who have not proved their loyalty, according to several administration officials and others familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Trump fired his acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, this week after the DNI’s election security expert, Shelby Pierson, warned the House Intelligence Committee that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election to aid Trump’s reelection. Pierson added that Russia is also interfering in the Democratic primaries. That was last week. By Wednesday, Maguire was gone, dismissed for transmitting damaging information to House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), perhaps public enemy No. 1 on Trump’s enemies list.
The purges come on the heels of Attorney General William Barr personally intervening in the pending sentencing of Trump’s longtime adviser and career dirty trickster, Roger Stone. Over two thousand former Department of Justice employees signed a letter calling for Barr’s resignation. “The rule of law and the survival of our Republic demand nothing less,” than for the Department’s career officials to uphold their oaths to the Constitution.
Barr is still there, the purges continue, and White House threats to investigate and prosecute Trump’s enemies multiply. There is not a star with Trump’s name embedded yet in the pavement outside the DOJ. But it is understood.
At this rate, Trump’s likeness will soon decorate the sides of the Washington Monument like a celebrity’s stories-tall image at Caesar’s Palace or building-sized images of leaders in less-American regimes.
It is again “a time for choosing,” as Ronald Reagan’s 1964 Republican convention speech is known. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” he said, invoking Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Advocating the nomination of Barry Goldwater in the depths of the Cold War, America faced a choice, Reagan said. A choice between a comfortable peace with communist despots and defending with blood and treasure, if need be, “the last best hope of man on earth.” In his overwrought view, electing a “Great Society” Democrat meant bending a knee to tyranny.
Decades later, we are at a moment in our nation’s history more defining than that, facing an existential threat not a continent or an ocean away, but in the nation’s capitol.
Rev. Jim Wallis reflected on how the Republican Party and the religious right, in alliance since the 1970s, have twisted the meaning of patriotism and Christianity in defense of a political philosophy that betrays both. Facing South asked Wallis to reflect on the state of Christianity in the age of Trump. Wallis said:
I say don’t go left, don’t go right. Go deeper. Our democracy’s literally at stake, I think, and the integrity of faith is at stake. In this crisis, we’re going to figure out who we are. Trump didn’t cause all this. He’s just a consequence. He reveals.
White evangelicals have struck a Fustian bargain with a president whose every interaction is transactional:
“Give us our judges and we’ll ignore everything you’re doing” — that’s the will to power itself. I got on the phone with a bunch of evangelicals after the election. I have the white evangelicals saying on the phone, “Well, we didn’t vote for him because of his racial bigotry, but because of other moral issues.” And then a black evangelical woman says, “So racial bigotry isn’t a deal breaker for you.” And that was the end of the conversation.
There are cracks in the wall, Wallis says, as younger and suburban Christian women break with hard-right orthodoxies. What we all lose sleep over is whether it will be too little too late.
“I think the religious right, the white religious right, white evangelicals, they might rise and fall with Trump,” Wallis says. “They could be the chaplains for what would be an American brand of fascism.”
It would not be the first time Americans flirted with that. But if we don’t rise to meet that challenge, flirting could be the least of our troubles. “In this crisis, we’re going to figure out who we are,” Wallis says. We already know who some of us are. It’s up to the rest of us to make sure America’s place in history is not further degraded by them.
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