Citizenship in the new McCarthyism
Donald Trump’s second-term accomplices, people such as Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Pam Bondi, have written themselves into a very dark chapter in American history, one their children and grandchildren will find shameful. Pray that it’s not our final chapter.
Then there is Marc Elias. It’s not boasting — braggadocious, as the criminal occupying the Oval Office might say — when attorney Elias speaks of standing up to the Trump administration in court. Because he’s done it again and again, successfully. So successfully that Donald Trump calls him out publicly as a nemesis.
“Deadline White House” on Monday invited Elias to address the cowardice many Americans have shown in the face of Trump’s efforts to bully and intimidate them like a mob boss into “bending the knee.” Trump seeks, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen wrote, “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company — like the Trump Organisation, in fact.” It is what Trump most admires about Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
In pursuit of that level of autocratic power, Trump and his antidemocratic allies claim authorities from “the school of constitutional denialism,” former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told host Nicolle Wallace. The Constitution does not provide any remedy at all, Luttig said, save impeachment for a president who denies his responsibility to uphold it. Republicans in the House and Senate long ago pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to Trump and Trumpism, not to the Constitution. They see no need for any remedy.
Elias called out legal colleagues who have kowtowed before Trump and soiled their reputations and dignity. He was one of only two lawyers who would appear in the “60 Minutes” installment on Sunday that examined in scathing fashion Trump’s relentless attack on the rule of law. Trump calls Elias “a thug.” For Elias, that’s a badge of honor.
On Monday, however, Elias did more when Wallace asked what it was like to be in the vanguard of those defending our democracy. Alluding to the McCarthy era (and worse), Elias said he might have “blended into the furniture” like the attorneys who capitulated. He chose not to. He then challenged average Americans to ask themselves if they are really the kind of people they think they are [timestamp 6:04].
I grew up the grandson of immigrants who came to this country because there was no where else in the world that would take them. And I guess I always believed when I learned in school that the minister in Germany who said “they came for the trade unionists and I wasn’t a trade unionist, so I didn’t say anything, and then they came for the communists and I wasn’t a communist, so I didn’t say anything, and they came for the Jews, and I wasn’t a Jew, so I didn’t say anything, and then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out.”
I believed when people said that they would never be that person who did nothing, that they were telling the truth. I believed that when people would read about the Civil Rights movement, and the appalling silence of the good white people, as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, that when we all said we would never be that silent person, that we would do something, we would speak out, I always believed that that’s what we would all do.
So, to be honest with you, it never occurred to me when Donald Trump came along, and when democracy was being threatened, it never occurred to me that when I stepped forward that everybody else wasn’t stepping forward with me. And sure, it has become clear that that is not true in the legal profession as much as it should be. But all that’s causing me to do is to say, well, I got to step a little further front than I even was planning on. Because there’s no there’s no world in which it’s going to be okay to capitulate to a man who says that he doesn’t know whether or not the president of the United States needs to uphold the Constitution.
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