Chopping down the tree of liberty
Immediately after Donald Trump’s reelection last fall, I told my mother, 93, “We’re in trouble.” Rarely have I been so prescient.
The Bulwark’s Mona Charen feels it. So does David French at The New York Times. As does Michael Tomasky at The New Republic.
Charen once found discussions of America’s founding salutary as “essential guidance for the present and future.” The lives of the founders, the Federalist Papers, etc. But the other day she had to turn off a podcast on such matters because what we are experiencing now looks like the end of the story. The wise but flawed system of government born out of the Enlightenment seems to be “spiraling down into authoritarianism following a convulsion of baseless hatred and self-inflicted ignorance.”
Charen laments:
Trump doesn’t hold a monopoly on baseless hatred, but he and his fascist enablers have elevated it to a place of centrality in American life. They are using the full power of the state to intimidate, to punish, to silence, to exile, and even to kill. Is America still a free country? Less so than at any time in memory. It’s not too late to reject the fascists, but it’s damn close.
MAGA Christianity makes French’s head spin. The faithful who came on Sunday to mourn Charlie Kirk, cheered when his widow, citing Christ’s example, forgave his murderer. But they also cheered Stephen Miller’s Joseph Goebbels-adjacent eliminationist speech. Miller declared everyone opposed to Donald Trump’s (and Miller’s) authoritarian makeover of the United States as enemies of western civilization.
“Particularly disturbing was the rising crescendo,” French writes, “as Miller repeatedly declared other people — human beings whose lives are every bit as precious as those of every person in that stadium — to be ‘nothing.’” That way lies gas chambers.
French laments how MAGA Christians get their own faith so miserably wrong. “It is a great tragedy of our time that so many Christians see Trump’s malice as an instrument of God’s divine plan.”
Reviewing the Tom Homan bribery story from MSNBC’s Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian, Tomasky ponders what it means that we learned that Trump’s DOJ killed the investigation the same day Trump ordered prosecutions of three people what done him wrong. He declared New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, and former FBI Director James Comey “guilty as hell.” Of what, it doesn’t matter. He demanded retribution and right now, “We cant [sic] delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
It doesn’t matter that “Presidents Harris, McCain, and Romney would [never] have publicly ordered their attorneys general to prosecute three high-ranking political opponents, two of them elected officials.” Trump has turned the DOJ into an instrument of his vengeance.
He’s openly violating the U.S. Constitution, defying the courts, and violating the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, the Fourth, and the Due Process clauses of both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. He’s threatening the Fourteenth’s birthright citizenship clause, and he’s turned our government into an open-air extortion market.
Tomasky writes:
Combine this with what happened last week to Jimmy Kimmel, and I think we can now just say it. The United States of America is no longer a democracy. It’s not a totally authoritarian state. I’m obviously writing these words of dissent, as are hundreds, thousands of others like me. We’re still having elections, so far. Most courts are still functioning normally. At many levels where the White House can’t just do turnkey autocracy, there is ferocious resistance. And there is a defiant public making their voices heard, alongside a not-insignificant faction of Trump voters who are growing disillusioned with what they’re seeing. And as the polls tell us, the mad king is failing to win people over, and public opinion, at least much of the time, still matters too. These facts can reassure us.
Count me anxious.
The irony to all this is that the rock upon which Donald Trump built his MAGA church is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is built upon the stable constitutional democracy that he exploited that made him wealthy and famous (not that he’d admit it). The world is watching as he and his reactionary Christian-nationalist allies strangle that golden goose. Put another way, it is not clear today if Trump is chopping down the tree of liberty (Miller wants to water with blood) or standing on the branch he is sawing off.
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