We are taught that in a representative democracy, checks and balances
make it impossible to have a dictatorship because it is the system, not individuals,
which makes the Constitution inviolable. Well, the current president’s ever expanding
abuse of power, and the apparent incapacity of the rest of the government to
put a stop to it, make it clear that this is yet another lie our teachers told
us.
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| Trump and McConnell - anti-democracy jihadists |
The Age of Trump has hinged on just two men: President Donald Trump, who
has consistently run amok and afoul of the rule of law, and Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell, who has blocked any and all attempts to stop him.
The vast majority of GOP House and Senate members, with only a small
handful of exceptions, has acquiesced to Trump’s hostile takeover of the party.
It appears that this has been the case because GOP members of Congress worry
that opposing him might hurt their re-election
chances with his anti-Washington, authoritarian base, because they are afraid
that he will pillory them on Twitter, or because his clearly racist, sexist,
xenophobic, anti-civil rights, politics suit them to a “T” (party).
And so they have fallen in line, rank and file—some against their better
instincts but motivated by fear or blind ambition—behind the autocratic
forty-fifth White House occupant and have basically reneged on their sworn
obligation to defend the rule of law, deferring to the absolute power of the
president and his right-hand henchman, Mitch McConnell. This Republican Party is
the party of Lincoln no longer. Nor is it any longer at the service of the
Constitution or the interests of the majority of the American people. Wittingly
or unwittingly, it is at the service of Trump, and so far has kept him from
having to respond for the grave damage that he is doing to the country, to the
rule of law and to representative democracy.
The GOP has been rendered the POT, an apropos acronym meaning Party of
Trump. And with the indispensable aid of the current attorney general, who has
relinquished the traditional independence of that post to place the Justice Department
at the beck and call of the president, these two autocrats alone now decide
what the law and what the interpretation of the law will be.
The rest of the three-branch system has had to look on helplessly,
seeing their every action quashed, as the US has been turned into an autocratic
regime run by a madman and ensured by his shill, just over the course of the
last three years. If the so-far ineffectual opposition to Trump fails to muster
the kind of overwhelming support necessary to send Trump, McConnell and other
staunch Trump enablers packing at the end of this year and to immediately
initiate a serious reconstruction era for beleaguered American ideals, justice
and equality, the chances, after four more years of abuse, of ever again
re-establishing the United States as Americans and the world once knew it will
be slim to none.
