US DEMOCRACY—ENDANGERED SPECIES

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.

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.