We've Come Off the Rails

 

We’ve Come Off the Rails

The United States of America has always prided itself on one distinction between it and many if not most other countries in the world. We established our country nearly 250 years ago through a violent rebellion against the British, but since then governmental power has been gained peacefully. With few exceptions, Americans have not seen violence as a legitimate way for anyone to come to power anywhere in our country. In the Civil War, which was of course horrendously violent, the Confederate states used violence in an effort to take power over them away from the federal government more than to put themselves in control of it. Our governments come to power under a binding constitutional system through peaceful (if often verbally nasty) political campaigns and free elections.

That way of political being is under serious threat today. It is under serious threat because of one man, Donald J. Trump. Trump cares about only one thing in the whole world, namely, power for Donald J. Trump. We know that to be true for myriad reasons, but one of those reasons stands out as the most significant When he lost the 2020 presidential election he did everything, or nearly everything, he could think of to do to hold on to the presidency despite that loss. He used legal means first. He and his supporters filed dozens of lawsuits around the country seeking to have a court reverse the electoral result in their state. When that didn’t work Trump tried illegal but nonviolent means of reversing his loss. He had people dummy up fake electoral certificates that cast a state’s electoral votes for him rather than for Biden. He had those fake certificates sent in to the federal government, something that surely constitutes attempted fraud on the government. He pressured Republican state officials to reverse the electoral result in their state though they had no legal authority to do so. He pressured Vice President Pence, acting as President of the Senate, to reject electoral votes from certain states when he presided over the joint session of Congress that met to receive and affirm the electoral votes of all of the states.

All of Trump’s legal and illegal but nonviolent efforts to overturn the legitimate result of the 2020 presidential election failed. So he turned to violence. On January 6, 2021, he sent a violent mob to the US Capitol to stop Congress’ certification of the result of the 2020 election by force. As his crazed supporters, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” broke into the Capitol and terrified everyone who was legitimately there, forcing the members of Congress, the vice president, and others to run for safety in fear of their lives, Trump sat in the White House, watched the insurrectionary violence on television, and approving of it all. I’ll give Trump this. There are reports that he thought about ordering the US military to intervene to keep him in power, but he didn’t do it. Nonetheless, Trump’s actions leading up to and on January 6 show his willingness, perhaps even his eagerness, to use violence to keep himself in power.

Trump has been out of office since January 20, 2021. Since that time he has been indicted four times for around ninety felonies committed as he tried to gain the presidency in 2016 and to hold on to it in 2020 and 2021. He is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and it appears virtually certain that he will win it. It is not at all clear that President Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee that year, can beat him in a general election.

Winning the presidential nomination of a political party through legal means is, of course, not a threat to American’s constitutional system of government. Nevertheless, Trump remains such a threat. He is that threat because he and many of his supporters are perfectly willing to use force to put him back in office. A recent poll indicates that the number of Americans who think the use of force to put Trump back in office is justified has risen from around twelve million to around eighteen million since Trump’s multiple criminal indictments. Eighteen million Americans are willing to use violence to put their Dear Leader back in power! Eighteen million people! That’s more than the populations of numerous smaller states put together. It is orders of magnitude more than the number of people currently in the American armed forces. Whether it is enough actually to seize power by force is, I suppose, and open question. These people are, after all, hardly an organized and trained military institution. It is, however, more than enough to turn this country into a living hell as they try to do so.

The fascistic Trump movement tells us that our country has simply come off the rails. A significant number of our fellow citizens see the use of force to put an egomaniacal, utterly uncaring, psychologically unstable man in power over our whole country. That man is a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, and a xenophobe. He is an inveterate liar. He loves dictators, and he wants to be an American one. If this country had not come completely off the rails, Trump would appeal at most to a small fringe element of society. Mot of us would never associate him with mainstream American politics. Yet this country made him president once, and there is a not insignificant risk that it may do it again.

In other writing I have taken stabs at explaining the Trump phenomenon. The best I can do at explaining it is to say that it is a product of demographically inspired fear among white Americans facing the loss of their exclusive privileged status in the country combined with massive stupidity among those people. But whatever its cause, the Trump movement is not and can never be a healthy part of a democratic country. It is evidence of sickness not health in the American political and social systems. There may not be much we can do to change the factors that have produced the movement. The demographic changes that underlie it will continue. The mass stupidity arising from the failed American system of public education will continue to grow until this country wakes up to what good education really is. No, we can’t uproot the ground causes of the Trump movement, not, at least, in any short or even medium term.

We can resist that movement with some hope of defeating it. It is not the fringe movement it should be, but it is a minority movement nonetheless. Even when Trump won the presidency in 2016, he lost the popular vote to the very unpopular Hillary Clinton. Most Trumpists are Republicans, and there are for more Democrats and independents than there are Republicans in this country. Our best hope for suppressing the Trump movement is for the Democrats to field candidates who can attract nearly all Democrats, most independents, and even a few Republicans. Sadly, it is not clear that elderly Joe Biden, who will be the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2024, is such a candidate. It is not at all clear that any Democrat is such a candidate.

So be it. We can’t change it. We can, however, do every legal, nonviolent thing in our power to keep Trump out of office. That must be our goal, to keep this product of American dysfunction as far away from the White House (or any other seat of governmental power) as we possibly can. Trump will destroy America if he ever becomes president again. Please, God, don’t let that happen. Help us to keep it from happening. We just can’t survive another term of Trump as president.