"Abraham Lincoln warned us about Donald Trump" -- Daily Kos+ My Comment

My Comment:    July 4th, Independence Day, is the perfect time, I thought, to expound on the meaning of its profundities while we exist now during the time of a depraved administration that separates mothers from their children, denying all Constitutional due process and other actions so base and so ugly I thought once would never happen here. It is, though, happening here and it is the perfect national holiday to perfect a theme that zeroes in on this corrupt of all presidencies; a presidency so malevolent, so mendacious and so evil that it beggars the mind and gives pregnant pause to a writer lest one not write something adequate to express one's disgust of it all. 

In 1776 our nation threw off the shackles of tyranny and powerlessness to become a beacon of light that would in time pave the way for millions of immigrants fleeing the dangers of the hostile lands in which they were born.  They crossed a perilous sea to an unknown place, steeped in a language they could not speak and customs they did not know.  They stared in awe onboard their ships, at Lady Liberty in New York Harbor as they approached their new life.   The inspiring 1883 poem "The New Colossus" written by Emma Lazarus and placed at the statue's pedestal translated to them a sense of awe, hope and freedom to the many who heretofore had none.  Those beautiful tear stained words beckoning the tempest tossed millions to seek safe arrival in Liberty's arms I write indented below.  The poem as many know says:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Happily I was sent an article by the Daily Kos, a progressive publication, climbed Liberty's Everest heights to reflect all that I believe and with laser like precision.  The writer entitled it "Abraham Lincoln warned us about Donald Trump" and says as follows:

"If the corruption and rot currently stinking up the Oval Office has had one salutary effect, it has been to force many Americans to actually think about their civic responsibility towards the nation. This 4th of July as we commemorate our country’s repudiation of British tyranny, many of us have found ourselves wondering what exactly this Holiday represents, and how it can be reconciled with the criminal Buffoon that our fellow Americans recklessly saddled us with in November of 2016.

Our 16th President, widely viewed as our best, explained in clear terms what this Holiday should mean to us, we who have inherited the legacy the authors of the Declaration of Independence sought to bestow upon future generations. It is not simply the rejection of British rule and the desire for self-governance, but the “universal” principles that justified our separation that matter. And as Lincoln warned, fealty to those principles must transcend any individual politician—including the President.

These of course are the precepts set forth at the outset of the Declaration, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, resurrects Abraham Lincoln’s words and sees in them a warning about today: 

“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines in conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence,” he declared in 1858, “if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated in our charter of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles.”

***

“Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began — so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.”

"Well that moment has arrived, and with it Lincoln’s challenge to all of us to uphold the country’s principles, now under assault not only by a malevolent autocrat, but by a thoroughly corrupt and slavish political party that sustains him"

The United States is now led by a man––bereft of Christian virtues, his own Twitter account a testament to his dearth of self-mastery or prudence––who extols the supposed strength of the Communists who suppressed lovers of liberty at Tiananmen Square, the authoritarian tyrant who leads Russia, and the thug who leads the Philippines. His political ideals would be a cancer to any body politic. It festers within ours and spreads daily. 

In his time, Lincoln warned that a country that continued to embrace slavery was at risk of damning itself not only because slavery in and of itself was a horrendous evil, but because by doing so it would necessarily abdicate the values set forth its own creed, exemplified in the Declaration. A nation that does this forfeits not only its legacy, but its right to any respect from the rest of the world. Of course, Donald Trump’s public embrace of corrupt, murderous dictators and disdain for our closest allies, those not only economically or militarily allied with us but also our ideological kin, has the same corrosive effect on this country as slavery once did: 

Citizen Trump’s entire public life was predicated on the unapologetic pursuit of self-interest, through lust, greed, lies, bankruptcies, and sordid behavior besides. The ethos that he carried into the White House is sufficiently similar as to risk America’s friendships with democratic peoples, whatever remains of its reputation for sincerity, and the moral character of its people in just the ways Lincoln warned, even if the particular injustices before us today are different.

On a 4th of July in which we find our Democratic norms under constant, unrelenting assault by an Administration that pays no heed or shows any interest in our country’s most cherished beliefs, it is an ideal time for the majority of Americans who do care about the country’s future to listen to the warning of a real President, one who through his words and deeds truly deserves the respect of all.