November 3, 2020 – Reflections on Tyranny--the Threat of the Trump Presidency

 While I thrill at the Democratic victory and savor the moment of the Biden/Harris win, the presidential election was close.  Why is this nation divided still split right down the middle as significantly as it was in 1860, the dawn of the Civil War.

Donald Trump did not get the majority of votes but he surely did get enough to leave some of us scratching our heads as to why.  Trump to me was the most corrupt, most mendacious, the most sadistic, the meanest, most self inflated narcissist to ever hold the nation's highest office -- the presidency.  What was Trump's appeal to so many -- mostly white men but not all -- in this our representative democracy?  

The half that supported him were satisfied with the obvious democratic carnage as he rode roughshod over our founders' greatest bestowal -- the balance of power.  He and his democracy destroying minions were satisfied with his rude insulting tweets, his labeling of the most respected news organizations as fake news crushing truth, his embrace of anyone or anything that supported him including the right wing hate extremist terrorist groups like the neo Nazis and others who raised their arms in a Nazi-like salute shouting "Hail Trump." He told us some of the marchers in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us" were "very fine people"  and that the Proud Boys, a right wing extremist terrorist group, should stand back and stand by ready to help him if he needed their help.  No, none of them were very fine people.  His supporters did not flinch an inch when he described the military dead as "losers and suckers" or that John McCain was not a hero because he was "captured."  Trump said "I like people who were not captured" -- this coming from the draft dodger Sergeant Bone Spurs Trump who got away with everything because no one held him to account for anything nefarious he did, even paying someone to take the college boards for him.  The rules simply did not apply.

His enablers, the entirety of the Republican Party feared him so much so even in the face of impeachable offenses such as the abuse of power, contempt of Congress, and subverting the rule of law they refused to find him guilty and remove him from office even though clear impeachable offenses were committed.  In the face of numerous corruptions, illegalities and unconstitutional actions, Trump got away seemingly with it all as America became weary of it all.  Why would one half of America choose to ignore 250 years of a democratic experiment, often the envy of the world, and support a leader who was a human wrecking ball to a democratic system with designs on power far greater than even two terms as president.  Why?  I can only guess.

I feared Trump because of the lessons other fascist states can teach.  Fascism can happen anywhere and nearly happened here. How many times have I asked myself how could a bastion of intellect and a nation of learning that was Germany raise its arms in the Nazi salute for a totalitarian demagogue and mass murderer that was Adolph Hitler. If it could happen there as I looked at Trump and thought it surely can happen here.

"You have a republic," said Ben Franklin, if you can keep it." Democracy stands by a fragile Constitutional thread. It can be lost more easily than it was created.  All it takes is the will to erase it and a leader that takes advantage of that will.

The two ingredients of Fascism that create the poison of its elixir are nationalism in extremis and hate.  Most all of us are nationalistic that is most of us love our country but most of us do not hate so much that we would use our love of country to promote and adhere to a doctrine of hatred and the personification of it through violence.  

Both Trump and the haters that supported him seem strong but they are not strong they are weak.  Hundreds of years from the first slave ship, through the viciousness of Jim Crow up until our present time the vestiges of that hate in our present era resided in the presidency of Donald Trump.  Trump gave one half of the nation the green light to hate -- to hate Black Lives Matter, to hate the black/brown immigrant and fear a loss of American whiteness, to hate the loss of the Civil War, to hate the advancement of black rights and to hate the other whatever or whomever the other may be. From the loss of the Civil War, to the growth of American foreign policy criticism which saw America as not as the exceptional nation it said it was, conservatives have devoted years assembling power to overrule liberal thought and changes no matter how just and fair those changes were.

In the end, this nation showed its exceptionalism because the greatest threat to its democracy,  a second election of Donald Trump, was thwarted.  This election shows that this nation is a democracy in the fabric and the sinews of its being but that we must be ever vigilant to keep it strong because tyranny can happen anywhere even here!