“Patriotism means to stand by the Country. It does not mean to stand by the president.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Donald Trump increasingly makes clear, in spite of the Constitutional limitations imposed on the presidency, he intends to amass more unconstrained power for the Executive Branch and for himself, personally!
While not on the golf course, he churns out Executive Orders circumventing Congress’s legislative role, has launched an unprecedented campaign of retribution against his political opposition, and without any proof, unilaterally uses claims of “national security” as a justification for a growing number of unconstitutional actions … asserting “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”.
Repeatedly, Trump demonstrates a lack of knowledge of or sympathy for America’s story and founding ideals or a faith in the government our Founders created. An unapologetic narcissist, he believes he alone should have unrestricted control to dictate national values and governmental policies, rejecting America’s successful, nearly 250-year experiment in representative democracy.
His actions are emboldened by an impotent and slavish Republican-controlled Congress and a Supreme Court whose majority has concocted previously unimaginable concepts of “presidential immunity” and a “unitary executive,” neither even remotely alluded to in the Constitution and which the Framers rejected.
Trump has surrounded himself with unqualified loyalist based solely on their absolute allegiance to him rather than the Constitution they swore to support and defend. He traffics in misstatements, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories; ignores facts contradicting his personal opinions; equates language, protests and demonstrations which criticize or question his words or actions with disloyalty, labeling those engaging in such protected speech as unpatriotic America-haters.
He has transformed the Justice Department into his personal law firm, using Attorney General Bondi to close investigations into his complicity in the January 6th insurrection and his retention of classified documents cases and to enact retribution against Justice Department personal who were assigned to those cases.
Also, in Trump’s crosshairs have been the media, universities, law firms with government clients, private-sector corporations and even students who have been intimidated by his extortion-like threats.
Never before would you hear such comments from the Executive Branch as;
- The Presidential Press Secretary saying, “American cannot function if President Trump has to deal with co-equal branches of government having the ability to check is power.”
- A senior immigration official stating certain undocumented immigrants will have “less due process” than required under the Constitution.
- A Vice President advocating the president should, “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
- Any President if asked whether he/she had to obey the Constitution answering, “I don’t know.”
Despite our Constitution’s system of checks and balances, designed to ensure no one Branch could dominate the political process or erode guaranteed liberties … previously unimagined blind loyalty to an authoritarian populist president now outweighs fealty to the Constitution and threatens the fabric and future of our Republic.
Unless Congressional Republicans finally muster some patriotic courage and decide to put country before sell-interest and/or Justices on the Supreme Court reject the spurious rationale they ave used to insulate and empower the presidency and this president, America’s democracy is at serious risk of following a dark course of devolving into a dictatorship as occurred a century ago in Germany and in Russia, Hungary and Turkey since 2000.
