Assasination attempt, bum's rush on Biden aside: Listen when Trump talks anti-American
I intend to appeal here to all of our better angels.
The hope is to do so without accusing anyone who supports or is considering supporting Donald Trump of being in league with the devil. Our time is better spent assessing reality and sorting out our options, whether or not we find them wholly satisfactory.
I also want to let you all know that you’re not crazy—I have now re-run the column linked at the end of this message, first published more than four years ago, mulitple times in recent months.
And I’m not crazy, either, because this is purposeful.
What’s crazy is our politics—and it seems decidedly more so in recent weeks, with an actual assassination attempt on a former president and current Republican nominee for the White House followed by the political self-immolation of the Democratic incumbent, who is now that party’s former nominee.
Donald Trump got a big boost in both voter sympathy and campaign donations after his brush with death; he will likely benefit from a cottage industry that’s grown around the event, pushing everything from fundraising appeals to souvenirs.
Kamala Harris got a big boost in campaign donations upon assuming the mantle of Democratic leader in place of President Joe Biden; she will likely catch a wave of voter sympathy in coming weeks as the political apparatchiks on the other side of the political divide try to diminish her.
That’s the political view.
Here’s a perspective from everyday life.
I am not a member of either party—and I have never been a fan of Harris as a candidate or public official.
That’s a long way, however, from the legitimate concerns for our fundamental freedoms that Trump incites in my mind.
I believe it’s worth putting those concerns down in writing now for the same reason that it’s once again worth posting the column linked below—the one from four years ago.
I believe I am the only journalist who truly heard what Trump said when he won acquittal on his first impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. Others in the media and the world of politics were apparently too fixated on their contempt for Trump—or had slipped too far into his circle of sycophancy—to consider plainly what his words meant.
They all simply failed to hear and understand and report how he clearly foreshadowed the posture that would lead to the January 6, 2021, assault on the cornerstone of our republic—the orderly transfer of power aligned with the will of the people as expressed through voting, a process that was vetted by numerous courts and various judges appointed by Trump himself, by the way.
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Plenty of journalists and commentators and social media “influencers” analyzed the likely effects of the acquittal on what was, at the time, the upcoming presidential race. Many yammered on about fundraising, and generally wallowed in their respective ideological pools of red and blue.
Yet they didn’t hear what Trump told us.
He’s telling us again, with his casuistry at work to devalue the vocabulary of our democratic and republican ideals—and it is particularly notable that both of those terms mean much more as lower-case adjectives than upper-case political parties.
Now is the time to be both republican and democratic even if you consider yourself a Republican or a Democrat or independent.
Listen to what’s being said in the campaign for the presidency.
I believe our better angels will guide us if we listen for ourselves.
The republic for which our flag stands, the democracy it represents and the Great American Experiment it signifies will require nothing less.
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