Donald Trump’s Place In History May Be That Of The Man Responsible For The Undoing Of The American Constitutional Republic
By
Leonard Zwelling
–Alexander Hamilton
Leave it to an immigrant who came to the United States before it was the United States yet without whom there would be no United States, to sum up the pickle we are in at the present moment.
It would be worth your while to seek out the episode of NPR’s Fresh Air attached above from February 16, President’s Day. The great presidential scholar and author John Meacham discusses the particulars of the Trump presidency that so deviate from everything that has come before it. As the quote from Hamilton suggests, the United States as a republic is hanging by a thread under the current president primarily because the current president does not believe in the United States Constitution and certainly has no respect for the law.
As a facile example, during the episode an audio clip from Donald Trump’s speech in Davos, Switzerland was played in which he basically says that he did not find the president of Switzerland to his liking when she complained about the 30 % tariff he put on her country’s watches. He then raised the tariff to 39% after their phone call because, he said, didn’t like her. In the clip, he mistakenly said the US trade deficit was $41M. I believe it was $41B. He also did not know if he spoke with a president or a prime minister of Switzerland.
First, the President of the United States has no constitutional authority to levy tariffs and second, only kings punish allies for rubbing them the wrong way.
Folks, you can talk yourself blue in the face to try to convince yourself that the United States is not being run by a man who would be king and a Congress and Supreme Court prepared to let him. I believe Trump’s desire for autocracy is so intense that if polls show that there is a threat of the loss of the GOP majority in the House in November, Donald Trump will do something to subvert the election, or surely to undermine confidence in the American electoral system. He did it in 2020. He will do it again.
I know there are many people out there who believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent. It’s been examined in over 50 court cases and in various states (and remember, for now, states run our elections). It was not a fraud. If you believe that it was a fraud because you like conspiracy theories or because your friends and family say it was a fraud, you are both deluding yourself and compounding our nation’s problem. You have become part of the threat to democracy if you truly believe our elections are not fair.
In our history, only one man has sought to undo a presidential election after the result was certified by Congress. That man is Donald Trump. Even Al Gore didn’t try that and he had a legitimate beef with the process in 2000.
And while we are on the subject of what is undermining our nation, I suggest you also read or listen to Ezra Klein’s discussion for The New York Times about the real story behind Jeffrey Epstein and it has nothing much to do with the trafficking of young girls. It has to do with the fact that the very rich are running this country and not for the betterment of the American people. Furthermore, these super-rich people are both ethically and intellectual void.
Not surprisingly, one of those morally compromised rich people is Donald Trump.
In the end, one of the things that sets apart good leaders from bad ones is their character. From Trump’s behavior with women, to his willingness to stiff people who did work for him, to his multiple bankruptcies, to his belief that the laws of this nation and the Constitution, both of which he took an oath to uphold, do not apply to him, Donald Trump is an existential threat to the United States of America as a representative democracy.
The current President of the United States is the real fraud.
Toward the end of John Meacham’s interview, he noted that even once the “Communist-hunter” Joseph McCarthy was discredited in the 1950s, about 35% of the American people supported him. That’s about the level of support that Donald Trump enjoys in the country right now.
What does that say about the American people? Nothing good.
