Now in my 90s, I have witnessed more than a third of this country’s history. My earliest political memory is of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s voice coming through my parents’ home radio. According to actuarial tables, my last political memory revolved around two extremely negative short-term events: the reelection of Donald J. Trump or the chaos that would ensue after his defeat. There is a possibility that it is.
I hope to beat the actuarial odds for at least another 5 or 10 years. Just as I once longed to see the end of the Nixon era, I now want to see the end of Trumpism. However, I am concerned that two possible outcomes of the 2024 presidential election could be very negative. And we are well aware that one of those negative outcomes is inevitable. Trumpism will remain a brutal force in American politics for at least another decade.
I believe Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney has done everything in his power to ensure that Mr. Trump is not re-elected and that the disruption to the rule of law that occurred on January 6, 2021 does not occur again. Romney was booed for defending the U.S. Constitution and accused of being a deep state operative, but he narrowly escaped censure at the 2021 Utah Republican convention. His Republican Senate colleagues ostracized him. He was receiving credible threats from Trump supporters – threats so believable that he spent $5,000 a day on private security for himself and his family.
Mr. Romney, like other courageous Republicans, was nearly expelled from the party. Mr. Romney will not publicly support Vice President Kamala Harris, but remains adamantly opposed to Mr. Trump’s re-election.
Mr. Romney’s descent from 2012 presidential candidate to 2021 “RINO rebel” shows how little character he has within today’s Republican Party. This derogation of character dates back to Newt Gingrich’s address to a group of college Republicans in 1978. His presentation can be summarized in six points. Become a warrior of power politics. Be a statesman, not a politician. Instead of educating voters, they manipulate them. It’s all about winning. Don’t trust anyone.
Mr. Gingrich’s Republican “reform” paved the way for a takeover of the Republican Party by Mr. Trump and members of his personality cult. For the past eight years, Trump and his MAGA mob have waged an unprecedented attack on the twin pillars of our nation: truth-telling and civic virtue.
The result: No former president has ever been a more flawed candidate than Trump — a man who is cognitively impaired, mentally unstable, and self-centered, his appetites, his instincts, and his dictatorship. This proves what some have called him a man who believes in nothing but his personal ambitions. Major opinion polls give him a 50% chance of being re-elected.
Such a person has taken over America’s major political parties, enlisted the allegiance of its most radical and/or opportunistic establishment figures, and forced its moderates to choose between cowardly silence and the end of their political careers. I have never been forced to do this before.
If such a person is re-elected, he will reject experienced advisers loyal to the Constitution, reject the “adults in the room” who might control his most authoritarian impulses, and instead Never before have you been given such complete authority to appoint loyalists to carry out your ideas. bid. Furthermore, these supporters will enact the blend of executive control, pseudo-liberalism, and Christian nationalism planned in Project 2025.
Never before has such a person, if re-elected, been so thoroughly insulated from criminal charges and prosecution. It’s all because of the far-reaching and much-criticized presidential immunity decision handed down by six conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Extreme countermeasures are already in place if Trump loses. His allies have flooded the courts with lawsuits that would make it easier to challenge the election results. He and many of his supporters in Congress continue to promote Trump’s baseless big lie that there was massive fraud on the part of Democrats in the 2020 election. President Trump has repeatedly said for months that he could only lose if the election was stolen again. It appears that procedures are being prepared to challenge the legitimacy of electoral votes.
American democracy will most easily be preserved and our conservative movement saved only if Mr. Trump, his ardent supporters, and those who support his silence are decisively defeated at the voting booth. Probably. Trump has a 50% chance of losing in the polls. Unfortunately, most Republican incumbents in red states are likely to be re-elected.
Our country is now more polarized than at any time in my memory. Domestic threats to democracy are serious. Despite evidence to the contrary, I continue to embrace Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s optimism that “the arc of the moral world is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Our nation’s constitutional order will survive as long as people of goodwill promote and support it, along with the quest for a more inclusive and just society.
Dr. Andrew Bigeland is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Seattle University. He taught political philosophy, law, medical ethics, and logic, and held the Piggott McCone Chair in the Humanities. He lives in Salt Lake City.
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