The Trial to Save the American Experiment

It really IS "The United States of America v. Donald J. Trump"

The Doomsday Clock for American Democracy has been pushed back by a few minutes.

Donald John Trump is the greatest threat to the United States since the Civil War.

That fact must be understood by all Americans. As the indictment from a grand jury of American citizens that was released yesterday makes clear, the former president attempted to bring the constitutional Republic to an end after he lost his reelection bid in 2020, setting in motion various schemes to overturn the result, culminating in an insurrection in which his followers invaded the Capitol.

Here’s one way to grasp how great the threat is: In the past eighty years, the United States has been attached three times: on December 7, 1941, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021. The first two of those attacks unified the American people to strike back at those responsible and eliminate the threat. In the third, approximately one-third of the American people and one of the two major political parties are siding with those who attacked the nation. Try to imagine the Republicans after Pearl Harbor supporting Japan or the Democrats after 9/11 rallying around Osama bin Laden. Either is unimaginable. Yet the Republican party today is almost solidly on the side of the man who tried to end democracy.

The indictment makes clear that he was trying to overturn the outcome of an election he had lost and knew he had lost and that would mean the end of the American Republic, the end of the American experiment in rule by the people, from the bottom up—in effect reversing the principles of the American Revolution and making Trump a monarch.

A Time cover during the Mueller investigation nicely captures this truth:

Here is a plain fact: Donald Trump sought—and very plainly is still seeking—to turn the United States into a dictatorship with himself as the absolute, authoritarian ruler.

Rightwing extremists in the No-Longer-Party-of-Lincoln have long castigated those in the party who are less extreme as “RINOs”—Republicans in Name Only. But it is those who continue to follow Trump as he seeks to end the American Constitutional Republic who are the real RINOs.

Those who opposed the ratification of the Constitution were known as Anti-Federalists. The accurate name for the party that follows Donald Trump today would be the Anti-Republicans.

The above was Trump's reaction when he learned that Robert Mueller had been appointed as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The declaration was 6+ years early, but now it finally may be accurate. That, though, is by no means certain.

Trump is a master of one ability: that of authoritarians to use constant repetition of lies to poison the brains of their followers.

An essay in Politico on Sunday by Marcel Danesi, “What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán Understand About Your Brain,” is essential reading to understand what those of us who believe in the ideals of America are up against. The author shows how the repeated language of hate and dehumanization of “Others” that authoritarians like Trump use “becomes more effective the more it is used” and directs “their thoughts, making it easy to focus on certain things and ignore others.”

There was a slogan on the left in the late 1960s that said, “The Revolution will not be televised.”

The trial in United States of America v. Donald J. Trump—a title that sums up what is at stake in it—must be televised in order for there to be a chance to break through the coating Trump and his allies have put over the brains of so many Americans. People need to see for themselves that all of the witnesses to Trump’s attempt to destroy our country were Republicans—indeed, they were people close to Trump. As they observed up close what he was doing, it “woke” them to the fact that he is an enemy of the nation.  

And the trial must happen before the 2024 election. Special Counsel Jack Smith left the co-conspirators out of this case, presumably to make clear that Trump is the man behind the whole scheme, but also to avoid the delays in the date of the trial that having multiple defendants could cause.

Yesterday’s indictment pushed the Doomsday Clock on the American Experiment in democracy back several minutes farther from midnight, but the danger remains higher than it had been at any time between 1865 and 2016.

I’ll have much more to say about all of this as the case unfolds.

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NOTE: My times they are a-changin’. I have just retired after teaching for, they tell me (I’m thinking of demanding a recount), a half century, at Millsaps College. I’ll miss the classroom and stimulating discussions with students, but my life won’t change that much, as I have for decades spent most of my time writing and that will continue.

One thing that will change, though, is our income. Without my teaching salary, I need a new source of revenue. A patron or group of patrons establishing a fund to support my writing would be nice, but that’s not in the cards. Accordingly, I have decided to start taking paid subscriptions to my Substack essays. I don’t want to keep anyone from reading them without charge, but for those who can afford a paid subscription, I hope you will do so. There will also occasionally be a premium essay that is only available to paid subscribers.