Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger asks a question no current Republican politician appears willing to say out loud for fear that Musk, Trump, or other rightwing billionaires will use the corrupt Citizens United decision to blow them out of the water politically with a multimillion-dollar primary challenge:
“[A]s I watch the behavior of our political leaders, the comments of an ever-increasingly unhinged Trump, and the growing indifference of many Americans toward our role in the world, I have to ask a painful question: Are we now the bad guys?”
It’s a helluva question.
Our nation’s Founders overthrew a king in 1776, and paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared.
The signers wrote in the Declaration, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” and it was a simple statement of fact. The day they signed that document, each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the ruler who controlled their lands and their homes.
One the wealthiest of the signers was Thomas Nelson of Virginia, but a year after the signing the British had seized his home and lands. When he and George Washington attacked the British in Nelson’s hometown, Nelson encouraged Washington to attack the Nelson homestead, which British General Cornwallis had taken as his headquarters, with cannons. The house was destroyed, and after the war Nelson, unable to repay loans he’d taken out against it to help finance the Revolution, lost his property; he died in poverty at the age of 50.
The wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Robert Morris, lost 150 ships at sea in the war, wiping out his small fortune; he died destitute. Signer William Ellery of Rhode Island similarly lost everything, as did Virginia’s Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison, Pennsylvania’s George Clymer, New York’s Philip Livingston, Georgia’s Lyman Hall, and New Jersey’s Francis Hopkinson.
The British destroyed New York’s Francis Lewis’ property and threw his wife into such a hellhole of a jail that she died two years later. Three of South Carolina’s four signers — Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., and Arthur Middleton — were captured by the British and held in a filthy, unheated prison and brutally tortured for a year before George Washington freed them in a prisoner exchange.
New Jersey farmer John Hart’s wife died shortly after he signed the Declaration, and his thirteen children were scattered among sympathetic families to hide them from the British and conservative loyalists. He never saw them again, dying alone and wracked with grief three years later.
New Jersey State Supreme Court Justice Richard Stockton took his wife and children into hiding after he signed the Declaration, but conservatives loyal to the crown turned them in. He was so badly beaten and starved in the British prison that he died before the war was over. His home was looted, and his wife and children lived the rest of their lives as paupers.
Altogether, nine of the men in that room died and four lost their children as a direct result of putting their names to the Declaration of Independence. Every single one had to flee his home, and, after the war, twelve returned to find only rubble.
They were all willing to fight and die for the idea of democracy in America. Every one of them.
And now, after 236 years of existence — as Donald Trump bows to Putin and tweets a picture of himself cosplaying king in a gold crown — America is on the verge of becoming an entirely different type of nation.
We’ve always (or nearly always) been on the side of democracies. We fought against fascists in World War II and defeated them. We helped create democratic alliances in Europe and Asia; we led the fight to create the United Nations.
And now we’re joining Russia. This century’s dictatorial, imperial power.
Monday will be the third anniversary of Putin’s brutal invasion and rape of Ukraine. When he was a US Senator, Marco Rubio said:
“Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian thug who is accountable to no one. … I don’t think what Vladimir Putin exhibits is leadership: I think what he exhibits is thuggery … and we should be clear-eyed about that. … At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton was part of the single biggest blunder ever when it came to Vladimir Putin, and that’s the reset with Russia.”
Today, Lil’ Marco is talking about “incredible [investment] opportunities” for American billionaires and US corporations who want to do business with Russia.
Just five months ago, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham stood with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Washington, DC and said, “You’re the best kind of ally. You fight the Russians so we don’t have to.”
Today, Graham — like every other Republican senator and House member except Thom Tillis — has been cowed into a terrified impotence, unwilling to do anything to stop or block America’s new dictator-friendly democracy-hostile foreign policy.
Our military is being purged along hard-right ideological lines, as was the Department of Justice; the FBI is next on the firing line, although reports suggest that purge began weeks ago.
Virtually every major government agency is under attack by the DOGE hackers, as the America government is being crippled; Putin is no doubt delighted.
Even our defense budget is scheduled to be cut with a chainsaw, just as the threat from Russia and China is at the highest point in our lifetimes.
They shut down children’s cancer research, Alzheimer’s research, and food and drugs for the world’s poorest people. They are laying off FAA employees at the same time planes are falling out of the sky. They’re gutting the staff that processes your Social Security, tax, and Medicare payments.
Trump and his MAGA crowd are tearing our government apart, apparently with the goal of replacing it with something quite different than America has ever experienced before.
An entirely new America. A royal America. An America of, by, and for the morbidly rich.
One that resembles the vision petrobillionaire David Koch laid out in 1980 when he ran for Vice President on a platform calling for the destruction of nearly every federal agency except the Pentagon and the end of all income taxes on billionaires.
A country that will bear little resemblance to that grand idea our Founders fought and died for.
And they’re doing it as fast as they can — dismantling our country, our democracy, and realigning our foreign policy — because they know once Americans catch on we will rise up and try to stop them.
America’s media and our free speech rights are under ideological attack, with every major television network having been sued for millions; one has already capitulated. A Substack newsletter writer was sued for millions by the new FBI Director. Trump even sued a small Iowa newspaper and their pollster because they offended him.
Both Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Robert Garcia have been threatened with investigation and imprisonment by a US attorney for their comments about abortion and politics, despite the Constitution protecting members of Congress from such intimidation. Schumer apologized on the floor of the Senate for saying of SCOTUS justices’ anti-abortion Dobbs decision, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price”; Garcia is defiant.
Republicans could stop this, if they will just find their spine. Every soldier in the American military is willing to die for their country on a moment’s notice, every single one, but elected Republicans — who are supposed to have the courage to make decisions about war and peace — won’t even raise their hands or lift their voices.
History will not treat this GOP well.
And to add insult to injury, this week Trump took down the agency that protects our elections from foreign interference. The same sort of influence that may well have put Trump into the White House in the first place.
As The New York Times noted in an article titled “Trump Dismantles Government Fight Against Foreign Influence Operations”:
“Experts are alarmed that the cuts could leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations and embolden foreign adversaries seeking to disrupt democratic governments.”
Putin’s been playing Trump for a sucker since, apparently, 2017. That was when Trump’s then-National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said the president had a secret, private meeting with Putin. McMaster tried to warn Trump about Putin but, he wrote in his memoir:
“Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery. …
“I told Trump how Putin had duped Bush and Obama. ‘Mr President, he is the best liar in the world.’ I suggested that Putin was confident he could ‘play’ Trump and get what he wanted, sanctions relief and the US out of Syria and Afghanistan on the cheap, by manipulating Trump with ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship’. He would offer cooperation on counterterrorism, cybersecurity and arms control.
“I could tell that Trump was getting impatient with my ‘negative vibe’. I said what I needed to say. If he was going to be contrary, I hoped he would be contrary to the Russian dictator, not to me.”
Yet here we are today, with Trump realigning America toward Putin and away from the democratic republic of Ukraine and the rest of democratic Europe.
As a result, Russia’s next step is to wait until Ukraine runs out of American air defense systems and then just start bombing the crap out of Ukrainian cities. Millions could die and it could lead to World War III, but that seems just fine with Trump.
And, apparently, that’s just fine with every Republican Senator and Congress member except Tillis. America is on the verge of becoming the world’s newest thug nation ruled by fabulously wealthy oligarchs and a man who would be king.
Thus, sadly, the answer to Congressman Kinzinger’s question is clear: Yes, we are now the bad guys, at least for the moment. We are now on the side of the royal ideology of absolute power held by that one man, the King, whose soldiers imprisoned, tortured, and murdered so many of our nation’s Founders.
When Rhode Island’s Stephen Hopkins signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked to his friend William Ellery that, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.” But Virginia’s Benjamin Harrison, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, commented to Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry, a short, thin man, “With me it [the hanging] will all be over in a minute, but you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone.”
Will any Republican in today’s House or Senate — the bodies those men created — find even a fraction of the courage of those who founded this nation?
The people of America — and the world — are holding their breath, waiting for the answer.
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