How America may be facing its 'biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War'

30 August 2023

Countless pundits, journalists and politicians have commented that the United States is in "uncharted territory" in 2023, and it's an accurate statement. Never before in U.S. history has someone faced four criminal indictments while being the frontrunner in his party's presidential primary.

That frontrunner, Donald Trump, has a 45 percent lead over second-place candidate Ron DeSantis in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, according to a Messenger/Harris X poll released in late August.

The Washington Monthly's David Atkins, in an op-ed published on August 25, warns that the U.S. is in danger of suffering its "biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War."

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"Donald Trump's reckless criminality has not only placed him in dire legal peril," Atkins warns. "He has also put the entire country at risk of an unprecedented constitutional crisis. The four major cases against Trump are each damning in their own way and present possible prosecutorial challenges, but Trump's guilt in all of them seems indisputable."

Atkins continues, "Unless Republican jurors engage in a historic act of jury nullification, it seems very likely that the former president will be convicted on at least one of the charges. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Trump is dominating his Republican rivals in GOP primary polling. It is unlikely that any new revelations will alter Republican primary voters' views. Because Trump is likely to become the GOP presidential nominee, his criminality has become the country's problem. If he wins the election, it will plunge the nation into crisis."

The United States officially separated from Great Britain on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Atkins comments that the U.S., during its 247-year history as a democratic republic, is "lucky not to have experienced this sort of thing before."

But that luck, according to Atkins, may be running out.

Atkins warns, "The Founders also did not anticipate the poison of a mass propaganda outlet like Fox News or an electoral base so monomaniacally inclined to punish its perceived domestic enemies that it would elect an authoritarian."

Read David Atkins' full Washington Monthly op-ed at this link.

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