Bulwark Policy Editor Mona Charen writes that the continued presence of Trump at the levers of the nation is wearing away at the country’s foundation and its people.
“Reflections on the Founders no longer feel energizing. Instead, it now feels to me as if we’re seeing the end of the story,” said Charen, a conservative columnist. “Their wise (if flawed) system for ordered liberty, in which majorities would rule but not trample on the rights of minorities, is not holding up.”
Charen said she wonders “whether this is the way the United States of America ends — spiraling down into authoritarianism following a convulsion of baseless hatred and self-inflicted ignorance.”
None of the president’s countless violations appear to “break through and provoke a revolt by civil society, she said. Not the bowing to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, nor the public bullying of Russian victim Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s “reckless and idiotic tariffs on friends and allies” also have failed to break the camel’s back, even though Trump pointedly excluded Russia from his tariff scheme.
Trump’s massive cuts to basic scientific and medical research rolled over and left no enduring impression on the public’s ire, and the Trump family’s “grotesque self-enrichment dwarfing anything in American history” also appears to have inspired no one into action.
And then there’s the “creation of a MAGA standing army in the form of ICE” argued Charen, and the firing of generals who “would not proclaim loyalty to the orange king.” Likewise, the “reign of terror” on immigrants, many of whom have been living and working here for decades” have kicked no one into action, nor have the detention camps in violation of basic standards of sanitation, or Trump flagrantly instructing the Department of Justice to push criminal charges “against Trump’s critics, and firing prosecutors who decline to do so.”
It's enough to put you off educational musings of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, said Charen, who until recently enjoyed engaging debates about the Federalist Papers and America’s founding.
“Alongside the norm-shattering, law-flouting, and witchcraft-embracing politics of Trump 2.0 is the moral injury this administration is inflicting,” said Charen. “… Trump doesn’t hold a monopoly on baseless hatred, but he and his fascist enablers have elevated it to a place of centrality in American life. They are using the full power of the state to intimidate, to punish, to silence, to exile, and even to kill. Is America still a free country? Less so than at any time in memory. It’s not too late to reject the fascists, but it’s damn close.
Read the Bulwark report at this link.