With a sharply divided country, and an unwinnable Vietnam War, 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon seized on a sign held up by an Ohio high school student. Her message: “Bring us together again.”
Of course, the private and paranoid Nixon would tell aides: “Nobody is our friend.” But the kid’s message spoke to the endurance and resilience of America. We could fight it out at the ballot box, on the floor in Congress, but compromise and the rule of law kept the Republic on even keel.
Donald Trump has trashed all that. We have a vengeance-driven, 79-year-old president bent on putting salt in social wounds rather than finding common purpose. The voices of dissent, exercising First Amendment rights, he dismisses as “far left lunatics.” Whenever anything goes wrong — even a teleprompter malfunction — “enemies” get blamed.
Some years back, following the “Prague Spring,” I visited the Czech Republic. Our host had been arrested a year earlier when communist rulers deployed troops to suppress, of all things, a celebration of John Lennon’s birthday, a demonstration against oppression, keyed to a famous lyric, “Give peace a chance.”
It could never happen in America, we assured each other. Yet, last week, 44 minutes into a 73-minute stemwinder, our president talked about instructing the Secretary of Defense— pardon, Secretary of War — “I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Portland, maybe Seattle — vibrant cities with productive multiethnic populations have been signaled out, demonized as “hellholes, “out of control,” and “ruined.”
Our military has by tradition kept aloof from politics. In 2020, JCS Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and our Rep. Adam Smith pushed back, resisting Trump’s urge to deploy American troops against American citizens. No more. The high ranks of government are today staffed by Trump toadies. The POTUS’s initial acts included sacking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A four-star Army general, Secretary of Defense in the last administration, was replaced by a weekend Fox News talk show host.
We used to watch World War II movies of evil Gestapo agents snatching people off streets, even violating the confessional in Catholic Churches. Yet, within the past week, masked ICEmen in an unmarked vehicle picked up an “illegal” outside Horizon House on First Hill. Longtime U.S. residents, who arrived here as toddlers, are being shipped off to countries where they have never lived.
The first American-born pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, has been moved to decry “the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States” and appeal that “we respect one another.” Trump’s first-term Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis of Richland, Wash, warned: “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlefield’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.’”
Early in this decade, a compromising Congress managed to “get (bleep) done” on two fronts. The Infrastructure bill would repair our roads, and upgrade rail lines and airports. The Inflation Reduction Act made — at last — significant investment in clean energy technology. Trump is now using the government to put progress in reverse and punish the 26 states that voted for Kamala Harris last year. He’s blunt about it, saying: “We can cut a lot of things we didn’t want, and they are Democrats’ things.”
The early result is that New York loses $8 billion in transportation projects. The administration has pulled back another $8 billion in clean energy spending, affecting 321 awards for 223 projects — which were programs approved by the Congress.
The U.S. Department of Energy is canceling $1 billion in federal money designed to jump start a green hydrogen hub in the Northwest. Russel Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, boasts about rejection of new technology, crowing: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled.”
Climate change is neither agenda nor scam. It is reality. Weather extremes are doing billions worth of damage. Hotter climate is triggering enormous wildfires, droughts, human migration, and melting polar ice caps — and Trump calls it a “hoax.”
The president’s purpose is to divide. Using social media, he dispenses invective, ridicule, and mockery. He bullies, for example, threatening to pull World Cup soccer matches out of cities he doesn’t like. Or lavishes money on a new White House ballroom while starving the National Park Service.
The United States, united and motivated, is unstoppable. We have bested Soviet Communism and National Socialism, led the world in technology innovation, and served as a beacon of liberty. The keys to America’s greatness have included division of powers, orderly change of government, the rule of law, and an ever-more-inclusive society. Now, a would-be Caudillo — a bossman— would take all that away. Walt Whitman put it best: Resist much, obey little.
This article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
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