This morning I awoke with this continuing feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. Ever since Donald Trump was inaugurated I have had this feeling of the bottom dropping out of life as we know it.
I love my country. I am proud of my country.
Fifty six years ago on January 27th, a date I will always remember as long as I am alive, I volunteered for service (Army) for my country. I am no hero and I was scared to death when I boarded that Trailways bus from Philadelphia early on that cold January morning to Fort Dix New Jersey. I was putting my life on the line for my country because I felt it was my duty. A small price to pay for living in the greatest country in the world.
Thousands of other men and women have paid the ultimate price, their lives, in service of our country. Why? So we can have the freedoms that no other country on this earth has.
And now what do we have? A despot in power who is ignoring the usual norms of a democracy.
I cannot escape this feeling of dread that I have. Already he has insulted our neighbors and friends. He attacks Meryl Streep but praises Vladimir Putin, a thug and murderer.
I struggle for words to express the great danger that faces our country right now.
We elect a president to protect us. Instead this country has a president who is making us less safe.
This morning I read a column by Eliot A. Cohen, who was a counselor in the United State Department under Condoleeza Rice from 2007 to 2009. Mr. Cohen expresses my feelings more than I ever could with my limited skills of expression.
A Clarifying Moment in American
History
There should be nothing surprising
about what Donald Trump has done in his first week—but he has underestimated
the resilience of Americans and their institutions.
I am not surprised by President
Donald Trump’s antics this week. Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as
announcing a wall that he would force
Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks
with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous
bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy
decision-making group below the president, while inserting his
chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative
foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and
summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his
temperament; not his program but his character.
We were right. And friends who urged
us to tone it down, to make our peace with him, to stop saying as loudly as we
could “this is abnormal,” to accommodate him, to show loyalty to the Republican
Party, to think that he and his advisers could be tamed, were wrong. In an epic
week beginning with a dark and
divisive inaugural speech, extraordinary
attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA
that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and
now an attempt to ban
selected groups of Muslims (including interpreters who served with
our forces in Iraq and those with green cards, though not those from countries
with Trump hotels, or from really indispensable states like Saudi Arabia), he
has lived down to expectations.
Precisely because the problem is one
of temperament and
character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power
intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in
calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of
international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or
perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already
have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four
or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th
Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.
The question is, what should
Americans do about it? To friends still thinking of serving as political
appointees in this administration, beware: When you sell your soul to the
Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. Trump’s
disregard for either Secretary of Defense Mattis or Secretary-designate
Tillerson in his disastrous policy salvos this week, in favor of his White
House advisers, tells you all you need to know about who is really in charge.
To be associated with these people is going to be, for all but the strongest
characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction.
For the community of conservative
thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a
testing time. Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is
decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward
or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it.
Rifts are opening up among friends
that will not be healed. The conservative movement of Ronald Reagan and Jack
Kemp, of William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol, was always heterogeneous, but
it more or less hung together. No more. New currents of thought, new alliances,
new political configurations will emerge. The biggest split will be between
those who draw a line and the power-sick—whose longing to have access to power,
or influence it, or indeed to wield it themselves—causes them to fatally
compromise their values. For many more it will be a split between those
obsessed with anxiety, hatred, and resentment, and those who can hear Lincoln’s
call to the better angels of our nature, whose America is not replete with
carnage, but a city on a hill.
This is one of those clarifying
moments in American history, and like most such, it came upon us unawares,
although historians in later years will be able to trace the deep and the contingent
causes that brought us to this day. There is nothing to fear in this fact;
rather, patriots should embrace it. The story of the United States is, as
Lincoln put it, a perpetual story of “a rebirth of freedom” and not just its
inheritance from the founding generation.
Some Americans can fight abuses of
power and disastrous policies directly—in courts, in congressional offices, in
the press. But all can dedicate themselves to restoring the qualities upon
which this republic, like all republics depends: on reverence for the truth; on
a sober patriotism grounded in duty, moderation, respect for law, commitment to
tradition, knowledge of our history, and open-mindedness. These are all the
opposites of the qualities exhibited by this president and his advisers. Trump,
in one spectacular week, has already shown himself one of the worst of our
presidents, who has no regard for the truth (indeed a contempt for it), whose
patriotism is a belligerent nationalism, whose prior public service lay in
avoiding both the draft and taxes, who does not know the Constitution, does not
read and therefore does not understand our history, and who, at his moment of
greatest success, obsesses about approval ratings, how many people
listened to him on the Mall, and enemies.
He will do much more damage before
he departs the scene, to become a subject of horrified wonder in our
grandchildren’s history books. To repair the damage he will have done Americans
must give particular care to how they educate their children, not only in love
of country but in fair-mindedness; not only in democratic processes but
democratic values. Americans, in their own communities, can find common ground
with those whom they have been accustomed to think of as political opponents.
They can attempt to renew a political culture damaged by their decayed systems
of civic education, and by the cynicism of their popular culture.
There is in this week’s events the
foretaste of things to come. We have yet to see what happens when Trump tries
to use the Internal Revenue Service or the Federal Bureau of Investigation to
destroy his opponents. He thinks he has succeeded in bullying companies, and he
has no compunction about bullying individuals, including those with infinitely
less power than himself. His advisers are already calling for journalists
critical of the administration to be fired: Expect more efforts at personal
retribution. He has demonstrated that he intends to govern by executive orders
that will replace the laws passed by the people’s representatives.
In the end, however, he will fail.
He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible—The New York Times,
the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going
away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their
commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends. He will fail
because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator
sooner or later will say “enough.” He will fail most of all because at the end
of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are
decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip
Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
There was nothing unanticipated in
this first disturbing week of the Trump administration. It will not get better.
Americans should therefore steel themselves, and hold their representatives to
account. Those in a position to take a stand should do so, and those who are
not should lay the groundwork for a better day. There is nothing great about
the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the
greatness of America that will stop him.
