By Sid Schwab / Herald Columnist
As it is axiomatic that there can be no followers of Jesus’ teachings who support Donald Trump, so it is that there are no conservatives. And whereas there are plenty of Trumpists claiming to be one or the other or both, it’s no more true than if they professed to live on Mars.
Americans of every background and belief — excepting those who have no beliefs other than self-pity and selfishness and the certainty that they’re safe forever from Trump’s tidal wave of tyranny — ought to be sickened by what we’re witnessing from him and his cadre of sycophantic, Constitution-ignoring oppressors. Not just sickened; taking to the streets. Figuratively, if not literally. Writing a column into the wind, even.
What Christian who accepts what Jesus actually said can countenance the spectacle we just saw in the Oval Office, where two despots congratulated each other for their lawless cruelty? Laughed and joked over the fate of an illegally deported man, incarcerated in a Salvadoran torture chamber. Only an unreachable Foxophile would believe that, had Trump told El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele to bring the man back, he wouldn’t.
What conservative can accept scooping up people by masked goons and, ignoring due process — the most foundational American law — sending them to a brutal, foreign prison, forever? Or enjoy seeing the gloating pictures of the cruelty the White House produces? (YouTube: tinyurl.com/lockup4u) What law-respecting American, anywhere, would not be outraged by Trump’s plans to send “home-grown” — i.e., American citizens — to the gulag, without (or despite) adjudication? With only Trump’s or AG Pam Bondi’s or FBI head Kash Patel’s or Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s attestation to their criminality, all of whom lie prolifically in the face of all evidence to the contrary (For News: tinyurl.com/Pamlies2u).
It’s deliberate state-sponsored terror, meant to frighten potential critics into silence. In the U.S. By the U.S. It should be unconscionable to every American. For unrepentant MAGAs, it’s an existential disconnect.
If Trump and his confederates can decide who’s a criminal and who isn’t, no American should feel safe. Not former cyber-security chief Chris Krebs, who, for the crime of telling the truth about a non-stolen election, is subjected to Trump’s weaponized order for a DOJ “investigation.” Under Trump, truth is treason. About another retributive target, he said exactly that (Politico: tinyurl.com/Tsaystreason). To literal deathly silence from the wrong right.
Remember when “weaponization” was House Republicans’ favorite word? Evidently, it no longer applies, even as Trump attacks Democrats in Congress who’ve stood for justice? (tinyurl.com/nodissent4u) Suddenly, as Trump peels away constitutional protections from us all, House Republicans are three-monkeyed (Adobe Stock: tinyurl.com/3nosee).
Nor can we yet ignore Trump’s idiotic tariffs. The ones, you know, based on the brilliance of King Arthur of the Deal; permanent not permanent, economy-growing destroying, paused by a genius chess-master as planned all along because people got “yippy,” which was planned all along.
Remember the old saw of someone peeing on your leg and claiming it’s raining? It’s what Trump and his excusers have been doing since day zero (Daily Kos: tinyurl.com/wetshoes4u). Not just about the price of eggs or shower-flow. Or “beautiful, clean coal.” For anthropomoistened lower extremities, nothing beats Rubio, once considered within a standard deviation of reasonable, who offloaded this: “The alliance between POTUS and President Bukele has become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.” Then he stood and removed his knee pads.
Trump’s abrogation of the First Amendment, facing no resistance from Republican leaders and their enabling media, makes those tariffs seem almost trivial. They’re only about money and food and livelihoods and the ability to retire. Trump’s flouting of the Constitution threatens the persistence of America as the Land of the Free. It hasn’t been the Home of the Brave for a decade: Cowardice has become the unifying characteristic of congressional Republicans. Among Trump’s voters, though, it’s less about cowardice than the inability to process information in a way that leads to wisdom. Which is the nicest way it can be put.
“Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong,” announced Trump’s pressbot Karoline Leavitt. About what? Providing constitutionally protected counsel to people resisting a lawless government? What’s wrong is that, like several media organizations, those lawyers agreed to government bribery, which Bondi will never prosecute.
Addressing Trump’s tariffs, but equally applicable to the mindset of relentless Trumpists, conservative writer David Brooks wrote, “Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence” (Press Reader: tinyurl.com/4brooks2u).
Here, it doesn’t much matter how MAGAs vote. But they might have friends or relatives where it does. Or children or grandchildren who, as they seek to survive the wreckage of what once was, will wonder why their progenitors did nothing. They should internalize Sun Tzu’s warning, presaging Trump, “An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.”
Then, recognizing their complicity in this evil and remembering what it means to be American, do something.
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
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