The Flag of a Soon-to-Be Failed State?

The following was written on May 7, 2020. I have added a follow up today, April 22, 2025. Incidentally, let me state categorically that I am NOT a Democrat (or Republican). I'm Independent and will never be a member of any political party--other than the party of the human race.

 

This photo headed my latest essay, this one directed toward Democrats and Independents, which follows (sorry, it's relatively long):

 

IF AMERICA IS TO BE SAVED, WE MUST BE PREPARED FOR A LONG WAR OF ATTRITION

 

Like so many others, I have a relative who is a bit hard to be around these days. Both this person and their spouse have had professional careers and are reasonably intelligent people, and yet both of them are avid, dye-in-the-wool Trump supporters—utterly blind to the incompetence, ignorance and narcissism on full display every time Trump speaks or acts.

 

How is this possible?

 

We all know people like this. How can so many otherwise intelligent people be sucked into the black hole of ineptitude and corruption that is Donald Trump and his Republican enablers? I keep thinking/hoping that perhaps some of these Trump followers haven't been entirely lost and are merely skirting the edge of Trump's event horizon, waiting to be snatched away from annihilation by . . . something. They're intelligent people. Surely they can be reached.

 

So, every once-in-awhile, my hopes are aroused when Trump says or does something so outrageous, even by his standards, that I think, “Ah! This, THIS is so vile, so absurd, surely this will finally open the eyes of some of his followers and they will be freed of the crushing gravity of Trump's corrosive malfeasance and come to their senses.” I dared to think that when the details of his inhumane treatment of migrants came to light. Surely the heartless kidnapping of small children—ripped from the arms of their loving mothers—would be the catalyst that would finally change their perception and reveal to all the inhumanity of this president.

 

I was, to understate, wrong.

 

I should have realized at that point, if terrorizing and abusing children could not dissuade his followers, nothing could. I am ashamed to say, however, that there have been many other times when an outlandish comment or action by Trump, in spite of the mounting evidence to the contrary, made me wonder if some of his support might peal away with the new revelation of idiocy or mean spiritedness or solipsism. And each and every time my hopes are completely dashed—yet still I continue to search for glimmers of hope. I guess it's time to acknowledge that at my core, I must be an optimist. It sickens me to admit it. It goes against all the layers of cynicism, pragmatism and despair that surround it and that usually color my perception of everything. How can I be an optimist in a world with Trump as president?

 

But how can I deny the reality of that core when, on April 23rd, I heard Trump muse on the possibility of injecting disinfectant “like a cleansing” into the body to treat the virus, and my immediate reaction (after retrieving my jaw from the floor) was that this absolutely nutty and dangerous idea might be SO nutty, SO dangerous, that some of his followers might at long last recognize Trump for what he really is—a profoundly, dangerously ignorant blowhard?

 

After being wrong so many times before, my reality testing was intact enough to recognize that these hopes might very well be dashed again (though the use of the word “might” in that sentence, instead of the more accurate “would be” shows how insidious that kernel of optimism really is). Still, I was buoyed by the prospect. I wasn't so deluded to think in my wildest fancy that his supporters would desert him en masse, but surely a few would be jolted to their senses.

 

Surely?

 

A couple of days later, I bumped into my unnamed relative and spouse. We chatted a bit about nothing in particular, and then I offered a joke: “I suppose you're out shopping for some disinfectant to inject in case you come down with the coronavirus?”

 

I'm sure that you, dear reader, lacking that infernally unrealistic core of optimism that I am afflicted with, can anticipate the reaction far better than I did. I wasn't expecting a full-throated disavowal of Trump, mind you, but I was expecting some acknowledgment of the insanity of his ideas—maybe a shrug of the shoulders or a wry smile as a tacit admission that yes, he was way off base at least in this particular.

 

Of course I was wrong . . . again. What I received from them was an agitated, all guns blazing, defensive assault on the very idea that Trump is anything but a remarkable president [here I could agree, remarkable indeed!]. Attacking his critics, they said, “The media is so unfair!” [How dare they insist that the idea of ingesting/injecting Lysol is dangerous!] “Everyone just loves to nit-pick him to death.” [Read: kidnapping children? no big deal.] “And anyway, he was just thinking out loud.” [Can you really call musing about injecting Clorox—into the human body—“thinking?”] “No one ever talks about all the good things he does, they just fasten on his few mistakes.”

 

Well, I had to hand it to them, they were right about the media rarely talking about the good things he does (not counting “Fox,” of course). But unless you happen to be a billionaire, or a bigot, or think nature should be paved over, it's darn hard to point to any of those “good things.” As for the “few mistakes” that phrase, in reference to this administration, could, in the real world, be nothing except high satire.

 

They said more than what's quoted above, but that will give you the flavor of it. They’re just two people, and statistically, they can hardly be held up as models for all Trump supporters. But they aren't the only Trump supporters I know. Everywhere I look I see the same refusal to see facts as they are, the same blind support, the same adoration. Maybe there were a tiny number of individuals who were actually jolted to their senses by the remarkable nonsense that tumbled out of Trump's mouth that day, but it's very clear that it's nigh on to impossible to tear people away from the Cult of Trump. To hope that a significant portion of them will see the light come November is way beyond the capacity of my annoying little core of optimism. (Hmm. Maybe some injected Lysol would rid me of it?).

 

Armed with the knowledge that Trump's supporters are implacable and determined to see him re-elected, we need to recognize that we face nothing less than an existential threat . . . and that threat is us. Those of us who can still tell the difference between fact and the alternate variety must act as if the survival of our country is at stake, because it isn't an act. These United States have already suffered such grievous injury at the hand of the Trumpublicans that we are on the brink of becoming a failed state. Only decades of sober leadership and a motivated, thoughtful and sane majority can pull us back from the brink and heal those injuries. We can't wait for or hope that the GOP comes to its senses. We who understand the threat must simply out muscle the GOP and overwhelm them at the polls. We must be willing to overcome all of the many hurdles the Trumpublicans throw down—the gerrymandering, the voter suppression,the dirty tricks, the ruthlessness. We cannot let our guard down . . . ever—not for November 2020, not for 2022 or 2024 nor any of the local elections occurring in between. If we—Independents and Democrats—cannot become a determined, impassioned, yet reasoned force that endures (and votes!), this country will not endure.

 

This brings to mind an early speech Abraham Lincoln gave which we should all take to heart as a warning for all time. After noting how fortunate all of America's citizens were to inherit this country—the greatest on earth—from our forebears, he said it wasn't from abroad that we should fear attack, but from within.

 

"All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined . . . with a Buonaparte [sic] for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

 

"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

 

If we are to die by suicide, i.e., allow this president a second term, or allow any Republican to win the White House in the foreseeable future, we will not be able to blame Trump, or McConnell, or the GOP, or their followers. That they are the most destructive internal force this country has faced since the Civil War is certainly true, but if they succeed in destroying America, it will be the rest of us that must shoulder the blame. We will have allowed it. Like someone releasing a lion onto a crowd of children—it isn't the lion who'll be blamed for the resulting carnage.

 

There is no room for complacency, no room for voting for a third party as a protest, no room for staying home because your favored candidate lost the primary or because Biden is far from perfect. There is too much at stake: the very survival of our country. We must resign ourselves to a long war of attrition and remain eternally vigilant against the Republican threat (as well as malfeasance by Democrats—which is equally important). Electing Biden will not be the end of this war, nor will regaining control of the Senate. Though vitally important, these are merely the opening battles that need to be won—the beginning of a long series of such battles—the battle for the soul and survival of our nation.

 

The question is, are the Democrats and their Independent allies up to the task?

 

[April 22, 2025] The answer to that last question, we now know, was no. Yes, Trump was defeated in 2020, but we are now living in the nightmare of his resurrection. Sanity won the battle but has been annihilated in the war. And that nightmare is even worse than I'd imagined, and my imagination had painted a pretty awful portrait. Nothing, no individual act of this would-be tyrant in obvious tyrant's clothing, has been particularly surprising--it's the speed and the extent of his authoritarian take-over that has stunned me.

 

It really shouldn't have.

 

After our fascist leaning Supreme Court ruled that presidents are free to do whatever they want with their authority without fear of legal repercussions (a ruling that clearly flies in the face of any reasonable "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution)--Trump, who is devoid of the tiniest shred of morality, could unleash all of his bigotry, lust for power and corruption--openly, with no fear of reprisal. And he is aided in this unvarnished destruction of democratic norms by something he learned in his first term--bolstered by this Supreme Court's sympathy for the authoritarian idea of the unitarian executive. In this ideology, all bureaucracy, every facet of the executive branch is controlled absolutely by the president--no independent Justice Dept., or any of the various bureaucracies. If the president wants to send the FBI to investigate his enemies, there is nothing to stop him. Well, excepting any honorable and competent appointees. But there are none in this administration. In his first go-round, among the too many corrupt cronies he appointed, he also named a good number of well-qualified individuals who ended up resisting many of Trump's worst impulses. Having learned from this "mistake," there are zero honorable men/women in his cabinet or any other position of note. They all bow to Trump--the Constitution be damned. Sending people to prison without so much as a sham hearing? It's all fine and dandy to his attorney general (who insists the Supreme Court approved--when they actually ordered him to bring them back).

 

And virtually all of Trump's core supporters are eating it up. The veil has been drawn. It was pretty transparent all along, but now Trump supporters see his dictatorial efforts and they applaud him.

 

So, has that infernal core of optimism I spoke of been finally annihilated by our current state of affairs? Sadly, not entirely. My optimism that Trump's MAGA core might someday see the light has been fully extinguished, but I continue to hold out hope for those who orbit him more distantly. Recent polls show some slippage of support. Weirdly, his overall support has been hovering in the low 40's, but regarding his individual actions/stances, they all are even lower--with the exception of immigration (always where he drew the most support), but even there, support has dropped below 50%.

 

I can't really say I'm optimistic about his support dropping to such lows that even his rubber stamps in the legislature begin to desert him, but I am hopefully. The chaos he sows is so great that more and more people are taking notice, as is his disregard of the health and welfare of Americans (gutting Medicaid, cutting back on--the FDA, the CDC, Head Start, and on and on, not to mention putting someone in charge of Health and Human Services that does not believe in science). But he's also cut programs that help combat Russian, Chinese, N. Korean and Iranian efforts to steal our secrets and disrupt our economy all the while planting seeds of disinformation to disrupt society. This too makes us less safe--as does cutting to almost zero our support of global health initiatives. Millions of people, mostly children, will die throughout the world because of this. Thousands of Americans will also die needlessly.

 

Electing an utterly immoral, hateful, unqualified and profoundly ignorant person to lead the most powerful nation of earth has consequences. How could they be anything BUT bad?

 

In a recent interview, Trump was asked, ". . . don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” His response: "I don't know." THIS is who we elected president!

Done