COLLATERAL DAMAGE

I can no longer hide it. It’s been getting personal. I’m in my rapidly passing ‘golden years’ and yet I’m finding myself utterly incapable of living in the moment, just enjoying the many blessings bestowed on me and my family. And the reason is Donald Trump and what he has done to the Republican Party and the American political system. It has inflicted colossal collateral damage. My days are being spent fretting over the question if and when he will be held to account for the damage he has wrecked on the functioning of the American republican democracy and if and when the members of what once was the Grand Old Party will confess to the errors of their ways and revert back to their traditional conservative beliefs.

In my 2014 book “Neither Here nor There, a First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism” (available on Amazon.com) I wrote about my coming to America that ‘given my experience with socialism in Europe and my evaluation of the origins of American democracy, I found myself more at home with the basic credo of the Republican Party than the platform of the Democratic Party.’ How the world has changed! And, at the risk of sounding cliché, I proclaim that I did not change so much as the party has changed.

Nowadays, from the time I wake up in the morning until I retire for the night, I keep my I-phone within reach and check on every ping to see if any court has ruled in any way on one of the many court battles involving Trump or his co-conspirators, to read everything written about section 3 of the 14^th Amendment, and follow every election that reflects on the balance of power between a degenerate Republican Party and the Democrats and Independents who form the bulwark against a slide of our democratic governance system into authoritarianism. It is not that I want it to be so, but I just can’t shake the sense that the fate of the great American experiment will be decided by what happens now, in the run-up to the November elections, by how the voters will judge the culpability of Trump, and ultimately by how the losing side will respond to the verdict of the final arbiter, the American electorate. And I don’t want to be caught unawares.

Admittedly, in retirement I may have too much time on my hand to fret about these things, but clearly, I’m not the only one affected. Trump has managed to alter the social landscape in that people have given up on normal political discourse and have entrenched in their camps, informed only by Fox News and Newsmax on one side and CNN and MSNBC on the other. I blame Trump, and the blind and dumb masses that follow this pied piper, for the fact that I have become a single-issue socialite. It is collateral damage from a criminally corrupt assault on Republican democracy by a thug who should have been cast out of the running before he even started but wasn’t.     

I find myself in the despicable position that in every conversation, live, by phone, or other media, with family, friends, and chance connections alike, my mind keeps wandering off to the only topic that matters to me now: ‘How do we get out of this mess and block the populist autocrats from ruling the roost.’ It is that important, and alarming, to me. Even though I would probably not have to live long with the consequences, I shudder to think what the world would look like after a win for Trump in November. Others have already been painting that scenario in vivid colors. It is not that we have not been forewarned. Thankfully, Trump’s campaign message is so outrageous, incoherent, and false that I have to think that he has been digging his own grave, in fact a mass-grave for him and all his lackeys in the MAGA realm, and that the rational voters in November will unambiguously reject him. But even in that case the threat will not be entirely averted. It will be near impossible for the Democrats to hold on to their majority in the Senate in November and the Trump faction will remain amply represented there. And we can rule out that Trump and his voters will concede defeat, even if the numbers will show him losing the electoral college vote and the popular vote. The question then becomes (again) if the institutions protecting democracy will hold against all the shenanigans we can expect from legislators, in Congress and the State legislatures, who have pledged fealty to the pied piper. One thing will be in democracy’s favor this time: the pied piper will not have the power of the White House behind him, and the Vice President will not be on his side. For protection of our democracy, it will be extraordinarily important that the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives to assure that, at a minimum, one half of the three branches of government will be protected from a slide into authoritarianism.

In the meantime, it would be helpful if the Supreme Court, in its upcoming rulings about Trump’s disqualification under section 3 of the 14^th Amendment and the immunity claim, makes it abundantly clear that America is a nation of laws and that nobody, not even a (former) President is above the law. In the process, the Supreme Court should allow the court system to bring the major Trump litigations to a verdict prior to November 5, so that the voters have indisputable guidance on the (lack of) qualification of the Presidential candidates for office.

With so much to be decided in the coming months, and so much riding on the outcomes, I’m afraid that my single focus obsession with what happens next will not be interrupted anytime soon. Call it collateral damage, caused by misguided missiles or, rather, a malicious misfit.