Ultimately, "We the People" Are Going to Have to Clean up the Trump Mess Ourselves

For the first time in American history, a former President has been indicted in federal court.  Evidence, mountains of it in fact, has been produced which indicates that former President Donald J. Trump committed multiple felonies upon his departure from office.  That comes on top of mountains of evidence of his crimes that were uncovered by the Mueller investigation, which his own attorney general refused to prosecute, effectively elevating an American citizen above the law.  Yet to come, the mountains of evidence related to his refusal to participate in a peaceful transfer of power, but instead, tried to corrupt the process with fake electors and a riot to disrupt the ballot counting process.  

How did such a person ever get elected President of the United States in the first place?  How is it that one of our two major political parties failed to properly vet their candidate and instead, let him bribe and buy his way to the White House?  The Republican Party sacrificed all of its values and principles to let this man, devoid of morality or conscience, be their candidate, and helped him get into the White House.  It is a corruption that goes way beyond anything we have ever seen before.  

We've had hints and flashes of it in the past, and we ought to know by now that America is not immune to the corruption of its democratic government.  But within one of our major political parties, having the power to set the agenda, control the judiciary and take a shot at permanently disabling the will of the people expressed through the ballot box overcame the idealism upon which this country was founded, and that allowed a heartless, immoral demagogue to become President of the United States with the goal of using the power of the office to set up an autocracy of the rich and dismantle the people's government. 

A System That Runs on Trust 

In a constitutional democracy which depends on the rule of law, the level of trust required to make government work is so high that there are no constitutional restrictions preventing a criminal from running for the nation's highest and most powerful office.  There are certain crimes which make individuals ineligible for the presidency, but those were only added to the constitution after a devastating civil war opened up cracks in a system that hadn't been tested up to that point.  

So it is possible for someone who has been indicted and convicted of crimes, even felonies, to continue to run for public office and be elected.  In Trump's case, the indications are that some of the indictments could fall under the fourteenth amendment restrictions on his ability to run for public office.  It is even more likely that the January 6th investigations, which include the attempts to subvert the electoral vote process and the violent Trump Insurrection against Congress, would contain the kind of charges that, if convicted, would render him ineligible for election as President.  

But we can't count on that.  

Like most wealthy, influential individuals in this country who live above the law and get away with it, Trump has a cluster of lawyers who will find every loophole and possible weakness in the law to delay and obfuscate everything he can.  And we know, because he has openly declared it, that if this goes on past the nominating conventions and into the election itself, that if he gets elected to the Presidency, he will take the constitition out of its secure case in the National Archives, and burn it.  

So it is up to We, The People 

It is up to us. 

While we still have the power, we need to use it.  Every person in this country who sees this for what it is, is old enough to vote and is eligible to register, must do their patriotic duty.  It is very clear that Trump does not have the kind of public support necessary to pull this off, and must depend on trickery, deception and lies to win.  He has advisors who explored every possible avenue of the use of his presidential power, from attempts to subvert the electoral vote with fake certificates for unelected, ineligible electors, to exploring the possibility of declaring a national emergency and martial law to stay in power.  

With all the noise he and his gang made about the election being "stolen," I am not convinced that they didn't try to stuff the ballot boxes themselves.  There's plenty of evidence that they made multiple attempts to supress voter turnout, and they put out calls for "observers" who were ready to do what was necessary to alter the vote counts.  They paid people to pose as "eyewitnesses" and give false testimony to "hearings" which they goaded Republican lawmakers into conducting, to look "official."  We had better be ready for an even greater volume of this kind of thing happening in 2024.  

We need to generate a voter turnout for President Biden like this country has never seen.  Trump must not only be defeated, but for justice to be done, he must be completely repudiated.  And not only does that mean getting every potential Democrat and Independent on board, it means working on Republicans who have been brainwashed and duped by this selfish, immoral, valueless demagogue. We are going to have to figure out how to politically convert those who are capable of reason.  There are plenty of them out there, my best guess is that half of the Republican Party is waiting for someone to step up and take the banner of their party out of Trump's hands.  And among that segment of the party, there are enough who are capable of seeing reality, and the genuine threat to this country's existence that is posed by Trump, to take him out at the ballot box.  

This is Our Call to Arms

Disloyalty and unpatriotic "UnAmericanism" has become the theme of the Republican Party.  You don't hear Trump's apologists talking about trusting the court system, in which he is "innocent until proven guilty," with the outcome of these indictments, you hear them talking about their NRA membership and their guns.  That tells you that there are people within their ranks who are enemies of the United States of America.  They are developing strategy that is not aimed at defending Trump against the charges, but at subverting the process itself, which is unpatriotic and unAmerican.  

The founding fathers built a constitutional democracy that allowed for political change to occur every time an election was held, because the power to govern is derived from the people themselves, not from some privileged monarchy or oligarchy whose entitlement is based on the protection of something other than basic human rights.  It is time for us to use that power.  There's every possibility that a foreign power, an enemy, is behind the ideology that is pushing the Republican Party's agenda, and we must defend ourselves against it with the best weapons our founding fathers gave us to fight with:  Our free speech and the right to vote.  

We can no longer sit silent, or keep our conversations to ourselves.  We need to show up at town hall meetings, city council meetings, school board meetings, and call this evil out whenever it shows up.  We need to pick up the phone and burn up the lines to talk shows and public forums, dominated by extremists, prepared with facts, and prepared to be censored and cut off, but ready to defend our country.  And we need to be active in getting other people to make the effort to go to the polls, or to fill out their mail-in ballot.  

Americans in the late 1700's were called on to defend their freedom from the tyranny of monarchy.  In the mid-1800's it was to defend people from the tyranny of slavery.  Now, we are being called on to defend our country from the tyranny of oligarchy.  Our job is clear, to make sure that we have a free and fair election and to make sure that we repudiate the attempts to subvert this country.