DONALD TRUMP: THE PRISON YEARS
DONALD TRUMP: THE PRISON YEARS
By Deborah Long
If I could do one thing this fall, it would be to write the unauthorized biography of Donald Trump entitled, The Winter of Our Discontent - Donald Trump, the Prison Years.
But today’s the day we’re all supposed to clutch our collective pearls and read the résumés of Trump’s expected picks for the Supreme Court – the pick that is intended to permit the Supreme Court to repeal Roe v. Wade; the pick that is intended to shift the Court to the far right for generations.
It appears that Trump’s choices have been reduced down to two or three wholly right wing jurists, each entirely on board with the GOP agenda of unregulated gerrymandering, state voter suppression legislation, union busting, and the “corporations are people, my friend” doctrine of the plutocratic wing of the Republican Party. No matter which way you look at it, this appears to be a done deal.
And if the symbolic right wing crusade to reverse Roe v. Wade is finally realized by this new court, then in an ironic 180 ° turn in American history, the Republican Party will finally have fully metastasized from the party of their own sainted leader, Ronald Reagan, to that of a party that supports the development of a rigid federalism in an increasingly authoritarian regime of their own making. And instead of channeling Ronald Reagan’s exhortation to the Soviets to “tear down that wall” and to join the prosperous western democracies, this new Republican Party will implement the commands of its Evangelical Christian base by “Tearing Down That Wall of Separation”, the wall conceived by Thomas Jefferson, placed into the Constitution by James Madison, and signed by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The Republican Party intends to insert Christian inspired religious dogma into a constitutionally mandated secular government.
Historians have written that, “Hamilton feared anarchy and thought in terms of order; Jefferson feared tyranny and thought in terms of freedom.” The ensuing years of our constitutional democracy have been a struggle to reconcile these two philosophies of our founders, and we have benefited from having this debate both within parties and between parties. But America has swerved off the path of this debate. We have invited into our house a Republican Party that is leading us toward autocracy – toward the very form of government that Ronald Reagan sought to dismantle. How far it will take us toward this disintegration of our founding principles is not yet clear. Perhaps Donald Trump will enlighten us after his summit with Vladimir Putin next week.
