Voters must stop America’s slide into authoritarianism

BDale Butland

anana Republic is a nice place to shop, but it’s a lousy form of government.

Yet under President Donald Trump, a banana republic is what America is beginning to resemble.

You can see it in the president’s penchant for describing the free press as “the enemy of the people.”

You can hear it in his almost daily denunciations of law enforcement officials who are investigating him and his campaign associates for obstruction of justice and collusion with a hostile foreign government.

And it’s evident at his political rallies when he refers to Hillary Clinton — and then encourages his audiences to robotically chant “lock her up.”

Now others in the administration seem to be following the president’s lead. When a speech he was giving recently was interrupted by this chant, Jeff Sessions — Trump’s attorney general and the nation’s top law enforcement officer — appeared to be amused and saw no reason to spoil the fun by reminding his teen-age audience that the person whose imprisonment they were calling for has never been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one.

And now we’ve learned through his press secretary that the president is seriously considering revoking the security clearances of at least six well-known former national security officials, not because they’ve done anything wrong, but simply because Trump doesn’t like their criticisms of him and his policies. Even more incredibly, the Los Angeles Times reported last month that Trump “did not rule out” similar action against former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

This isn’t politics as usual — or just another example of Trump’s willingness to be “politically incorrect.”

This is a pattern of behavior that is both deeply disturbing and fundamentally un-American.

We have watched it unfold in other times in other lands.

It is a slow-motion slide toward authoritarianism.

Heaven knows that nipping this in the bud should not be a partisan issue.

You’d think that all members of Congress, whether they be Democrats or Republicans, would willingly join together to say that here in America, we don’t criminalize our political differences or jail our political opponents.

You’d think they would be happy to remind our president that in America, we are committed to the rule of law, not the rule of individual men.

And that in America, we recognize that a free and independent media is not the “enemy of the people,” even when we hate the stories they report or the opinions they express. Unlike the 20th century European tyrants who coined that odious phrase — or the tin pot dictators who still hold sway in many Third World countries — we proudly stand with founding patriots like Jefferson who wrote in 1787, “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

You would think those things, but you would be wrong.

Because if we’ve learned anything over the 19 months that Trump has been in office, it is that the party controlling both houses of Congress will not hold this president accountable.

Ever. For anything.

Quaking before the minority of voters who comprise Trump’s base and who will not desert him even if, as the president himself so colorfully put it, he were to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” Congressional Republicans are politically invertebrate, totally incapable of standing up to this president.

But there is an election coming in November. And if those who presently control the Congress will not provide the checks and balances on which our system of government depends, then it will be up to we the people.

This fall, we must vote to preserve our republic and the democratic norms that have sustained it for over 200 years.

This fall we must vote to keep America, America.