Don’t confuse Trump with his normal veep
I keep reading about how important it is to buck the “normalization” of both drama king Donald Trump and theatergoer Mike Pence. Except that Pence is normal — a normal, very conservative Republican politician.
Liberals have a bunch of wellknown policy disagreements with the president-elect, who has promised to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, gut environmental regulations and “empower law-abiding gun owners to defend themselves.”
They have a few additional disagreements with Pence, who doesn’t share Trump’s view that same-sex marriage is settled law and has a far longer, much clearer record of opposing abortion rights. On just about every issue, in fact, Pence is a lot more reliably righty than his boss-to-be. Yet he worries me a lot less.
It’s not that I’m more apt to agree with him — actually, with Trump so hard to pin down, the reverse is true. No, it’s because I don’t wonder whether the governor of Indiana intends to ignore the Constitution, or undermine our democratic institutions under cover of chaos, or set us against one another in the streets.
Trump supporters who think all opposition to their man is partisan are mistaken. And so are Trump critics who make no distinction between the usual policy differences that chafe after you lose an election, and the potential threats to our democracy that are not usual at all.
If Trump and his party privatized Medicare, that would be a mistake in my view, but one that could be remedied as soon as vot- ers insisted. But if he got us to shrug as he suppressed free speech, or to answer the specter of Muslim internment camps with indifference, then we would have lost something even more precious and harder to win back: the very values that do make America great.
Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator whose words of wisdom Trump retweeted during his campaign, was utterly unlike our president-elect in many ways. But Il Duce and The Donald have enough in common that we can’t afford to ignore the not-so-distant history of a democratically elected leader who became a totalitarian, swung from left to right, preached that the greatness of ancient Rome needed to be restored, and believed that there are two classes of people — the dominated and the dominators.
So when Trump says he wants to weaken the freedom of the press, or make Muslims register, or jail dissenters whose right to burn flags is clearly protected by the First Amendment, I don’t see those as distractions but as alarm bells, as is the enthusiasm he excites among the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other haters.
What I find most reassuring is the very thing that many liberals find most disconcerting: Though I may not agree much with the conservative constitutionalists Trump has promised to nominate to the Supreme Court, I do dare to believe that not one of them would uphold any law denying us the freedoms that I hope I’m dead wrong to fear losing.