Threat to nation

Authoritarianism a very real danger

Recently, President Joe Biden traveled to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to excoriate “MAGA Republicans.” I can understand and appreciate why he did so. As he said, “They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

Not too long ago, as a presidential candidate, Biden made a case to the nation in the autumn of 2020 that the soul of America was on the ballot. He was right to do so. That said, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said on CNN that Biden’s speech was divisive because it “singled out a segment of Americans and said basically they’re our enemy.”

Yes, it did do that. President Biden also said, “Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.”

To be sure, Hutchinson was, to the best of my understanding, awake on Jan. 6, 2021, and he has been aware of the rhetoric Donald Trump has used perpetually to cast doubt on the 2020 election, foment resentment in our democratic process, and cast aspersions on President Biden, including calling him an “enemy of the state” in a recent speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Hutchinson had nothing to say about that.

Biden’s aim in Philadelphia was to warn Americans of what is at stake in 2022. There are, for example, 2020 election deniers on the ballot for governor of Arizona and Pennsylvania, two swing states that will play a major role in 2024. In Pennsylvania, where I lived for a time, Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, stated that he would not have certified Biden’s win there in 2020 (Biden won by almost 80,000 votes; all of Trump’s voter-fraud allegations were unfounded).

Pennsylvania is unique in that the governor appoints the secretary of state who, in turn, oversees elections. In 2020, Republican leaders in the state legislature thwarted efforts by Trump to have them appoint new electors in defiance of the will of the voters — an issue that has the former president and his ilk in very hot water legally.

Hutchinson, the former leader of the bipartisan National Governors Association, has not admonished Mastriano — the GOP nominee who also arranged buses to take people to Washington, D.C., and was personally present at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection — for being divisive. Mastriano, it is worth noting, has regularly appeared on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast to amplify false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

The ease with which Arkansas Republicans have criticized Biden’s speech is mind-boggling in the face of Trump’s mania.

This past week, for example, Trump described the Department of Justice as “vicious monsters” for searching his resort for the classified materials he has since acknowledged, via his social media platform Truth Social, that he knew were in his possession. These are the same documents that Trump, according to the Department of Justice, had placed in a secure, key-access-only underground room after first falsely decrying that the FBI had planted them there. Victimization is a hallmark of the Trump universe. Too often, Republicans extol it as virtue.

Acult of personality is a cult after all, and as sentient beings, wisdom and logic inform us that what Trump continues to instigate — white Christian nationalism, autocracy, or tyranny, depending on the speech — is a threat to the values of our nation. As it states in the Declaration of Independence, “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Many Arkansas voters, blind to Trump’s enduring conspiracy, have yet to find their way beyond their insouciance. That is concerning because Trump’s concept of executive power runs blatantly afoul of Article II of the U.S. Constitution.

To that end and most recently, Trump, during his Wilkes-Barre speech, evinced grand admiration for President Xi Jinping of China. Trump fawned over President Xi’s executive power and referred to him endearingly as a “king” because Xi had maneuvered the politics of the Chinese Communist Party to coalesce his power into a presidency “for life.”

This penchant for authoritarianism, pursued relentlessly by Trump and allayed by many in the Republican Party, does place our democracy in peril.