It’s all over
As I’ve told you for the past several years, Donald Trump is no threat to the constitutional underpinnings of our Republic.
He’s merely a man — and not a very good man at that— who answered the cry of the past 100 years from many in the business world that “What this country needs is a businessman in the White House.”
Well, we’ve had a businessman in the White House for the past four years, how well has that worked out?
Two entirely different worlds are business and governing. The former transacts what it does privately and is accountable either to the owner of a company or a just handful of people on a board of directors. The latter transacts its business publicly (most of the time) and is answerable to an entire nation.
Trump never understood nor did he care how government worked or the supremacy of our Constitution and its institutional safeguards against anti-democratic threats, especially those that may originate from the Executive Branch, i.e., the President.
Those institutional protections are many in number but the primary ones would be Congress, the federal judicial system, the military, and most important of all, the people of this country who are a hell of lot of smarter and more resilient than our elites think they are. Trump has none of these institutions behind him and his agenda.
There are now 20,000 National Guard troops assembled in the Capital, and they aren’t there to support a coup. They are one of those Constitutional institutions that will prevent any attempted antidemocratic takeover of our government.
The courts, comprised of a mix of liberal and conservative judges, who ruled in over 60 lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign to invalidate election returns and procedures, dismissed all 60-plus cases. That’s another Constitutional institution that upheld the primacy of the rule of law cannot be perverted by the individual, no matter who that person is.
Another example of a Constitutional institution that worked is the Congressional action this week, when the House of Representatives, including all Democrats and 10 Republicans, impeached Trump for the second time in a little over a year. While I believe and I think most folks would agree the Senate, for purely political reasons, will not convict Trump on the charge of “incitement of insurrection,” I think the vast majority of Americans agree the House’s charging resolution got it absolutely correct:
“In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government,” the resolution reads. “He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
Apparently Trump never took a high school civics course otherwise he would know there’s a bridge connecting the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence that explains a government’s legitimacy and moral right to use the political and governing power of the government is only justified and lawful when consented to by the people over which that political power is exercised. It’s called the “Consent of the Governed” clause found in the Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Simply put, the government is the people, and the people are the government.
In a real sense, Trump actually believes that he and what he calls “our movement” are the real government. It’s a short step from there to delegitimizing an election as a fraud, when you don’t win.
But the good news is the disgraceful spectacle of an aborted, half-assed insurrection carried out by misfits and traitors last week, with their assault on the People’s House, AKA the Capitol Building, proves that our Republic and its people are in no danger of being brought low by a rag-tag mob bent on overturning a presidential election and re-installing someone who is a loser in more than one sense of the word.
Now it’s time for that loser to go away, it’s all over and he’s finished forever, because the American people say he’s done. And that’s as done as you can be.
There are now 20,000 National Guard troops assembled in the Capital, and they aren’t there to support a coup. They are one of those Constitutional institutions that will prevent any attempted antidemocratic takeover of our government.