Giving aid and comfort

Back when Nazi storm clouds were gathering over Europe, otherwise capable leaders were ignoring and misreading them. Playwright and icon George Bernard Shaw, a shrewd observer of human nature and vocal political theorist, appraised Mussolini as a “kindly,” “most amiable man” and Hitler as a “very intelligent gentleman.”

When Shaw reassured the world, “Don’t be frightened anymore about the Germans,” many of his late 1930s contemporaries were only too willing to believe him and the chorus of equally soothing voices. Winston Churchill’s war alarms were simply too extreme and disquieting.

Sadly, Churchill’s grim perception and prophecies proved true.

Clearly, I’m no Churchill. But I see storm clouds.

I’m talking about the president. I’m not one who protests that he’s “not my president.” By the terms of the Constitution to which I claim allegiance, he was duly elected. However, that same Constitution details more than the process of election. Its words and the body of derivative precedents and customs dating back to George Washington are our government.

We have been governed by exceptional men and mediocre men, but we have not been a government of men. We’re a government of laws.

That whole body of law is as sacred as the law that made Donald Trump our President. None of us – not me, not him – are above those laws. Both of us are subject to those laws and to the same penalties when we violate those laws.

You cannot champion the law that made him president while you disregard the laws he disobeys. You cannot swear by the one while you wink at the others.

I heard him assail Mexicans as murderers and rapists. I saw him point to “my African-American.” And after he dismissed Africa as a “s-hole” continent, I heard him claim to be the “least racist person you have ever interviewed.”

I heard him mock John McCain’s ordeal as a prisoner of war, even as he claimed to “love our vets.” I heard him boast to “know more about ISIS than the generals” and assail those generals as “rubble.” Now he wants a parade.

I’ve heard him pose as a victim of McCarthyism, even as he demanded his own Roy Cohn to manipulate the law to protect him.

I’ve heard him attack the judiciary. I’ve heard him solicit violence against the free press.

I’ve heard him brag about assaulting women.

I’ve heard his endless, baseless fictions.

I’ve heard him lie. Serially.

All this and more is wellknown, well-documented, and indisputable.

We are so worn down by excess and the abuse of common decency, and grown so accustomed to ignoring evidence, that rather than believe our eyes, ears, and right reason, all of which point to his complicity in wrongdoing, we would sooner believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department, federal judges, and a procession of lifelong public servants, many of whom are Republicans, have conspired to falsely accuse Donald Trump, a rampant narcissist who has compiled a record, from Manhattan to Atlantic City to the White House, of lying, flaunting custom and the law, and proudly acting in his own narrow selfinterest.

Donald Trump deserves the fair application of the law. But the nation deserves the unfettered application of the law.

That law allows for the removal of a president for just cause.

That law permits members of Congress to remain seated when the president speaks. That law permits any of us to withhold applause even when the president thinks he deserves it. It’s not un-American to disagree with him. If it were, we would still be bowing to the king. It certainly isn’t treason. If the president knew the Constitution, he would know that James Madison was deliberately not glib when in that Constitution he defined “treason against the United States” as consisting “only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

I don’t know why every member of Congress, Republicans included, didn’t rise up to defend their colleagues’ prerogative to sit, or why they didn’t see the President’s charge of treason as an assault on the separation of powers. I don’t know why Republicans contort themselves to defend words and actions that are increasingly indefensible.

There is no gain in advancing your party if you lose your country in the bargain.

Some of the president’s partisans will argue that his cry of treason was just Trump being Trump. That’s precisely the problem. Trump is Trump.

I do agree with the president on one point. It is “a disgrace what’s happening in our country”, and “a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves, and much worse than that.”

As for treason, we do have enemies. Obstructing the search for those enemies isn’t the act of a patriot.

Just over 60 years ago, Joseph Welch, the army’s lawyer at the McCarthy hearings, famously and bravely asked the senator if he had left no sense of decency.

Even Richard Nixon had the decency to resign.

He was confronted by Republicans with the decency to demand it.

I fear it’s pointless to ask if this president has any pangs of conscience. But we can ask Congress, and we can ask ourselves.

We must ask. Have we left any sense of decency? Nations do fall.

The fate of ours hangs on our answer.