Republicans Keep Talking About Low Faith in Our Institutions
This is like a drug dealer complaining about discarded needles at his kid's park
Everywhere you go, they are carrying on about how “weak our institutions are.” They talk loudly in lines, not as much as they used to, but you can still hear their snide remarks. They are constantly posting about it. Like-minded Trumpists will signal each other with comments like, “Well, if we don’t stop them, soon we all will be speaking Spanish.”
Trumpists are racists. Maybe most of them that put him into office weren’t, but the core, the Trump-supporter who was MAGA before MAGA was a thing, is racist. My brother, for example, has been a racist his whole life, and when Trump won, his fantasies were on their way to being fulfilled. In 2016, our institutions were healthy and strong except for one: the U.S. Congress. Republicans have whittled away at the sanctity of this storied body for decades, and with the election of Barack Obama, they — Mitch McConnell — decided to put an end to the legitimacy of Congress.
By 2016, with the right-wing takeover of SCOTUS underway, America entered into its darkest period when Donald Trump declared war on our nation’s institutions. People don’t understand that the caprice of politics and the continued, steady, not-so-flashy health of the nation’s institutional foundation are not opposite sides of the same coin.
The institutions are not to be politicized ever. Even Richard Nixon, after his late-night drunks wandering around the White House talking to ghosts of our nation’s past, concluded that he couldn’t push anymore. He resigned out of a lack of political support and an understanding that he shouldn’t launch an assault on the nation’s foundation.
Donald Trump, beginning with his early and ridiculous fight with the Parks & Recs people of Washington over the size of the crowd at his inauguration, made it his personal passion to weaken the institutions that had made America what it is. At first, Trump, because he was ignorant of civics like most of his followers and had no idea how the government works, figured that he had all of the power that, say, Putin or Xi had. When Trump learned that the “institutional foundation” was able to stop the majority of his anti-democratic dictates, he declared war.
First, it was against America’s highest law enforcement body, the F.B.I. Next, he attacked the Justice Department and would eventually win that battle when he removed the dithering Jeff Sessions because he was being too faithful to the institution. He refused to do Trump’s bidding and so was forced out. William Barr made a mockery of the institution, and we saw for the first time in our history how easily a president could become a “legal dictator.” Eventually, however, after Trump’s lunacy about the stolen election, Barr bailed, but only because he didn’t want to go down with the ship — he was protecting himself and not the institution.
The institutions are surprisingly strong
Trump’s war on the institutions, joined by right-wing media, continues unabated. While the nation’s core institutions are not compromised politics, except SCOTUS, which is a fun house of mirrors for the right wing, Trump has been successful at brainwashing his not-so-bright base, and even the politically clueless Americans on the left, that “the institutions are ailing.” The mantra, “There is low trust in the nation’s institutions,” when you get right down to it, is a statement that means almost nothing.
This phrase is a far-right call to action and nothing more, and yet, thanks to the unrelenting media attention it gets from the right, it gets picked up from time to time by the mainstream media, which suddenly adds credence to the lie. The thing is, if the institutions were suffering, Trump would still be president. The fact that our institutions, when pressed on by right-wing pressure, sprang back to health means that they are not ailing but thriving.
It is for this reason that the right professes such confident agitation that our nation’s institutions are sick and not to be trusted. Our foundational core is still strong enough to prevent the fascist takeover of our nation by Trump’s MAGA, and they understand that until Americans are actively willing to ignore these institutions, no such takeover can occur.
January 6th was a trial run for “ignoring” an institution. Trump supporters committed the only documented voter fraud. After all of the money-wasting, time-wasting recounts, and the bullshit “forensic audits” — right-wingers love to act like they are clever by using such terms — President Biden’s lead in Arizona, for example, increased! The same has occurred all over the country, where Republicans have lied and cheated to re-elect Trump.
When Ohio voters voted to support abortion rights, local Republicans suggested that the results should be ignored. Pennsylvania’s former Senator, Rick Santorum, on CNN, said that “pure democracies” are not good and that the Ohio results were attained because Democrats manipulated “sexy issues” like abortion — and they should be ignored. Ignoring the will of the voters is what Russia, Belarus, and other dictatorships do, not the United States!
How did the United States get to this place where potentially half of the nation is openly calling for a Trump-led dictatorship? As I told a friend in January 2017, four years of Trump’s incessant poison will be plenty to unlock the stupidity in the minds of a significant minority of our nation. Backed by right-wing media, his “revolution of dumb” will eventually wreck our nation’s democracy. My friend scoffed and said, “Four years is not that long. People are smarter than his rhetoric.” That is when I scoffed.
Which one of us was right? Today, that friend is against Trump and is confused about how people can still support him. That fact proved my point from four years ago: The volume of Trump stupid would be so great that Trump moved the gauge for most Americans from what used to be unimaginable to suddenly imaginable.
We are there now: in the imagination of Donald Trump.
Spanish is a beautiful language