Dark Clouds

I am watching TV this morning after the latest round of primaries, trying to intuit what will happen in November.  I know I am not alone.

The news item that catches my eye is the report of President Trump’s meeting with Evangelists behind closed doors.  It reports that the President told the evangelical group that if the Republicans lose the House to the Democrats, “they” (I assume he means the Democrats) will change all that Trump has done immediately and violently.  Violently??

Here we go!

Remember how the election in 2016 was ‘rigged’, and Trump wasn’t sure he would accept the outcome----unless he won?  Now he is baiting his evangelical toadies with threats of violence.  His message for the midterms is if Republicans don’t win there will be violence.  What a despicable tactic.

Have we not had enough of this kind of divisive kind of language?  When I think of how far our politics has descended to the level of what passes for normal in banana republics around the world, it doesn’t seem far fetched to expect this kind of fetid threat from Trump. 

Tom Friedman writes today in the New York Times of how our politics has become ‘Russified’ after 2 years of Trumpian rule; how our Congress in the hands of the Republicans has evolved to a similar state like that of the Duma in Russia—a rubber stamp body that has abdicated it’s power for oversight and separation of powers that was created by the Founders. It is clear that Trump’s campaign rhetoric will be racially divisive, threaten violence, and play to his trope of ‘truth is not the truth’.

There was a comment written about Friedman’s opinion piece that rang true for me:

“Doesn't it seem odd that a ‘Russified’ country apparently can be redeemed through the magical powers of democratic voting? As though the most corrupt American government in living memory is going to allow itself to lose in a fair election?

At the end of 2018 when our election results are 'highly irregular,' all this effort put into winning a democratic election that we were never going to be given is going to look like the most pointless resistance one could imagine.”

If the House does not wind up in the hands of the Democrats in November, there may be no hope for the preservation of our current form of government.  If Republicans remain in control, we will never find out if the Trump Campaign was complicit in the Russian attack on our democracy since it is the Republican’s mission to corrupt the Russian probe and not let the American people know what really happened in 2016.  Treason and criminal action will have won the day.

Frankly, I am more hopeful that truth and decency will ultimately win out.  It is what our American experiment was all about.