The demise of the American republic

HALIFAX—For a couple of years now, I have been trying to get Canadians to pay attention to the biggest political story on the planet. I am beginning to feel a little like Cassandra with a sore throat. I am talking about the demise of the American republic in a burst of norm-shattering developments never before seen in that country. For the first time in history, a former U.S. president is under criminal indictment—in fact, a slew of them. The most recent charges against Donald Trump include knowingly using fraudulent information and the power of government to prevent the peaceful transition of power from himself, who lost in 2020, to Joe Biden, who won. In other words, he was rejecting the will of the people. That’s what they do in countries where power flows from the barrel of a gun. Remember when moral turpitude was grounds for scuttling the career of a political candidate or incumbent? Remember Gary Hart and John Edwards? Where is morality in politics today? You be the judge. When then vice-president Mike Pence told the then-president that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to stop the certification of the 2020 election result, Trump told Pence that he was “too honest.” When you tell someone that upholding their constitutional oath is too honest, it means that you don’t care about honouring anything but your own self-interest. That aside, for the first time in history, Trump is not only increasing his lead in the race to win the 2024 Republican nomination for president based on multiple criminal indictments, but he is also successfully fundraising from them. Florida governor and 2024 U.S. presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis recently said that if elected to the White House, he would 'start slitting throats' in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons And it is not as if Trump has been shy about what he would do if a fear-ridden, racially divided and suspicious America were to put him back in the Oval Office. He has openly boasted about increasing the powers of the president, and subordinating the rule of law by weakening the judicial branch. Against the Constitution, you say? Definitely, but Trump has also talked about the need to suspend the Constitution. Remember. Increasing executive power, while reducing the power of the judicial branch, is by a direct route the shortest way to authoritarian dictatorship. This is not the first time in history that a dangerous demagogue has imperilled democracy—and, in some cases, destroyed it—with devastating consequences for everyone. Hitler, as everyone knows, first came to power at the ballot box, becoming chancellor of Germany. He never looked back. He suspended the German Constitution, stirred up the sense of aggrievement in his citizens, and proceeded to drag the world, and the Jewish people, into the 20th century’s nightmare of nightmares. Trump’s open hostility to the judiciary—the anchor of the rule of law in a democracy—is being carried even further in other countries that are ostensibly democratic. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has so debased his country by constitutional overhaul, suppression of dissent, and control of the press that several countries in the European Union wonder if Hungary is even a democracy anymore. In fact, it is a DINO: democracy in name only. In Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under indictment on corruption charges, legislation has been introduced making the Knesset—not the Israeli Supreme Court—the final word on who interprets the law. For months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have hit the streets to protest against this judicial “reform," and why not? If a simple majority vote in the Knesset can trump a ruling of the Supreme Court, justice will have been replaced by whatever is politically expedient for the party in power. A handy benefit if you are PM Netanyahu, who faces the prospect of jail time, if convicted on the corruption charges against him. Like Trump, Netanyahu has raised a political shield against legal jeopardy. In a few days or weeks from now, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to bring more indictments against the former president, and perhaps others. The charges will relate to White House efforts to pressure state officials to change the electoral result in Georgia from Biden to Trump. Trump is famously captured in a recorded call asking Brett Raffensperger to find him the necessary votes to flip the state his way. If the Georgia DA indicts Trump, it will be the fourth time in three months that the former president has faced federal criminal charges. When you add in the civil case he faces in New York—which one court described as “staggering fraud” involving hundreds of millions of dollars—his main primary campaign appearances will be in a series of courts across the country. The GOP has had multiple opportunities to put this serial liar and sexual assaulter out of business. Instead, they gave him a pass through the kangaroo court of a Senate they controlled at the time when he was twice impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours. Instead of dumping Trump the way the GOP dumped Nixon in 1972, the Republican Party has endorsed Trump’s obscene charade as victim rather than perpetrator. It is not a prosecution, he claims, but a persecution designed to keep him from office. Nothing in recent political history can match the absurdity of the claim that the Department of Justice has been “weaponized” by the Democrats to keep Trump out of office. Consider two glaring problems with that view. First, not a single one of Trump’s enablers in the House and the Senate have seen the evidence compiled by prosecutors like Jack Smith. So how can you declare it is a political witch-hunt? How can you denounce the DOJ in the absence of the facts it has gathered and acted on? And in the case of Smith’s recent indictments against Trump regarding Jan. 6, 2021, virtually all of the witnesses in the case are Republicans-state officials, GOP officials, and Trump’s own staff, including some of his past lawyers. Or are all of these card-carrying Republicans who worked for Trump and wanted him to win the 2020 election part of the plot? Instead of denouncing Trump, top Republicans are spewing hogwash to protect this hustling grifter who elbowed his way into politics and is now holding an entire party hostage. Senator Lindsay Graham has already declared that the judge who will hear the Jan. 6, 2021, case “hates” Trump. Others in the party have endorsed the ex-president’s nonsense about a deep-state conspiracy. Some have told their constituents that agents of the IRS will come to their state and shoot Trump supporters. And guess what the guy running second to Trump in the primary polling has said? He would not only fire the head of the FBI, not only end the so-called “weaponization” of government, but on day one of his administration, he would “slit the throats” of these murky bureaucrats of the deep state. So why should Canadians pay attention to what’s happening in the Divided States of America? From water, to rare-earth minerals, and sheer geography, there is a lot in Canada that some people would like to get their hands on. We share the longest, unguarded border in the world with the U.S., just under 9,000 kilometres. Just saying. Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times