By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Today, I was thinking about what, in real terms, have been the existential threats to the American Republic since 1865. Honestly, in macro terms, only World War II is arguably a bigger threat to the United States than the current Trump Administration.
Let me explain.
If you were to compare WWII and Trump to threats an individual might face in the real world, WWII was analogous to, say, a fist fight. It was a street brawl, but we had friends and they had friends and by my mid-way through the fight, we knew we weren’t in real harm of dying.
Now, let’s look at Trump.
Trump is like an abscessed tooth that is going unpulled and there’s a real risk of…uhhh…it going septic? I say this because Trump is an avatar for a multitude of things that are seriously wrong with the American political system right now. If he’s not destroyed politically very, very soon — I suggest August 2019 — he could very well kill us, the Republic.
What I mean by this is, we could no longer be even a barely function democracy. It might not even be Trump who kills the Republic, it might be a younger, more ideological and more competent successor such as Sen. Tom Cotton. As such, we’re in a crisis. We have to pull this rotten tooth now, as soon as possible.
If we don’t, there’s a real chance that the only thing that will stop us going full theocratic, autocratic, fascist plutocracy is the basic temperament of the American population. We just won’t stand for the government going full tyrant, so the rules will be bent just enough that effectively we’re a “managed democracy” like they have in Russia. That’s Trump’s goal — to turn us into a clone of Putin’s Russia.
If that’s not a call to arms, a reason to galvanize the Center into a Radical Resistance, I don’t know what is.
