Republicans Hate America

They have chosen to stand with a man who wants to destroy the country

Francisco Franco. Adolph Hitler. Augusto Pinochet. Ferdinand Marcos. And now…Donald Trump.

The list of dictators who ended or suspended their nation’s constitutions is a rogue’s gallery of thugs whose lust for power and uncontested rule outweighed commitment to their nations. Some did it in whole, some just selected those portions of their founding documents that they didn’t like, but every one of these efforts had the same outcome: A destruction of democracy, ending all systems of checks and balances in the government, the trampling of civil and human rights, and overriding the rule of law. 

In each case, these hoodlums were either fascists or played footsie with the far-right, authoritarian ideology. They invoked (often contrived) threats from communists or socialists to their nation’s electorate and depended on weak-kneed supplicants in their parties to execute their narcissistic destruction of their nations’ liberties and decency.

From his actions dating back to 2015, only the most foolish could doubt Trump’s fascistic tendencies, and his craving to seize power as an autocrat willing to shred America’s system of equal justice and democratic rule. But now, with his literal invocation of his desire to “terminate” the Constitution, Trump has ripped away any remaining veil disguising his anti-Americanism. All to protect the country against his false invocation of an imaginary massive fraud in the 2020 election. The echoes of the same or similar claims by Franco, Hitler, Pinochet, and Marcos are stunning in their kinship.

Then, amid widespread backlash from everyone but Republican leaders, Trump turns to his traditional gaslighting, by denying that he ever typed the words that he typed. Trump bizarrely said that the words didn’t mean what he said because it was all about “'MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,' as has been irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election.” Yah, no. This whole argument about some (often imaginary) crisis is exactly how Hitler and Marcos justified crippling the guarantees from their nations’ constitutions, a model that - if Trump ever cracked a book - we might assume he learned from reading history.

The most terrifying part of this, though, is the refusal of the leaders of the Republican Party to condemn someone who literally declares his passion for destroying America merely to serve his own sociopathic needs. Time and again, as Trump has attacked norms and laws of our nation, the question has kept being asked of Republicans: Where is the line? At what point do you choose nation over party? The answer now is clear. There is no line. Trump can literally threaten the survival of our Constitutional Republic and the GOP will shrug its shoulders, mutter a few words of semi-disagreement, and scurry back to their offices hoping that their God King will not focus his eyes of destruction on them. Most people in the modern world have spoken the question - who among us would have sided with the Nazis in Germany? The answer to this question cannot presume what Hitler ultimately emerged as being, but rather examine who sided with him - both tacitly and openly - as he gradually undermined German democracy. We now know the answer: The Republican Party. It hates America, at least the America all of us have presumed exists as an outgrowth of the Founders’ vision.

In November 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to French scientist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy that contains words this country must remember: “Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” And Ronald Reagan, once a patron saint of the GOP who today would be dismissed as a RINO, said in 1967, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”

We take our freedom for granted. No matter what the threat posed by Trump, we always assume that freedom and human rights will out. But when one political party has drowned itself in a filthy swamp of self-advancement, nothing can be taken for granted. Make no mistake; both the 2020 and 2022 elections were about the survival of American democracy. The destruction of freedom in Germany, Spain, Chile, and the Philippines played out slowly until a final dramatic push shattered everything that so many of those nations’ citizens had fought and died for, all on the altars of a few terrible men.

Trump hosts an antisemite and a white supremacist neo-Nazi when he feted Kanye West and Nick Fuentes during a dinner at him home. He praised Fuentes for the same reason Trump slobbered all over the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un - both had the smarts to know that all the former president needs is a compliment, and he falls in love.

Nazis, antisemites, the termination of the Constitution: None of it is enough for the GOP. Their offices, their ability to get the best tables at fancy Georgetown restaurants, matters more to them than whether we are able to turn over our Constitutional democracy to our children.

The GOP is no longer a political party. It is a virus, feeding off an organism - the United States of America - in hopes that its appeals to racism, antisemitism and anti-Constitutionalism will keep it replicating, even if the host dies in the process. Republicans hate America - not some 1950s fantasy version where minorities stayed powerless and hidden while white Christians held all the power - but the America of 1787, when our Constitution was written. These self-seeking cowards, too spineless to speak up in defense of the nation created by our brave Founders who risked death to grant us liberty, are unfit to serve in any government.