Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
President of the United States Donald Trump at a campaign rally at the International Air Response Hangar at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport in Mesa, Arizona.
Republicans have come up with a brand-new threat to terrify voters into supporting them just in time for the midterm elections. Brace yourselves for it. If Democrats are elected, America will be under the control of angry, leftwing mobs rioting in the streets.
That’s an odd nightmare for Republicans to be tossing out right now. It’s certainly true we’ve seen a lot of dangerous mobs on television ever since Donald Trump was elected president, but they’re rightwing, not leftwing. They wear red hats and scream “Lock her up!” because some woman used the wrong email server. They recently added 85-year-old U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to their incarceration wish list. They really don’t like women very much.
We also saw a lot of emotionally distraught female survivors of sexual assault during the hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Supreme Court appointment, but they weren’t much of a threat, either. They felt threatened themselves by the blazing speed with which Republicans ignored Christine Blasey Ford’s “100% certain” identification of Kavanaugh as her drunken attacker to put Kavanaugh on the nation’s highest court without a thorough investigation.
Republicans don’t appear to understand the difference between a red-faced, lawless mob shouting about taking justice into their own hands and ordinary Americans exercising their constitutional right of peaceful assembly to express their opinions about the actions of their government. The latter is a basic tenet of democracy. All those marches by women, African Americans protesting unequal treatment by police, the pro-science march, those led by surviving kids from the Parkland, Fla., school massacre and those leading protests against inhumane treatment of immigrants are as American as apple pie.
Protest is an American Responsibility
Throughout American history, both political parties have engaged in mass protests against policies of their government. What citizens choose to protest is what matters. It’s tough to convince anyone protesters are dangerous leftwing mobs when they’re demonstrating for affordable health care, human rights for immigrants or to ban military weapons of mass destruction from our city streets. Back when rightwing tea parties were protesting President Barack Obama, a popular bumper sticker read: “Democrats Protest Wars. Republicans Protest Health Care.”
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What Republicans call angry, leftwing mobs are just the majority of decent Americans—Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans—who disagree with many of Trump’s cruel, divisive, un-American policies. Trump intentionally inflames anger among his most rabid supporters toward people of color, Muslims, immigrants, women and anyone who disagrees with him. When that provokes righteous political anger on the targeted side, that’s the sign of a healthy political democracy.
It’s obvious Trump would be more comfortable living in a much less democratic society. His professed love for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un may just be a passing fling, but he’s clearly fallen head over heels for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Lately, Trump has also embraced the idea of a single royal family having total control over a country and all its laws like King Salman and the Crown Prince do in Saudi Arabia. The Trump and Saudi royal families became close, working out a cover story for the murder and dismemberment of an exiled Saudi journalist who lived in the U.S. (Safety tip: Never start a fistfight with 15 Saudi assassins armed with a bone saw.)
Trump’s opposition to the basic principles of democracy is extreme when he openly advocates denying equal rights based upon race, religion and national origin. But Trump was not the first Republican to scorn such fundamental democratic principles as the right to vote and equal treatment under the law.
Republicans such as House Speaker Paul Ryan pay lip service to supporting democracy, but they’ve long-supported voter suppression laws to make voting more difficult for racial minorities and anyone else likely to vote Democratic. Corrupt Republican gerrymandering of voting districts distorts the outcomes of elections by making it nearly impossible for a majority of opposition voters to elect legislative or congressional majorities.
Even before Trump was elected president, he had a long history of lucrative business dealings with the Saudis. Trump grossly exaggerates the value of a U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia as an excuse not to issue any serious economic sanctions against it for the savage murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. What Trump really doesn’t want to lose are the tens of millions of dollars the Saudis have continued to pour into his hotel and condo businesses for years.
It’s extremely dangerous for Trump to pal around with the Saudis and find out what brutal, murderous regimes get away with. For the safety of our own democracy, the Secret Service never should have allowed our president to touch that glowing, hypnotic orb on his trip to Saudi Arabia. Trump has the mentality of an impressionable, overgrown child. We’ll know we’re in trouble if the war cry against Trump’s political enemies at his hate rallies escalates from “Lock ‘em up!” to “Off with their heads!”
