Be fearless in the face of renewed attacks by Trump & the MAGA wolves.
We can't be blackmailed by a minority power that every day tells us the only way to keep the country from coming apart is to let them rule it.
In so many conversations this past week, I’ve heard people talk about Donald Trump’s indictment like it is a victory for law and order. It is that, but I must caution you, it is only a tactical victory in a battle still very much underway. Churchill famously warned, after the allied victory at el Alamein that “it was not the end, not the beginning of the end, but possibly the end of the beginning.” We will see, later this week in Wisconsin, whether we are even able to move from defense to offense.
And we really must steel ourselves, because as terrible as it has been while they were winning, the misery they will impose in their rage and despair while losing will have great and lasting costs.
We are entering a time of real uncertainty. One that will demand a great deal of us.
Back in 1995, I worked as the head of Region V of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At 9:02 on April 19th I was in my office. Over the next few hours I huddled around a television with my colleagues as we watched in horror the aftermath of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
That crime has been on my mind since Donald Trump led what can only be understood as a white nationalist rally in Waco, Texas last week. Waco is where Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, became radicalized. We would be criminally naïve not to image this as a time that radicalizes more of our fellow Americans in the same way.
Donald Trump sought to be the president of the America that Tim McVeigh imagined. It is a country based on an identity rather than on an idea. In some ways, their vision of America is like the vision many other counties share- one based on a dominant ethnic population that shares a religion and social order. As Mr. Trump leaves the stage others are lining up to take his place, not to undo Trumpism, but to double down on that very same vision.
But the miracle of America is measured not by how cling to ancient distinctions, but by how far we have come by erasing them. And when those rigid old walls fall, we can see instead distinctions based on talent, on hard work, on character. Distinctions earned, not inherited.
All this has implications for the rule of law. In a Trumpian world, in Tim McVeigh’s world, law is imposed by rulers to reinforce the social order. It is an idea as old as Hammurabi. The great accomplishment of our founders was to bring forth a nation where the law is the set of rules we all agree to live by, and to continuously amend in order to create a more perfect union.
One kind of law is imposed. The other, adopted.
The difference is on stark display. Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents, his misuse of the IRS as President, the multiple current grand jury investigations, and now this indictment, are evidence of his disdain for adopted law. Those of us who would keep it, will insist he gets his day in court, and that the burden of proof is on the state. In our legal system he is assumed innocent. We do not fill beer halls with mobs shouting lock him up.
This week, the GOP engaged in a full-throated and nearly unified attack on the NY grand jury that indicted Donald Trump. Given the choice, they opted for politics over law. The choice was easy for them because they see law in that old way, as order imposed by the leader on behalf of a racial and religious order.
Not to be outdone in this gross and dangerous exercise in dangerous bad judgment, Governor DeSantis forcefully assured Floridians that he would not participate in an extradition should Mr. Trump decide not to surrender himself to authorities in New York. Mr. DeSantis is a lawyer. He has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution. Article IV of that Constitution includes the requirement for rendition between states. Here’s the text:
A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.
Like the other Republicans, DeSantis no longer sees legitimacy in adopted law. His record in Florida makes the point- while going through the motions one might expect in a democracy, his rubber stamp legislature is all about the imposition of his will- on corporations like Disney, on gay citizens just trying to get on with their lives, on books and on art, on thought itself. He is showing us what imposed law looks like- it is a tool for partisan ends.
Across the country, Republicans are imposing law in exactly this way. In Texas, the legislature moved this week to strip Harris County- Houston’s home and the largest county in the state- of its ability to conduct elections. This follows moves in Tennessee to deny Nashville the power of local control, and in Mississippi to create a separate policing body for white and black residents of Jackson. Not content with taking for themselves that had previously been in the hands of people who think and look differently than they do, this week the GOP continued its efforts to criminalize sex and gender viewpoints they dislike. Several localities are talking about banning pride parades, and this week one school district in Wisconsin forbade the singing of a Dolly Parton song that included the word rainbow in the title.
The rule of law, of law adopted through democratic means, is the bedrock of our nation and our society. It is being tested. And so are we.
Now the question before us is what to do. How do we heal our country and move us to a better place?
Let me propose that we move forward by fighting on two fronts. First, we must strive, tirelessly and against strong headwinds, to improve the lives of the great majority of Americans. We have to push to change rules that have created vast inequalities of wealth and power. We have to deliver on the promise of good jobs to anyone willing to work hard. Nothing will defang the MAGA wolves better than shared prosperity and new optimism. We cannot rest until this success is felt in rural America as well as in our cities. It must be for us all.
At the same time, we can give no quarter as we fight to crush the most dangerous power in America since big cotton brought us to Civil War. I, for one, am not willing to go backwards in order to keep the nation together. I will not be blackmailed by a minority power that every day tells us the only way to keep the country from coming apart is to let them rule it. I reject that entirely.
That means we must win the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin this coming week. We must continue to shine the brightest light on the lies- whether they come from Jim Jordan or Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson. We must organize and be fearless. We must remind each other, in the teeth of a sometimes violent and intimidating movement, in the constant path of conspiratorial propaganda that in the real world, the great red wave is a ripple and that together we are winning the fight.