By Lafe Tolliver, Esq
Guest Column
“Democracies die from internal apathy when the citizenry fails to sound the alarm even for minor transgressions committed by people in power who have no conscience to obey the rule of law.” Efal Revillot, 19th century Indian philosopher.
If you believe that you are on a political treadmill trying to both keep up with the blinding speed by which Trump and his acolytes are “flooding the zone” a/k/a: media outlets; trying to make sense of what is the end goal…you are not alone.
Recent polling is beginning to take shape that shows that Trump and his pit bull, Elon Musk, are losing favor with their slash and burn tactics against the federal government.
It is an accepted and ready axiom that everyone wants any government to be more efficient with his tax dollars and to root out cronyism in the awarding of contracts to insiders and heavy weight political donors.
But the principles of fairness and due process are still in the vanguard of what is done and how it is accomplished. You simply cannot arbitrarily and capriciously decapitate wholesale programs that have the salubrious benefit of helping both people and the country simply because you can.
A chainsaw approach to cutting medical care to veterans or supplying rural hospitals with needed operating funds or ensuring that poor students can access funds for higher education is both misguided and cruel.
If the chainsaw cutter cannot provide written criteria of what works and what does not work and what will go in its place, the proposed cuts are short-sighted and are done for malevolent reasons only to satiate the revenge lust of Donald Trump.
And now President Musk and Donald Trump has trained their evil glaze on the federal judiciary and the numerous judges who ruled against Trump over the past decade.
To try to accomplish this feat of malignant retribution, Trump first smears their name by his usual name calling of they being a Marxist, a communist, radical, left wing lunatic, stupid, incompetent and the list goes on and on ad infinitum.
Trump knows that if he can bring the judiciary to bend to his perverted will, it is game over for American democracy as we now know it.
Trump is relying upon his “base” of MAGA voters to blindly swallow his gibberish under the impression that he is, “one of them” and that he is fighting for them.
What is regrettable is that any voter, who subscribes to the theory that Trump is a populist and has not received his invitation to attend a social gathering at Mar-A-Lago and to bump elbows with their avatar and his fat-cat billionaires, is being duped.
The only valuable purpose his voter base served was to bum rush the Capitol on January 6 and to think that they are patriots after they have assaulted police officers and ransacked the Capitol.
And for those criminal renegades, Trump pardons them yet professing his undying love for the “men in blue!”
For those who can, go to the library and check out the classics, Animal Farm and 1984, two novels by George Orwell who prophetically envisioned a society that Trump is now in hot pursuit to recreate.
Be very clear, Trump does not love democracy or the judicial system because, in either case, he cannot run roughshod over principles of check and balances and avoid be scolded for his many excesses that, for now, only a court can check and block.
And if you are waiting for the cavalry in the form of a demoralized Congress to get their lame act together and call Trump and Musk into account, you have better odds with the Cleveland Browns going to the Super Bowl this year.
As stated in the introductory paragraph by the philosopher Efal Revillot, American democracy, as the sleeping beauty, is going into a deep sleep unless the prince charming, the energized American voter, sees the handwriting on the wall and goes to Code One! Which is to register and vote the feckless Congress out in the 2026 elections.
If not? If not…then the sleeping beauty starts to snore and it will be harder and harder to wake her up.
Contact Lafe Tolliver at tolliver@juno.com