Has the United States Gone Insane?
Will a 20-year-old violent mental case determine the election?
“YOU preserved [Trump’s] life, and YOU don’t preserve anything YOU don’t have a purpose for.”
A prerecorded prayer that was shared during service Sunday morning (7/14) from Pastor Jentezen Franklin of Free Chapel in Georgia.
“Joe Biden sent the orders,”
Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), minutes after the Butler, PA rally shooting, demanding that Biden be prosecuted.
“Today is not just some isolated incident… The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH and Trump’s VP running mate) on the X social media platform July 13th.
“The whole crowd will rise in unity and shout, ‘USA!’ with their fists up… He will be assuming a role like a folk hero or a martyr because he survived a near-death ordeal.”
Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University historian and expert on the presidency.
“The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) on X, Julu 14th.
“[Many] Democrats fear that Trump’s brush with death will make him something else: a landslide winner in November.”
Journalist and documentarian John Heilemann, Puck.com, July 15th.
We know guns cause a disproportionate number of civilian deaths, numbers which have significantly risen since the 2008 Heller vs D.C. Supreme Court ruling, the first such determination in two centuries that somehow the Second Amendment – passed during the era of flintlocks and muskets to let citizen soldiers keep their guns in peacetime – created a ubiquitous right for all citizens to keep and carry firearms. 330 million firearms (10% are semiautomatic assault weapons such as the AR-15 found with Mr. Crooks’ body after the assassination attempt on July 13th), to be correct, with guns accounting for the greatest fatalities in the US of children and teens. In the last two decades, a conservative Supreme Court and a lot of GOP state legislatures have expanded the rights of gunowners and contracted most attempts at gun control. We must be crazy!
So instead of recognizing the “almost” effectiveness of a legally purchased AR-15, the MAGA base has ignored that reality in favor of elevating Donald Trump to a superhero. Gun control? Forgetaboutit! It was ordained. Or as the Associate Press (July 14th) put it: “A chorus of Christian leaders is giving various degrees of credit to God for Trump’s survival.” As the ex-President fist pumped after being shot, the assassination attempt “is already energizing Trump’s base and, for some voters not sold on the former president, could overtake uglier images such as his Jan. 6 speech that whipped up supporters who stormed the Capitol, his ambivalent response to the race-based violence in Charlottesville, Va., or any number of events during and after his presidency that have prompted concerns about his fitness for office…
“Trump was still en route to the hospital when supporters began turning images of the former president emerging from the shooting into heroic online memes, extensions of the strongman persona that he began cultivating during his television career… They also began blaming Biden and other Democrats who warned that Trump is a danger to democracy, even when the shooter’s identity and motives were unknown. Sunday morning, the FBI identified the gunman as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican.” Noah Bierman and James Rainey writing for the July 15th Los Angeles Times.
When security analysts noted that Wisconsin law allows open carry of most firearms almost everywhere, including in the vicinity of the GOP convention in Milwaukee, the Secret Service indicated that there was nothing they could do about that outside of a small perimeter immediately around the convention center. We are indeed totally insane!
So, Trump is a superhero ordained by God to lead the nation, God’s choice for the November election. Clearly, not all ministers echoed that call, but enough did. But add to all this quasi-deification is the recent Supreme Court ruling that the President is indeed above the law within his official capacity (undefined), and that a criminal inquiry generated by evidence garnered from purported official acts could never be used against a president, ever.
The scales of justice are weighted… in favor of the ex-President. Trump-appointed federal judicial loyalists (and some older rightwing justices from earlier conservative administrations), given lifetime appointments with impeachment being the only mechanism for a forced removal – there are virtually no ethical restrictions on Supreme Court justices either – are bending over backwards to ensure that Trump is never convicted of virtually any crime where there is the slenderest thread that might be connected to an official act or statement. We are almost certain that if there are no more criminal convictions of Mr. Trump before November (a certainty), particularly federal crimes, if Trump is reelected, those cases will be shut down under his judicially expanded control over the DOJ… perhaps even self-pardoning.
Among the most obviously biased federal trial judges in the nation is a seemingly unqualified District Court judge in Southern Florida, Aileen Cannon, presiding over Trump’s classified documents case, a clear threat to our national security. Cannon has been reversed on appeal several times in connection with biased rulings favoring Trump. She just did it again. On appeal.
On July 15th – “coincidentally” decided on the first day of the court’s session after the assassination attempt on Trump’s life – Cannon reversed a quarter century practice (used by Republican and Democratic administrations alike) in ruling that since there was no constitutional or statutory basis for the appointment of a federal “special prosecutor” (specifically Jack Smith) without Senate confirmation, the case against Trump must be dismissed. Her dismissal sent waves of confusion in connection with Smith’s other criminal cases against Trump. If there were even a Supreme Court ready to uphold such a biased ruling, we have it today.
In the UK, after 14 consecutive years under rule by the Conservative Party, the recent transition to its replacement Labor Party was quiet, dignified and without incident. And then there’s the U.S.
I’m Peter Dekom, and with Trump as hero, God’s choice and above the law, I sure hope Americans do not mistake our form of government for a representative democracy, which it is most certainly not.
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