Forget all of the monarchical gold doodads and childish plaques dissing Democratic presidents that now defile the White House, thanks to President Trump. Ignore his egomaniacal addition of his name on the Kennedy Center. Such travesties are easily undone once he’s gone.
Alas, the same can’t be said for the incalculable damage that Trump has done in just one year to the nation’s precious intangibles: its character and constitutional protections at home, and its alliances and reputation globally.
Trump’s is a perversely remarkable achievement in so short a time. The havoc he’s brought — in lost healthcare coverage, unfunded medical research to cure diseases, crackdowns on academia, higher prices from tariffs, inflated debt, erosion of the rule of law and the tarnishing of America’s credibility and leadership abroad — is worse than many, myself included, expected. The impacts of many actions will outlast him. Some losses will be irreparable.
Americans knew what cruel coarsenessTrump was capable of, knew that he promised retribution and a makeover to some backward-looking imagined American greatness devoid of diversity. But what most people didn’t bank on was just how unchecked he would be by Congress or, so far, the Supreme Court — his constitutionally coequal partners, or so the founders thought.
As it happens, never has Trump’s unhinged radicalism and affinity for force been so plain and threatening as it’s been in this month of the first anniversary of his return to power, looking from Minnesota to Greenland and Venezuela.
He has Minneapolis under siege: Thousands of masked, armed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement outnumber local police about 6 to 1. More than in Trump’s militarization of Los Angeles, Chicago and other Democratic-run cities before, in Minneapolis Americans are seeing countless witness videos of the abuses of his “mass deportations” campaign by newly created paramilitary forces. After the killing of citizen protester Renee Good, the officer who shot her three times is going uninvestigated, let alone punished, while Trump’s Department of Injustice served subpoenas on Minnesota’s governor and five other Democratic officials, accusing them of obstructing operations.
Thanks to a compliant Republican-run Congress, Trump has tens of billions more for the rest of his term to hire additional storm troopers, ill-trained in police tactics or the Constitution. Meanwhile, he repeatedly threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act, a 219-year-old law, rarely used (contrary to Trump’s claims), allowing him to deploy military troops domestically. Red states apparently need not fear.
Trump’s reshaping of domestic law enforcement to emphasize force and his politicization of the military will be hard to unwind. Civil liberties and essential respect for law enforcement and the military will be the loser if they’re not.
Consider the declaration on Sunday of Trump’s resident White House brownshirt, Stephen Miller, that “only federal officers are upholding the law” in Minnesota and that local and state police must “surrender.” Back the blue? Nah, only the ones in fatigues or plainclothes, tactical vests and masks. It’s madness. He and Trump have it backward.
One member of Minneapolis-area law enforcement, Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley, on Tuesday stood flanked by other area police chiefs to say they’d all had “endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from U.S. citizens, including local cops — all people of color.” Bruley told of one of his off-duty officers who was stopped without cause by ICE agents, guns drawn, and asked for proof of citizenship. When the encounter grew threatening, she started to record. An agent slapped her phone away. The feds left when she finally told them she was a police officer. Said Bruley: “If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day. It has to stop.”
Yes, it does. But here’s a safe bet: It won’t. Even after Trump, that lawless attitude will persist among federal agents who were hired during his term.
Simultaneously, there are the Trump-provoked events abroad. In his grubby grab for North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally Denmark’s autonomous island of Greenland, after his takeover of Venezuela, Americans and the globe see that Trump aspires to be not the leader of the free world, like American presidents for 80 years, and not even a mere king of America, but emperor of the Western Hemisphere, unbound by alliances and international law.
Even as Trump falsely claims U.S. possession of Greenland is necessary for national and world security against China and Russia — the United States has long had the right to use Greenland for security bases and operations — he repeatedly acknowledges that he simply covets the icebound island the way he did big properties in his Manhattan real estate days. Ownership is “psychologically important for me,” he told the New York Times this month. That’s crazy.
Meanwhile, at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, allied leaders served notice that they’re fed up with mollycoddling the needy American president to maintain the U.S.-led system, notably NATO, that’s prevented a third world war.
As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it in his address, “We are in the midst of a rupture.” He got a standing ovation. Meanwhile, for the first time in a century, Canada’s military has reportedly created a hypothetical model of an invasion by the United States. A model friendship between two neighbor nations, broken.
On Wednesday the man all of Davos was talking about — just as Trump likes it — arrived. The U.S. president seemed to rule out using force against Greenland and Denmark (and other NATO allies) but nonetheless played the mob boss: “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no and we will remember.”
The only folks enjoying his chaos more than Trump himself are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Kremlin lieutenant Kirill Dmitriev reposted one of Trump’s diatribes against U.S. allies and added approvingly, “Collapse of the transatlantic union.”
Not yet, but Trump has time: 1,095 days to go. Who’s counting? The whole world.
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