NOTE: Donald Trump is proving to be a threat not only to our democracy, but to our way of life, his late night illegal act freezing all current federal funding day before yesterday being the latest example. Yet I fear too many Americans are, indeed, sleep walking (as Liz Cheney predicted) through what is happening as if it’s no big deal. They are wrong, very wrong, which is why I have chosen to offer this extended blog in three installments on consecutive days. I don’t possess any unique insight into what we are facing from the Trump presidency, but I do feel the weight of the crisis we are in and the moral responsibility to try to sound the alarm. The reason the material is too long for one blog is because I am trying to write a comprehensive narrative of this moment in history that has already put our nation into a crisis after only the first week of Trump’s second term. Anyone who is not deeply troubled by what we are seeing either likes what is happening or is not paying attention.
The hard truth is that the democracy and way of life we enjoy can be lost if we take them for granted. The title I have given to these blogs is a take-off from Sinclair Lewis’s 1938 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” not his best novel, but a reminder that what we think will never happen can.
I am not writing to Trump supporters. They are a lost cause. I am writing first of all to provide information to those who voted against Trump and already know the dangers he poses. I am also writing in the hope that some of the people who chose not to vote last November or voted for a third candidate will read this series and realize the mistake they made that helped put Trump back in the White House. They must play a role in the Trump resistance or he will succeed in re-making America into his image.
One last thing. Please share this blog in any way you can to help expand the circle of discussion about the dangers we are facing as a nation. Thank you in advance for doing so.
A Divine Mandate
In his inauguration speech a little over a week ago, Donald Trump said:
“Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to Make America Great Again” (caps his).
Of all the things he said in that speech, most of which was untrue or a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts, in other words, lies, it was the line above that I found most disturbing.
All of us should be alarmed that Trump sees himself as the person God has chosen to make America great again. That he believes he alone can save America was, of course, a theme in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. But now he has placed the blessing of God on himself, making his presidency divine destiny.
Whether or nor he actually believes what he said is questionable, but that won’t stop him from using God to justify whatever he chooses to do. A “savior complex” is common in religious cult leaders. Trump, of course, is not religious, and not even a man of faith, but he knows the power a cult leader has over people and he is exploiting that in every way he can.
Feeding Trump’s belief that he is the chosen one of God are partisan evangelicals who have become his most loyal base of support. Their roots go back to Jerry Falwell, Sr. who founded the Moral Majority in 1979. I had a front row seat in witnessing its birth during my tenure at what was then Lynchburg College (now the University of Lynchburg).
At the time Falwell said his group was non-partisan, that its goal was to engage the majority of Americans he believed were Godly people and wanted to bring God back to America. Within a short time, though, it became obvious that the Republican Party was the political vehicle he would ride in his effort to establish an unofficial Christian theocracy here in the U.S.
He didn’t come right out and tell evangelicals to vote Republican. He called it “voting Christian,” but he defined what that meant in such a way that it was clear that voting Christian and the Republican political platform on which Ronald Reagan ran were one and the same.
As time passed, the Moral Majority morphed into today’s partisan evangelicalism that has become the strongest and most loyal base Republicans have. Trump saw this right away and has been masterfully using them for his purposes since 2015.
His skill in doing so is seen in the fact that personally his behavior should be morally offensive to evangelicals, what with his constant lying, marital infidelity, cheating business practices, and obvious ignorance of what the Bible says, especially the teachings of Jesus, but the political intoxication evangelical leaders have come to experience in being around people of power made them easy pawns for Trump to manipulate.
Once the Supreme Court justices he appointed overturned Roe v. Wade, his statue among them was solidified. Telling the Justice Department to stand down in cases involving Bible reading in public schools, official prayers, and religious education in states such as Texas and Oklahoma will be his next gift to them.
None of this matters to Trump except that it strengthens his power over them. The crowning touch was when he told them that he now believes what they believe, that God saved him from an assassin’s bullet so he can save America by making it great again.
Partisan evangelicals think being great again means turning America into the Christian nation it was founded to be. Trump understands it in a different way. He believes being “great again” means America is the world’s bully much like he is in the Republican Party.
Trump sees power as a tool to dominate others, to win against opponents who are by definition people who oppose what he wants to do. That is how Trump sees the world. Those who are for him and those who are against him.
Partisan evangelicals have their own name for Trump opponents – godless liberals (Democrats) who want to destroy the country’s moral foundations with an anti-religious secularism that excludes Christianity from public life.
As someone who has been in ministry my entire adult life as both pastor and academic, I can tell you first hand that thoughts and actions by Christians fueled by religious zeal have caused some of the worst atrocities in history.
One of the reasons that is most relevant to Trump seeing himself as the instrument of God is that religious zealots don’t believe in compromise. They consider it a temptation to betray the will of God, a betrayal that puts their souls in eternal jeopardy.
Their absolutism about truth rests upon a stunning ignorance about the Bible, and about church history that is a cautionary tale of the often tragic consequences of such uniformed faith.
Because their anti-intellectualism protects them against facts, and truth, they remain adamant that compromise is a tool of the devil.
Even ultra conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona recognized this danger when Falwell and the Moral Majority first joined up with the Republican Party. In an editorial in the Washington Post he said if “these preachers” as he called them get control of the Republican Party “it’s going to be a damn big problem.” They refuse to compromise, he said, because they believe they are doing the work of God (see my book, Evangelicalism and the Decline of American Politics, p. 2 ).
Because of their no compromise attitude, political evangelicals are providing the perfect cover for Trump to fundamentally change the balance of power held by three separate branches of government as mandated in the Constitution.
He is doing it by embracing the theory of the presidency called the Unitary Executive that is an enemy of the Constitution and the form of democracy it created.
The Unitary Executive
Trump controls today’s Republican Party with an iron hand, and now he wants to extend that control to the whole government. The means by which he is choosing to do it is the theory of the “unitary executive.”
Establishing the American presidency as a “unitary executive” is the primary goal of Project 2025 that Trump lied about when he said he didn’t know anything about it. Not only did he know, he is hard at work defining his presidency by it.
According to this theory, the Constitution gives the President absolute authority in controlling the executive branch, including eliminating any substantive checks and balances on his use of power.
Combine that with the Supreme Court granting him absolute immunity for all officials duties (a distinction not in the Constitution), for all practical purposes this makes that power absolute.
Apparently some of the writings of now deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggest that he held this view of presidential power, and observers believe the current Chief Justice John Roberts also does, along with Thomas and Alito. Others might. It is likely the theory of the unitary executive was the philosophical underpinning for the Majority’s ruling that gave Trump absolute immunity for his actions, a decision legal scholars uniformly agree is not in the Constitution and, was instead, a creation of the Robert’s court.
The unitary executive is inherently dangerous because it concentrates unchecked power in the hands of one person, something that would certainly have been anathema to almost all our nation’s Founders, Alexander Hamilton possibly being the one exception.
Legal scholar, Andrew Kent, Joseph M. McLaughlin Chair, Fordham University School of Law, after careful review of historical materials regarding what the Founders intended for the powers of the presidency concluded, that “by far the least plausible original meaning of the Executive Power Clause [of the Constitution] is the one which sees it as granting an undefined amount of British royal prerogative power to the president” (“Executive Power, the Royal Prerogative, and the Founders’ Presidency,” Journal of American History, Vol. 2, p. 404).
Common sense would agree. There was nothing the Founders wanted to avoid more than investing powers in the office of the president that made him [or her] a de factor king. But that is what Project 2025 promotes and the apparent goal toward which Trump is now moving.
One of the impacts of a president who follows the unitary executive model is that it reduces the oversight and budgetary powers of the legislative branch. If challenged, a friendly majority on the Supreme Court could give Trump permission to do just that, a decision that would turn the entire federal government over to Trump.
But there’s more. Once Trump defines himself as a unitary executive, it would be a small step for him to accommodate political evangelicals by issuing executive orders that would establish America as a de facto Christian nation.
It is doubtful Trump would allow evangelicals to hold worship services in the White House as Richard Nixon did because he’s not actually religious and wouldn’t want to have to attend. But the point is, Christianity could easily become America’s unofficial state religion wherein other religions would be tolerated, but only as subservient to Christianity.
In return Trump would completely own partisan evangelicalism, giving him a radical base of support unlike any we have ever seen before now.
The flurry of executive orders and other decisions Trump has made in his first few days in office represent his first salvo fired at any potential opposition to his unitary and absolute rule over the executive branch. They also reveal just how shallow and petty he is as a person, which is why I described him as a”man-child” in my last blog. Here are a few of them with headings that I think appropriately describe their tone.
Mean:
- fired illegally 20 Inspector Generals who are the ethical watch dogs for federal agencies
- ordered ICE to go into schools, churches, and businesses to arrest undocumented immigrants
- ordered federal employees to report colleagues who defy orders to purge DEI efforts or be fired
- shut down all federal government DEI offices
Dangerous:
- halted all medical research funded by the government, including cancer research
- ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to stop issuing public health advisories
- stripped Medicare’s power to negotiate lower drug prices as it did that reduce the cost of insulin
- froze funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global health program that has saved tens of millions of lives around the world.
- pardoned all January 6 insurrectionists, including those convicted of injuring police
- removed security from former government officials putting their safety in jeopardy
- fired illegally 20 Inspector Generals who are the ethical watch dogs for federal agencies
- withdrew the U. S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord
Petty:
- reinstated Schedule F order so he can replace current employees with loyalists
- froze all civil rights cases currently being handled by the Department of Justice
Senseless:
- signed an executive order abolishing citizenship birthright guaranteed by 14th Amendment
Since taking office, Trump’s approval rating has slightly increased. And the Saturday after his Monday inauguration Trump held a rally in Las Vegas where the crowd cheered as he noted all the “great” things he had done in his first four days.
To what extent any of them knew what he had actually done is unknown, but street interviews with them over the years have shown over and again that they never know the facts about anything and don’t know that they don’t know.
Trump, of course, wants them to be uniformed, seeing that as a necessary pre-requisite to convincing them that the lies he tells are actually true. He has managed to convince 31% of all eligible voters to listen only to him and they elected him as a result.
But that was only because 29% of voters supported a third party candidate or didn’t bother to vote at all. Had they joined the 30% that voted for Kamala Harris, Trump would have lost.
Therein lies one of the most important facts amid everything that is happening. Trump seems to have taken over the country, but in truth he is supported by less than a third of the adult population. He looks stronger, and is claiming he was given a mandate the facts prove is another one of his lies.
At the moment, though, Trump’s actual power lies in his control of Republicans who control the Senate and House. Here is where we see that history does repeat itself. Hitler was able to combine the German presidency and chancellorship into one office, the Fuhrer, when the Nazi Party gained control of the Reichstag and Hitler controlled the Party.
That’s what autocrats do. They grab all the power they can and then roll over any opposition. Trump doesn’t have to be like Hitler to change America. All he needs are complaint Republicans in Congress.
This picture is a stark reminder that Senate and House elections are as important as the presidency. Had voters put Democrats in control of both the House and Senate, Trump would not be posing the threat he does now, most especially in putting people in his cabinet who are morally and professionally unfit for the position they will hold.
He would be creating chaos with his rhetoric and unilateral actions that faced legal challenges, but the threat to do permanent damage to our democracy and way of life would be reduced.
But we didn’t win, the Republicans did and they have shown they are perfectly willing to do whatever Trump wants them to.
Being a unitary executive, of course, fits who Trump is and has always been. The company he owns is small, basically a family business, because he wants complete control of it. That is what he wants to do with the country.
It is why he is drawn to dictators. He knows he can’t make himself a dictator, even on day one, but he can use the levers of power inherent in a unitary executive presidency to function as a de facto dictator.
That should alarm every American who wants the United States to continue being a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Whether it will or not is in our hands.
(More tomorrow)
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