Events of the past few weeks have highlighted the current vulnerability of the US, not militarily — that is a subject for another day — but in other dangerous ways.
Unlike some commentators, I would not go so far as to say that US democracy is on its last legs, but it is encountering threats that few ever expected it to face.
US President Donald Trump’s autocratic tendencies have recently become more pronounced than ever. True, he has lost several court cases testing the scope of his powers.
However, he and the Republican-controlled US Senate are busy stacking the federal courts with conservative judges, and the effects of his appointment of two ultra-conservative US Supreme Court justices are already visible — for example in the recent decision to allow Trump to use Pentagon funds to pay for a wall along the US border with Mexico.
Should Trump win re-election, he is likely to have the Supreme Court by the throat.
The latest phase of his presidential self-aggrandizement began with Trump’s co-opting of the secular celebration of Independence Day in Washington.
Traditionally, families gather on the US National Mall or at various sites around the capital to watch the fireworks.
However, ever since he saw France’s military parade on Bastille Day in 2017, Trump wanted his own extravaganza.
The Pentagon stalled him as long as it could, but this year he got a parade of sorts: a military flyover and tanks parked in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where he spoke.
Special bleachers were set up in front of the Lincoln statue (which I half expected to stand up and walk away in disgust), and seats were reserved for Republican donors.
For a president to speak publicly on July 4 is highly unusual, but Trump gave a long address that occasionally mangled US history.
He seemed to think, for example, that the US had airports during the Revolutionary War.
Americans like to think that their democracy has guardrails — understandings that, even without specific laws, impose limits on certain types of behavior, ensuring that there are things US leaders just will not do.
This is part of what holds the US together — or has held it together.
Yet just days after the July 4 festivities, Trump threw away another major guardrail by launching a racist tirade against four leftist US congresswomen of color: If they do not like the US, he tweeted, they can “go back” to where they came from.
This bigoted rhetoric has often been expressed to marginalize immigrants throughout US history, but no president had ever said such a thing openly.
Soon, he would go even lower.
At a re-election campaign rally in North Carolina on July 17, Trump stood by while the crowd chanted “Send her back,” after he attacked US Representative Ilhan Omar.
Omar embodies Trump’s most teeming prejudices: a dark-skinned Muslim immigrant with an anti-Israel streak.
Even some Republican members of US Congress, who almost never take issue with Trump, quietly expressed unease about the viciousness of the chant.
This sent Trump into a familiar dance: The next day he tried to distance himself from the chant, claiming that he had quickly interrupted it, before assuring the chanters the following day that he thinks they are wonderful people.
Trump, of course, has demonstrated racism for most of his adult life.
He and his father, accused of keeping black people out of their housing projects, settled a case with the US Department of Justice out of court.
He preceded his presidential run by falsely charging that former US president Barack Obama had been born in Africa.
He later went after US Representative Elijah Cummings, a black lawmaker who represents a district that includes part of Baltimore, Maryland.
As chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform, Cummings has been highly critical of the conditions in which migrants apprehended along the southern border are being held.
In tweets two weekends ago, Trump described Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
Trump’s aides have admitted privately to journalists that they expect Trump’s attacks on black and Hispanic people to help him win next year’s election.
The most recent reminder of the vulnerability of our democratic election system came in the form of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony in two US congressional hearings on July 24.
The power of Mueller’s words was almost lost in all the on-air chatter about his signs of frailty.
However, while the lanky war hero and former FBI director was sometimes shambling, his terse answers in appearances before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and its Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence made two things clear: Russia had engaged in a far-reaching and possibly successful effort to affect the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election — something that Trump still denies — and it is already trying to affect the next year’s US presidential election.
“They are doing it while we sit here,” Mueller said.
In addition, contrary to the claims made by Trump and his lackey, US Attorney General William Barr, Mueller repeated that his report did not exonerate the president.
However, more startling was Mueller’s insistence that various people around Trump, and Trump himself, had used the election campaign (and presumably the US presidency) to enrich themselves, and that such arrangements made Trump and others, like his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, vulnerable to blackmail by foreign patrons.
In his testimony, Mueller also asserted, unprompted, that to accept election help from foreign countries, as Trump did in 2016, is a crime.
Mueller reminded all Americans with an open mind that the guardrails around our democratic election process are crashing down.
In a television interview with American Broadcasting Corp’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump asserted that he would accept foreign help again. After an uproar, he took that back, although only partly.
In fact, the day before Mueller testified, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary: “The Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections.”
The day after Mueller testified, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report stating that Russia would be involved in the next US presidential election, and that countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China have the capacity to interfere in US elections as well.
Despite these warnings, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked Senate consideration of two bills aimed at strengthening US election security, arguing that the Democrats were trying to give themselves “a political benefit.”
Presumably McConnell was reflecting Trump’s position on safeguarding the US election process against foreign intervention.
At least McConnell removed any question that Trump and leading Republicans view Russian interference in US elections as being to their advantage.
All of them are now complicit in exposing US elections, the heartbeat of democracy, to ill-intentioned outside interference.
Elizabeth Drew is a Washington-based journalist.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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