America Celebrates its Birthday, while Trump Celebrates Himself
This week, our democracy turned 250 years old and celebrated with its back turned to its president. He couldn’t make himself relevant to our anniversary, even with his fireworks display or his Great American State Fair, because he has done nothing, at home or abroad, to further the cause of freedom.
At home, Mr. Trump attacks the institutions that protect our freedoms and deploys his troops to round people up. He regularly coerces businesses, bullies universities, attacks journalists, and undermines judges. Lying to America, he says he targets dangerous criminals to make us safe. In fact, his troops are on our streets taking nurses, farm workers, daycare center employees, drivers, and restaurant employees. They are taking men and women who entered the country legally and regularly showed up for court hearings to determine validity of their requests for asylum. Ten thousand people a week are now being captured, held in private prisons, shipped around in shackles on leased buses and chartered jets, and shipped off to any country that our tax dollars pay to take them. This is the antithesis of our long commitment to human freedom and dignity.
Nor is Mr. Trump concerned with unalienable rights. He has perverted the U.S. Justice Department to such an extent that the government has lost the presumption of regularity — the idea that when the Department goes to court it tells the truth. Grand juries across America have refused to return indictments as the Americans who sit on those juries now regularly determine the government’s desire to indict runs counter any evidence they present. When jurors have indicted, we have now learned, the Justice Department misled them. Even the most basic rights like citizenship mean nothing to Mr. Trump. Thankfully, by a 6-3 vote, his Executive Order stripping citizenship from millions born here was ruled unconstitutional.
His antipathy to human freedom and dignity is not limited to his domestic agenda. Americans paid for and developed an enormous defense capacity. It was an effort we sustained over generations to keep us safe and to further the cause of freedom in the world. In Mr. Trump’s hands, that power is squandered.
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