On Friday, Donald Trump praised Robert E Lee. Slaveholder. Sadist. Traitor. Loser. It was his way of offering another “attaboy” to the neo-Nazis that marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, even after they killed Heather Heyer, beat an African American man, and chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
Trump’s statement was a clear nod to his base. That would be the same base that sent pipe bombs to the Clintons, Obamas, congressional Democrats and CNN. The same base that gunned down African Americans at a grocery store in Kentucky after failing to gain entrance to a black church. The same base that killed Jews while in Pittsburgh and then followed up with another slaughter in Poway, California. The same base that burned down three black churches in Louisiana and the storied civil rights center, the Highlander Folk School. The same base that had a hitlist of Democrats, including Representative Maxine Waters, and an arsenal of weapons to do the job. The same base that pretends to be border patrol as it kidnaps and cages human beings and defies law enforcement to do anything about it. The same base that invaded a bookstore in a tony section of Washington DC to intimidate an authorwho was laying out the pathology that places whiteness above everything else, even living.
America is in the middle of an insurrection. Led this time by another rogue government, only this one is not ensconced in Montgomery or Richmond. The architects of rebellion are in the White House. While they have ignited the base by conjuring up a vision of whiteness imperiled by “illegals” crashing the US/Mexicoborder, “black identity extremists” gunning for the police, and terrorists who, apparently, can only be Muslim, they haven’t stopped there.
In a multi-front attack, Trump’s regime has laid siege to the very pillars of America – elections, the rule of law, “We the People” and the constitutional bedrock that Congress and the judiciary are co-equals with the executive branch.
In the process, the White House has dared Congress to fire back. There was that moment while testifying before the House financial services committee, when the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, sneered at Representative Maxine Waters that if she continued to “grill him” and make him miss a meeting, that “I will not be back here. I will be very clear.” That defiance also included blowing right past a congressional deadline, despite the clarity of the law, to release Trump’s tax returns.
