I'M TELLING YOU, MY DEAR, THAT IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE

In 1970, Johnny Cash asked the musical question, “What Is Truth?”  On Sunday, Team Trump weighed in with a couple of unconventional answers.  

Trump’s TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani got all mystical, telling the host of Meet The Press that “Truth isn’t truth.”  While the world was trying to figure out whether Rudy was being oracular or merely Orwellian (or maybe just stupid), Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren chimed in with a definition of her own.  “Truth is the new hate speech,” she tweeted. 

“What a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”  That’s from George Orwell himself, in the novel 1984.  Decades ago, when the year 1984 was still in the distant the future, I read the book for a high school English class.  We took it for granted that Orwell was describing life in Russia.  Nothing like that could ever happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  

There’s an old saying, often wrongly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  Steven Dutch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, has updated that maxim.  “Eternal vigilance,” he says, “is not the price of liberty. It’s the price of everything. Every object you own has to be maintained. In society, there will always be people who oppose whatever you hold dear. They will try to overturn, evade or weaken your reforms. Others will seek power, wealth, or status without doing any work. The only way to keep what you have is to guard it constantly.”

We failed to do that in 2016, and now we have a president who takes orders from Russia while his party looks the other way.  But Putin’s man in D.C. wasn’t very bright to begin with, and his cognitive decline is clearly accelerating.  He seems to be re-enacting a cheap reality show version of King Lear’s descent into madness, insisting on unremitting praise from his courtiers while raging incoherently against his enemies.

Trump was overconfident when he won the election.  He thought being president would be easy.  He’d spent a lifetime using his wealth and fame to stay out of serious trouble, and now – or so he thought – he’d have the resources of the federal government to watch his back while he basked in the support of his fans.  What could go wrong?

But Trump and his family broke laws along the way, and they were sloppy about it.  The press that indulged him when he was a playboy real estate tycoon and covered him as an entertaining change of pace when he got into politics, belatedly began doing their job once he was elected president.  Now his sins are catching up with him. 

His public life and his private life are both under scrutiny.  Robert Mueller knows things Trump desperately wants to keep secret.  Ditto for Michael Cohen, for Omarosa, and for Stormy Daniels and her attorney Michael Avenatti.  Trump is cornered, and he’s completely unprepared to deal with people who can’t be bought or bullied.  All he can do is rage-tweet.

Hillary Clinton got it right when she said “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”  Or anything with else.  These are dangerous times.  It’s scary how much is riding on the November 6 mid-term elections.  Eternal vigilance everyone!