By David K. Shipler
See Part I Here
Like a
broken clock that tells the right time twice a day, former President Donald
Trump’s recent call for the Constitution to be terminated was a fleeting moment
of honesty. He never honored the Constitution in practice, despite his oath to “preserve,
protect, and defend” it. He sought to undermine its foundational separation of
powers, and of course its mechanism of electoral democracy.
Still
raging and lying about the 2020 election, he wrote in early December, “A Massive
Fraud [sic] of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules,
regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” His post
appeared on his media platform, Truth Social, whose title aptly echoes the paradoxical
name the Soviet Communist Party gave to its newspaper: “Truth” (Pravda
in Russian). Need we cite Orwell yet again?
This
prominent a dismissal of the Constitution was a break from a long, modern
American tradition. By and large, all sides in the most acrimonious debates
ritually cite the document in reverence. They interpret it variously to suit
their own arguments, to be sure, sometimes with convoluted sophistry. But they
rarely hope to cast it aside. Even the January 6 rioters hailed the
Constitution as they violated it by storming the Capitol to disrupt the sacred
process of counting Electoral College votes.
So,
what is the significance of Trump’s remark? He has been sneered at for years
whenever he utters absurdities, with much of the public thinking that he has
finally crossed the line into a territory of his own demise. But for millions
of his spellbound supporters, that line is as imaginary as the horizon,
receding as he approaches it.
After his comment on “termination,” only a bare majority (51 percent) of registered voters polled by Quinnipiac University said it disqualified him from running again for president. A substantial 40 percent said it was not disqualifying. The figures among Republicans were troubling: Disqualified—just 17 percent. Not disqualified—72 percent. Democrats, predictably, were the opposite: 86 percent said he was disqualified, 12 percent said not disqualified.
