In what increasingly is looking like just another day in Donald Trump’s America, the president of the United States—a man who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and this nation’s laws—took to social media to rant that several Democratic members of Congress should be executed.
Their crime, according to our untethered-from-reality commander-in-chief?
Sedition.
What these Democratic lawmakers—all of whom, unlike this president, have served this country in military or defense capacities—said in a video was that people in the U.S. armed forces have no obligation to follow an unlawful order. Our soldiers’ duty, they said, was to the Constitution and this nation, not any one person.
To objective observers, what these Democrats said comes awfully close to stating the obvious. If one takes an oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, then one defends the Constitution.
Yes, the oath of enlistment also states that service people will obey orders from the president of the United States and the officers appointed over them, but it qualifies that by saying those orders must be in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
And the Uniform Code of Military Justice clearly says that no member of the military is obligated to obey an illegal or unconstitutional order.
So, again, the Democratic lawmakers simply stated the obvious.
But this president thinks the law is for other people, not for him, and treats sacred oaths the way dogs treat fire hydrants.
Hence, the presidential fulminations that elected officials should be executed just for telling military personnel that the law matters and that they should defend the Constitution.
At the same time, here in Indiana, five Republican members of the Indiana Senate have been “swatted” since they came out in opposition to the president’s plan to gerrymander our state in his favor.
“Swatting” is a form of political terrorism. It involves having someone call to report a domestic disturbance or some other threat at a public person’s home so that the police arrive.
It’s threatening in at least two ways.
The first way is that it’s always possible the police call could turn violent.
There’s a reason officers fear domestic disturbance calls. They know that, in such situations, tempers are likely to be flaring and, in a country in which there are more privately owned firearms than people, there’s a good chance a gun will be present.
So, they come in wary and, both to protect themselves and anyone they think might be in danger inside, ready to respond to any perception of a threat.
Police officers are trained to assess threats, of course, but they’re also human beings. That means they can make mistakes like anyone else can.
And their mistakes can be deadly.
The second way swatting is designed to terrorize is more subtle.
It informs the public official that people who might wish him or her harm know his or her address. In this case, the intent was to show members of the Indiana Senate not just that they were vulnerable—but that their spouses, children and neighbors were, too.
All of this ugliness flows from the top—from the guy in the White House whose ego was so bruised by losing the 2020 presidential election that he summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., and sent the bloodthirsty bunch off to the Capitol to try to hang his own vice president.
Mike Pence’s offense.
He honored the Constitution and followed the law.
It’s naïve to think that violence has never been part of American politics. It has.
But rarely like this.
It’s easy to understand why Donald Trump feels desperate right now. Polls show that he’s 10 points underwater on his strongest issue, immigration, and nearly 40 points below breathing level on his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
He’s losing—and when he starts losing, he always tries to intimidate or bully his way back into the contest.
He says he will make America great again.
But all he’s doing is making America angry, frightened and violent.
We saw what this president was capable of on Jan. 6.
We should have learned from that.
But we didn’t.
