...regarding American views about our system. There's this notion...that you have to respect the office even if you don't respect the man. This is part of American political culture. And yet we're talking about a man in Trump who is shitting on the office on a regular basis. Right? But we have to respect the office.
I think what happens, in this attempt to maintain political norms in the face of someone who has overturned all of those norms so disastrously, are, for example, these arguments about whether we should refer to Trump's lies as actually being what they are — which is lies — and not as "untruths," "mistakes," "alternative facts" or some other verbiage. A wise man once said that the only reason our system in America works is that it's based on the notion of shame. A lot of what we think are legal restrictions on the office of the presidency are not actually legal restrictions. They're actually moral restrictions that the founders didn't bother to put in writing because they simply assumed that shame would keep a person from abusing the powers of the presidency. They did not recognize the possibility of an absolutely and utterly shameless man being in this position.
But Donald Trump's power comes from the fact that he has no shame whatsoever, and yet we in the media continue to treat him with a level of respect that his office deserves, all the while watching him overturn all those moral norms. It's time to stop pretending that this man and situation are normal. It's time to treat Donald Trump as an enemy of the state, which is what he is.
There has literally not been a single major crisis that our country has faced in the last year and a half. What happens when this government is confronted with a real crisis? We are on the precipice right now. If we are not willing to do whatever it takes to overturn this moment, then we deserve what's coming to us.
A thought experiment: If this right-wing Christian fundamentalist or fascist movement were to get its way, how would America be different on a day-to-day basis for the average person?
It would be a country that looked enormously like a Christian version of Saudi Arabia or a Christian version of Iran. Nearly one-third of Americans can be defined as Christian nationalists. That is, by the way, more than 100 million people. Let's just keep that in mind for a minute. More than 100 million Americans believe the country is a Christian nation that should be predicated on Christian values and where religious minorities have rights — but rights determined under Christian law. That is the country we are moving towards. That is not the United States that our forefathers thought to create.
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