Why Couldn’t Liberal America See the Wolf Beneath the Sheep’s Clothing?

This piece will be running in newspapers in the very red congressional district (the sixth district in Virginia) in which I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012.

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For more than twenty years, I’ve said that the defects of both Conservative and Liberal America have played an essential role in generating our national crisis. The Conservative side incubated a destructive force, and the Liberal side proved too blind and too weak to stop it.

Long before Donald Trump stepped onto the political stage, it was clear that the Republican Party was becoming something different from the normal American political party it had been under Eisenhower, Reagan and the first Bush.

As the GOP’s most influential figures became people like Newt Gingrich, and Conservative America’s most prominent voices became those of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, American politics started down a different path.

• Deception, distortion, and manipulation increasingly squeezed out genuine communication.
• The demonization of opponents eliminated virtually all sense of “we’re all Americans.”
• Through a growing list of unprecedented actions, the Republican Party assaulted not only political norms but even the constitutional framework itself.
• The cultivation of grievance and outrage eroded the supporters’ interest in cooperation and compromise.
• The party ceased to seek any accomplishment other than the acquisition of ever-more power.

To all this, the Democratic Party and Liberal America generally remained blind. Deluded with the thought that this was still “politics as usual,” Democrats continued to talk about their “friends across the aisle.”

As a result of this blindness, the destructive force taking over the Republican Party continually gained in power—over the party itself, and over the nation.

Only now—with Donald Trump—has Liberal America generally awakened to the darkness. But Trump is merely the Republican Wolf without the sheep’s clothing. The Wolf had grown increasingly visible for decades, but Liberal America failed to notice until Trump stripped away the disguise.

Why did the dark and destructive nature of what has taken over the Republican Party of our times have to become as monstrous as THIS for Liberal America to recognize that it was in a fight for the soul of the nation?

• On the Access Hollywood tape, he bragged about grabbing women sexually without their consent because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
• He spread false claims about Barack Obama’s birthplace for years before finally admitting Obama had been born in the United States.
• He has repeatedly described whole ethnic groups of immigrants in degrading and dehumanizing language.
• He repeatedly portrayed himself as the nation’s singular savior, declaring “I alone can fix it” and sharing posts depicting himself in quasi-divine or messianic terms.
• He repeatedly declared that “Nobody knows more than I do about” taxes, technology, trade, courts, and many other fields in which there are actual experts.
• He repeatedly praised authoritarian leaders including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un while publicly attacking longtime democratic allies.
• He demanded personal loyalty from law-enforcement and national-security officials whose constitutional duty was to the country rather than to him personally.
• He has repeatedly exposed private citizens, and judges, and civil servants who opposed him to the threat of violence.
• He pressured Department of Justice officials to support claims of election fraud they believed were false.
• He encouraged supporters to come to Washington on January 6, 2021, and then delayed for hours before doing anything to stop their attack on the Capitol.
• Later, he pardoned all those convicted of crimes committed on his behalf in the January 6 attack, and subsequently set up a taxpayer-funded compensation program for many of the very people who had assaulted police officers in their attack on the Capitol.
• He illegally took highly sensitive government documents after leaving office and defied subpoenas requiring him to return them.
• He attempted to pressure a foreign leader of an American ally under threat from an American adversary — Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine – to give him illegal political help, by withholding military aid the law required him to give.
• He has used the presidency to enrich himself in ever more blatant ways, including directing government events toward his own properties, and demanding $10 billion in a suit filed against the IRS.
• He took over the Kennedy Center, removed its leadership, installed loyalists, made himself chairman, and had the institution renamed the “Trump-Kennedy Center.” He has made himself the first President to put his own face on American currency.
• He has treated the White House as his own property, destroying the East Wing without authorization, to replace it with a ballroom that was likewise unauthorized.
• He was found liable – by a unanimous jury of ordinary American citizens — unanimously of sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, and ordered him to pay millions of dollars in damages.

What a shame that it has taken so extreme a case to get Liberal America to recognize “what a grave threat has been rising to degrade America.

As “the soul of America” hangs in the balance, both sides of our deliberately-divided nation have some soul-searching to do. Just as Conservative America needs to look within to discover how it could be led to side with something of such monstrous character, Liberal America should inquire of itself why it took the discarding of the sheep’s clothing for it to recognize the wolf on the prowl.