The Creeping Tyranny of Donald Trump
The president-elect's tendency to go after people who criticize him by sending false and provocative statements to his 17 million Twitter followers not only imperils those people and their organizations, it also poses a clear and present danger to our democracy.
Democracy depends on the freedom to criticize those in power without fear of retribution. Presidents and president-elects throughout history have refrained from publicly condemning individual citizens for criticizing them. That sort of thing occurs in two-bit dictatorships with leaders intent on stamping out dissent.
No president or president-elect has ever before bypassed the media and spoken directly to large numbers of his followers to disparage individual citizens who criticize him. That occurred in the fascist rallies of the 1930s.
America came closest to this in the 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy wrecked the lives of thousands of American citizens whom he arbitrarily and carelessly claimed were communists.
McCarthy's reign of terror ended when a single man, U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch, asked him publicly, during the televised hearings McCarthy was conducting, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" In that moment, Americans began to see McCarthy for the tyrant he was.
Not incidentally, McCarthy's assistant was Roy Cohn, an attorney who perfected the art of character assassination. Cohn was also one of Donald Trump's mentors.
Trump's capricious use of power to denigrate and even endanger his critics must end. He is not yet our president. When he becomes so, and has far greater power, our freedom and our democracy could be gravely jeopardized.
We must join together to condemn these acts. We must ask: Has Trump no sense of decency?
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(Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few," now available in paperback. His new film, "Inequality for All," is now out on Amazon, DVD and On Demand. His daily blog is at www.facebook.com/RBReich/.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
