Democracies do not condemn and kill people without a trial. Dictatorships do that.
That’s what the U.S. military did on President Trump’s orders when it destroyed a small boat and its 11 occupants in the Caribbean.
Without proof, Trump claimed they were members of a narco-terrorist drug cartel carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the U.S.
It seemed small for such a long-range mission. But even if it was as Trump claimed, it was yet another tyrannical act by the man who once joked about being a dictator “only on Day One.”
U.S. practice has properly been to intercept drug traffickers on the high seas, which the Coast Guard does well, and then try them in our courts. The purpose of that deadly air strike was to give Trump another boundary to erase in his obsession to nullify constitutional limits on his power.
A clear and present danger
If the military is now accepting his illegal orders, Congress needs urgently to withdraw the war powers he’s invoking — and not wait until he unleashes lethal force on an American city.
His dictatorial intentions are a clear and present danger.
Unsatisfied with the victories he and his party have won fairly, he’s demanding that Republican states gerrymander the Democrats out of power permanently. That’s so corrupt that not even a majority of Florida Republicans favor it, according to a new Common Cause poll.
Revisionist history is a telltale sign of a dictatorship. Trump’s complaint that the Smithsonian Institution says too much about “how bad slavery was” makes him the first president since the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis to have a kind word for it.
He’s trying to erase all references to racism from our great museums, national parks, schools and the military. It’s book-burning without the flames.
Nothing escapes Trump’s clammy grasp. He bullies great universities, white shoe law firms, TV networks and even normally supportive news outlets like the Wall Street Journal.
Repeated abuses of power
He now wants to preempt state control of elections by banning mail voting and resorting to hand-counted paper ballots — a formula for mass confusion and corruption.
He has abused emergency powers to impose arbitrary tariffs on imports from around the world and begs the Supreme Court to let him keep the fruits of this multibillion-dollar tax on American consumers. Two lower courts said it’s unconstitutional.
Without explanation, the Supreme Court has paused lower court orders to let Trump freeze funds voted by Congress and to fire a Democratic member of what’s supposed to be an independent Federal Trade Commission.
Those decisions are not final, but they augur badly.
Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court became Trump’s overt accomplice in the subversion of constitutional government by immunizing him and all other presidents for any crime committed under the color of official duties. It is the worst decision since the 1857 Dred Scott case that brought on the Civil War.
Trump wants to rebrand the Department of Defense the Department of War without a thought to the billions it would cost or what that verbiage says about his own twisted personality. In a rare outburst of responsibility, a House committee has blocked it for now.
Decimating families
Trump’s decimation of families and workplaces for mass detention and deportation of even law-abiding immigrants is unprecedented in a democracy. He wants to make the citizenship exam more difficult and to deny naturalization on political grounds.
The masked officers who don’t identify themselves are more appropriate for a gestapo than to the U.S. Now, the court has given them a green light to resume racial profiling, another blow to the Constitution.
The abuse of emergency powers is epidemic in GOP states as well, particularly Florida. No previous governor would have thought, let alone created, something as hideous as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Alligator Alcatraz, burning more than $200 million without legislative approval on a function that’s a federal responsibility.
The Legislature seems poised to obey DeSantis’ command to gerrymander more seats in Congress. His well-packed Supreme Court has already shown that Florida can’t trust it to enforce the Fair Districts amendments that voters adopted in 2010.
All of this proves the maxim of Lord Acton, a 19th century British parliamentarian, that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It’s also confirming of a remark often, if incorrectly, attributed to 18th Century British stateman Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
With rare exception, the Republicans who run Congress and the Florida Legislature are as indifferent to their constitutional oaths as Trump. Most seem to care mostly about keeping him from opposing them in their primaries.
If U.S. troops were that selfish, the American experiment in democracy would have ended long ago. The rot from within now threatens to accomplish what no foreign enemy ever could.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
