Slow Motion Coup?

Two misdemeanors, one for false records, and the other for campaign finance, both with expired statutes of limitation, combined to create a fictional felony, multiplied 34 times, handed to a biased jury with faulty instructions. Egregiously unlawful, horrifying. We either care or will wish we had.

If we were not Americans, instinctively assuming the best of our justice system, believing ourselves above a corrupted judiciary committing election interference, we would call this – in some other country – an attempted coup, a slow-motion coup. Would we not?

Too strong? We now see local, state, and federal actors sworn to be devoid of politics, prosecutors, and judges, revealing they are fatally infected by the disease, no longer offering pretense to objectivity, impartial administration, equal application of laws, even to fairness.

The jarring reality: Trump’s conviction forces on us the real meaning of what is afoot in the country. It is a shocking turn in American legal, constitutional, and political history, not so much about Trump as about us, and about the government – state and federal – we call our Republic.

Like a Shakespearean comedy, we are seeing what the corruption of a judicial system looks like, the folly and horror of it. We are seeing the extent of cowardice in national leadership, political actors benefiting in silence, complicit in the takedown of our fair and impartial judicial system.

Truth is, this is not a Shakespearean comedy. This is not even a Shakespearean or Senecan tragedy, where the reversal of fortunes results from some noble’s tragic flaw. That is all subterfuge, the raw narrative we are supposed to think of and accept – but that is not the real tragedy.

Not only are Trump’s flaws a forced fit for Shakespeare, his candidacy being smothered by a coercive state, but the real tragedy is the one we are all being encouraged not to see.

We are living the tragedy, in real time. We idealistic Americans are the object of it.  In just a few short years, we have been infected with the disease of progressive Marxism, or call it mid-century Maoism, or the slow creep of what used to be “Communism” but is now sold as “Democratic Socialism,” the way fascism was sold in the 1930s as “National Socialism.” 

In short, the real tragedy is this: Unless corrected, we are witnessing the fall of an epic Republic, a nation that changed humanity by conceiving checks and balances, putting in place methods for assuring accountable, decentralized, self-rule from one generation to the next.

The real question, as we watch this tragedy unfold, is whether we will rescue the Republic. Will we together, in a chorus of condemnation, show the courage to call this what it is, a slow-motion coup, coercive forces among us knowingly subverting checks and balances, or will we let it go?

The significance of the Trump conviction goes beyond one man, one candidate, one court, one state, or even one federal administration. It relates instead to us – to who we are, who we choose to be. This is a tipping point for this Republic, a time of great decision – for each of us personally.

We can watch America continue to fall into despair, captured by one-party rule, progressive oppression of the individual, rights and personal significance at the state and federal levels, witness the devolving of a nation, turning us into a failed, relatively short-lived experiment in freedom, fairness, and self-rule – or we can reassert the validity of our Constitution.

To be disturbingly blunt: This is a warning bell, the first heart attack, scan you did not want to see. The mind drifts to another time when 400 years ago John Donne was Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a prescient, controversial, prophetic poet. England’s Civil War was 20 years off when he wrote: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls… it tolls for thee.” We either care, or we will wish that we had.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.