(Editor’s Note: Received this personal email from a longtime friend – Robert L. Harris. He is an experienced and keen observer of history, government & politics. I telephoned and ask if he would allow me to publish as a guest commentary on Phillipsbillboard.)
The more Trump and his crowd gin up their angry and vicious campaigns against people, the more resistance will grow. You cannot turn around 160 years in one pivot. You cannot undo the New Deal, and accomplished all in that era in a matter of weeks or months.
Trump and his team have done exactly what so many commentators said he would do with Project 2025 — which he denied, PERIOD. No waiting and seeing. America’s movement forward — as well as westward — has been defined by liberalism and a spirit of climbing the next mountain to lift people up — not put people down. An awful war was fought between two America’s — and two visions for America in 160 years ago. Free people won.
Despite periods of unrest and divisiveness, America has always moved forward. The people have stepped up time after time. Is America today defined by Trumpism or fighting Trumpism? Just over a half century post the Civil War, America went overseas to fight the First World War. And, within that same generation, we went back to finish the job — defeating Nazism and other forms of tyranny — literally across the Globe. Those America were defined by fighting movements like Trumpism.
America went to work after that — extending into even bigger things. The first Republican after Roosevelt built an interstate highway system and under a young and exciting President built a program to take us to the moon and beyond. America has always and will always move forward. Southern Conservative Lyndon Johnson then took on racism — head on. With the help of Hubert Humphrey, he builds a coalition to pass landmark Civil Rights legislation in the early-mid 1960’s.
Landmarks have been established all across our land.
Trump and Trumpists want to take us backwards. They want to take away freedoms and norms that were achieved by hard works, sweat and consensus building.
Trump and Trumpism cohorts are trying to turn conventional politics and government on their heads. Politics is the art of people relations. Trump is about only Trump. What relations? These people are turning — no, have turned in many respects — conventional Christianity on it head. They are turning doctrines of governing and faith on their heads.
This cannot be sustained — that is unless Trump and this Trumplican allies are allowed to destroy the norms and institutions that have been built over the last two and half centuries. And America cannot do that!