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This week, our democracy turned 250 years old and celebrated with its back turned to its president. He couldn’t make himself relevant to our anniversary, even with his fireworks display or his Great American State Fair, because he has done nothing, at home or abroad, to further the cause of freedom.
At home, Mr. Trump attacks the institutions that protect our freedoms and deploys his troops to round people up. He regularly coerces businesses, bullies universities, attacks journalists, and undermines judges. Lying to America, he says he targets dangerous criminals to make us safe. In fact, his troops are on our streets taking nurses, farm workers, daycare center employees, drivers, and restaurant employees. They are taking men and women who entered the country legally and regularly showed up for court hearings to determine validity of their requests for asylum. Ten thousand people a week are now being captured, held in private prisons, shipped around in shackles on leased buses and chartered jets, and shipped off to any country that our tax dollars pay to take them. This is the antithesis of our long commitment to human freedom and dignity.
Nor is Mr. Trump concerned with unalienable rights. He has perverted the U.S. Justice Department to such an extent that the government has lost the presumption of regularity — the idea that when the Department goes to court it tells the truth. Grand juries across America have refused to return indictments as the Americans who sit on those juries now regularly determine the government’s desire to indict runs counter any evidence they present. When jurors have indicted, we have now learned, the Justice Department misled them. Even the most basic rights like citizenship mean nothing to Mr. Trump. Thankfully, by a 6-3 vote, his Executive Order stripping citizenship from millions born here was ruled unconstitutional.
His antipathy to human freedom and dignity is not limited to his domestic agenda. Americans paid for and developed an enormous defense capacity. It was an effort we sustained over generations to keep us safe and to further the cause of freedom in the world. In Mr. Trump’s hands, that power is squandered.
Instead of earning global respect for deploying forces in the service of freedom, we now earn global dread for deployments merely in the service of destruction or coercion. He has ordered our military illegally to kill fisherman in the Caribbean and Pacific without trial or declaration of war. He ordered them to capture the President of Venezuela so he could be charged for crimes in U.S. Courts. At the time, Trump said the United States would run Venezuela. But as that beleaguered country struggles to recover from a devastating earthquake, neither Venezuelans nor anyone else in the world, sees any benefit from being “run” by America.
Then there is Iran. In that catastrophic failure, America’s armed forces achieved what no enemy every could — we empowered Iran to block the most important commercial waterway in the world, the Strait of Hormuz. And the Commander-in-Chief’s wanton use of Patriot missiles dangerously drew down stockpiles and emboldened the enemies of the very freedoms we celebrate on the Fourth of July.
And Russia. Which knows that Donald Trump has no interest in protecting Ukraine. Even without direct American help, Europe has been able to purchase U.S. Patriot missiles and deliver them to Ukraine. Now, because of the folly in Iran, we no longer have sufficient numbers to Patriots to sell. Russia knows that, and according to the New York Times, this week it “launched 68 missiles and 351 drones into Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s Air Force. None of the 23 ballistic missiles were intercepted.” The only defense against those 23 ballistic missiles are Patriots. Freedom in Europe suffers when America fails. Meanwhile, in Asia, this week, an emboldened China test fired new long-range, submarine launched ballistic missiles.
The ideas of freedom, human dignity, and unalienable rights have not merely been celebrated by Americans, we have fought and died for them throughout our history — at Lexington, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, and the beaches of Normandy. We struggled over generations to live up to them. On Blair Mountain, at Seneca Falls, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in front of the Stonewall bar, at Standing Rock. This July 4, we celebrated the 250th year of holding these values dear.
And, for many, that meant celebrating without celebrating Trump.
Now in fairness, not every American ignored Donald Trump this Fourth of July. Many Americans still follow him on his dark road. I spoke with one of them this week. He said that Democrats are communists who want to take control of the private sector. He told me that doctors are wrong to prescribe pills when living right is what makes us healthy. He told me Mexicans work hard but some are criminals, and that’s who we are rounding up. What I heard in there was that we still have a lot of work to do in our long fight for freedom, human dignity, and those unalienable rights.
On our great birthday, I celebrated our resolve to continue that fight.
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