Civil War

No shots have been fired. None likely will be. But what is it but civil war when the president and attorney general are supported by a majority of senators and a substantial block of voters and propagandists in defying the law, ignoring the Constitution, spreading disinformation, and seemingly attempting to convert America into a proto-fascist state?

To cite but one example of Republican-supported assault on American democracy: Despite conclusive evidence of Russian interference in our electoral process, massively documented in the Mueller Report, last week Trump admitted he’d just had an hour-long phone talk with Putin in which the subject of Russian interference in our elections didn’t come up. 

Trump and his supporters have all but invited Russia to reprise its efforts to swing the election to Trump in 2020 and are putting the brakes our intelligence agencies attempts to uncover and thwart continuing Russian interference.

Even non-shooting civil wars can be ugly. That’s likely to be the character of the eighteen months between now and the election. And if Trump loses by a narrow margin, he will claim fraud and refuse to accept results, whereupon unpredictable, possibly horrific, consequences will ensue.