As July 2016 rolled around and the Republican National Convention in Cleveland rapidly approached, my concerns over a brokered convention were topped by two paramount details: one was Donald Trump’s mental stability, and the second was his fluidity on the Bill of Rights, the constitutional anchor guaranteeing basic civil liberties for the American people. I recall how at the time, Trump’s platform was shaping up to appear in many areas, further left than Hillary Clinton’s and certainly matching aspects of Bernie Sanders’. Not even Mrs. Clinton called for a universal health care system for which Mr. Trump and Clinton’s socialist primary adversary Sanders were in total symmetry. For that matter, Mr. Trump failed first to even differentiate his platform from Sen. Sanders by his own unintended admission to both Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski while campaigning in New Hampshire. Once he did however, he doubled down and agreed to all points one-by-one as did Sanders (video is below). This was of course but a microcosm of the chaotic Trump campaign ‘strategy’ and his intentional courting of disenchanted Sanders voters fretting over their jobs “moving overseas to Mexico” while openly attempting to purge the GOP’s conservative majority.
There is no reason to doubt Jimmy Carter’s point that the current president is ‘malleable’. He is, after all, a populist — first and foremost.
And let us be clear: Donald Trump is neither conservative nor a true Republican. He five times flipped party affiliation and was hostile in his opposition to Ronald Reagan just 30 years ago. As recently as 2013 Mr. Trump declared his “friend” Hillary Clinton to have been “above and beyond everyone else” to have ever served as Secretary of State while discounting the Benghazi investigation as immaterial in the eyes of voters when endorsing her for another run at the presidency.
It is well known too Trump openly supported his “big league” newly elected mayor Bill De Blasio in early 2014. But most striking was the questionable phone conversation between he and Bill Clinton prior to his announcing his candidacy last year. No credible publication failed at picking up on this, asking whether there was collusion behind the scenes between the Clintons and Trumps. Trump’s own children could not legally vote in the New York closed primary because they were registered Democrats. For that matter, Ivanka Trump could have passed for Bernie Sanders when promising free child care in Cleveland as well as the entire kit-and-kaboodle.
No one in the audience appeared to care. In fact, they supported her pledge as if she would make it happen herself.
The biggest myth though seemingly grappling historically Republican voters by their ears involves the Second Amendment, which Mr. Trump initially pledged to leave untouched. That, too, has been compromised all while he claimed at first he would nominate only conservative justices before walking back the claim. What too few willingly acknowledge in their willingness to submit to the billionaire real estate mogul is how Mr. Trump is simply holding the party hostage at gunpoint (no pun intended) regarding the Second Amendment and the United States Supreme Court. We know already his intention of rejecting the pro-life platform as well as support Planned Parenthood. The most glaring example of fear mongering however among conservative voters in tying the demand for total fealty to Donald Trump to the Supreme Court is in the following meme that proved every bit as dystopian in its vision to the new party nominee’s keynote address.
It is true the death of Justice Antonin Scalia was a major blow to the Republican cause, though the Trump-nominated replacement, Neil Gorsuch, has filled in nicely. The same would be true should Clarence Thomas, 67, choose to retire or suddenly pass away. And while Trump has no intention of directly opposing Roe v. Wade regarding abortion rights (as is the case regarding his ‘talking-out-both-ends’ on the abortion industrial giant’s place in the budget), he likely will gamble his entire political fortunes by playing off the Second Amendment to the High Court while supporting his ban on high-powered assault weapons and arbitrary revocation of the American people’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments by introducing No Fly lists for select individuals classified as “terrorists”, who would then be ineligible to own guns.
Mr. Trump claims to be pro-NRA; all well and good. His son Donald Jr., is a big game hunter — whoopty-doo! But the problem now lies in his pledge to sue anyone he, again, arbitrarily deems guilty of libel against him for obscene sums in restitution, even threatening to sue Sen. Ted Cruz in South Carolina simply for filming campaign ads of Trump’s past interviews in opposition to him.
Mr. Trump has notoriously supported strengthening eminent domain laws for expropriating land for both public and private sector projects. His very contentious interview with Bret Baier from October 2015 reveals far more to Mr. Trump’s ruthless, cold, calculating character. This all ties into Trump’s selective willingness to employ the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to be “great stewards of this land”. Do keep in mind that Cliven Bundy is considered by some in the federal government to be a domestic terrorist for treading on protected federal land. Harry Reid most certainly does.
So, why again is President Trump a threat aside his intention to gut the Second Amendment, and yet too few Republicans are willing to acknowledge it? Consider the impetus behind President Obama’s accelerated efforts to erode it via executive fiat in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings — and how Donald Trump was among his most enthusiastic supporters in claiming Obama “spoke for him and all Americans.” Trump’s predecessor in the White House lied about most details behind his presidency. The difference in why Trump is the bigger liar than Obama on the Second Amendment is best summarized in his tweet praising Obama’s call for expanded gun control following Sandy Hook.
Is Trump breaking all of his main campaign platforms with respect to DACA and the border wall? No, because he openly supported ‘touch back amnesty’ early in his campaign. He is however American history’s greatest threat to the survival of the First Amendment and the rule of constitutional law through his approach to the NRA and gun control. I opposed Trump’s nomination on grounds of his fascist bend to his populist politics and hyper nationalism. His sanity is, in my mind, a topic that I do not believe has truly been addressed in spite of tests to the contrary, for narcissism is not exactly the same as Narcisstic Personality Disorder and therefore is not a truly diagnostic issue. Trump’s most loyal supporters do not care about the Constitution now, given they remain in unison on their desire to stick it to the Establishment and the Democrats.
I tried to approach Trump’s presidency on a ‘per policy’ basis for him to earn my approval, which all politicians should. I knew he was nuts; hell, we all did. But now, there’s no saving grace for me with regards to Trump. Yes, he managed to ram the tax cuts through Congress, but only to pacify the party’s conservative base. Beyond that however, he remains to a degree committed to maintaining Obamacare, to the quagmire that is Syria and Iraq, has utterly scrapped his plans to fortify the Mexican border with anything more than an elaborate fence, intends to keep DACA while he accelerates the war on drugs, and now attacks the Second Amendment by way of the First over social media.
Trump’s longstanding position and designs for gutting the Second Amendment are far more radical than anything Barack Obama ever publicly proposed. If due process is denied arbitrarily on these grounds based solely on a ‘see something/say something’ standard, the ability to detain illegal immigrants indefinitely will soon extend to American citizens who are then stripped of their citizenship rights by birth. Any political dissent can be labeled as a ‘mental illness’ in light of historical precedence during the Cold War in the Soviet bloc and by The Telegraph’s report on a study concluding that right-wing voters suffer from fear of diseases (‘mysophobia’, meaning ‘germaphobia’). President Trump, while still a candidate, proposed banning gun ownership for anyone placed on a federal ‘no-fly list’, a list normally reserved for suspected terrorists. Might Guantanamo Bay’s gates be reopened for a far more insidious purpose?
President Trump’s proposals would not only signal the beginning of the end to the Second and First Amendments, but the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Tenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments protecting rights to privacy, states’ rights, due process, cruel and unusual punishments, the rights to a speedy trial and furthermore, civil rights for all American citizens. It is conceivable that American citizens could be, for the first time since the internment of Japanese Americans into detention camps during World War II, subject to arrests without due process on the basis of their mental health, race, political persuasion and even religion in accordance to who might be targeted as ‘mentally ill’. It should also be noted too how Trump, while still a candidate, supported the placement of American Muslims on federal databases who could then be arrested without due process if suspected of terrorist ties — and his most devout supporters predictably rallied behind him.
Should the Second Amendment be repealed or robbed of all its teeth, it is almost a certainty that it could only occur under a Republican president, not a Democrat. The reason? Republican voters are well aware where the Democrats stand, but they would never suspect for a moment that their own party would take the final step to either nullify the wording of the law through bans on gun rights and gun sales, or simply force the full repeal of the Second Amendment by eliminating habeas corpus, a privilege enjoyed by every American citizen. Every Democrat lawmaker will line up, rank-and-file, behind Trump, while his most loyal supporters, left-leaning Republicans like Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lindsay Graham and the Alt-Right, whose values mirror many of those who are Democrats, will ensure this passes.
Well now, Trump is finally sticking it to a majority of Republican voters. How much worse off would we be under Hillary Clinton if we ask honestly as he grows more unhinged by the day, only now as the most powerful man on Earth? If he presses forward on gun control to inevitably revoke the rights for ordinary Americans to be protected under the law as citizens (due process, habeas corpus) by arbitrarily labeling certain people as ‘mentally-ill’ without a search warrant or legitimate psychiatric evaluation, he cannot be permitted to remain in office. I believe it entirely conceivable that he will use these excuses to indefinitely detain political enemies or undesirables. If he does, he must be forcibly removed by hook or by crook.
The president has embarrassed America on the international stage while humiliating conservatives into supporting him under the illusion that he might actually prove to be a ‘less bad’ president than Hillary Clinton. But now, his statist designs are far more extreme than Barack Obama or the Clintons ever were, behaving as a true American fascist politically blackmailing Republican voters. If Trump remains the best alternative, win or lose, the GOP can provide, its electorate have been unwittingly complicit in forfeiting their moral right to complain when they are eventually forced to surrender their coveted Second Amendment — and from there, the republic to the Trojan horse.
THE CONSERVATIVE HISTORICAL REVIEW 