On the fifth anniversary of January 6, 2021, let us be clear of the danger we face, and the moral corruption we are allowing to destroy “The last best hope for earth,” to quote Abraham Lincoln. We put a man in our White House who is not merely tearing it down physically, but methodically tearing down the cornerstones of democracy along with it.
Donald J. Trump carried out a criminal plan to overthrow the government of the United States, and according to over a 1,000 federal prosecutors in his first impeachment, and according to the Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, appointed after his second impeachment, he would have been indicted and convicted if he were anyone other than President of the United States.
Let this sink in – it’s because we have taken the blood, sweat and tears of our Founding Fathers, and the blood of countless American combat veterans, and traded it for the chaos of a real-time reality TV show. We gave the keys to the kingdom and nuclear codes to a charlatan who would be nothing but a buffoon if he were leading yet another business into bankruptcy, but who is dismantling the life work of hundreds of thousands of American government servants and undoing the world order established over the decades following WWII.
The simple truth is that on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump committed treason; he tried to overthrow our government. After the violence started, he knew people were in danger, including his vice president, and he refused to help. In fact, he poured gasoline on the fire and tweeted messages that easily could have cost Mike Pence and his family their lives. When Pence told Trump that he had no choice but to follow the Constitution, Trump said, “You’re too honest, Mike.” And when William Barr resigned rather than be part of an insurrection, Trump took every conspiracy theory the attorney general had debunked, and used them as red meat for an angry mob who then marched on the Capitol.
We seem to have fallen into collective amnesia, we’ve forgotten that Americans were beaten, wounded and died defending our government and that Trump pardoned every criminal who brutalized the police and engaged in sedition. And Congress abdicated its duty to impeach him a third time, because, according to Section 3, of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, those pardons aided and abetted the insurrectionists and disqualified Trump from holding any federal office.
We have allowed ourselves to become spectators to events that will lead to our country’s demise. With the help of Vladimir Putin and social media, tens of millions of Americans fell for the greatest con in the history or our country. Despite religious upbringing, civics classes, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, pledges of allegiance to the flag and to our constitution, we elected a man who called a day of violence a day of love. A sex offender and a convicted felon leads the country; a country that had been a beacon of liberty, justice and the rule of law for free and enslaved people all over the world.
READ: These Bucks County Republicans Participated in the January 6th Insurrection
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump stood on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., and told his supporters: “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.” The audacity of that lie was the trigger for one of the darkest days in American history. But Trump, like Hitler, will never be satisfied merely re-making America in his own image. He is redrawing the international map into spheres of influence that resemble the late 19th Century. In the last 72 hours, Trump orchestrated regime-change in Venezuela and told the world that he will be running Venezuela at least temporarily. He is ignoring, and thereby negating, all of the checks and balances designed by our founders to limit one-man-rule. And like everything Trump, he will continue to get away with illegal/unconstitutional actions unless the other two co-equal branches of government do their sworn duty – a duty they abdicated five years ago on this very date. The longer they wait, the more they render themselves irrelevant, inviting further disaster; because, as Winston Churchill warned observing Hitler, “The appetite may grow with eating.”
