Nov 8, 2016 - - - - - - - - Nov 8, 2017

What a difference a year makes -- election day 2016 to today.  David Smith, writing in The Guardian, looks back to the moment just before 3 AM on November the 9th:   "Donald Trump moved to the microphone at the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan as an astounded, euphoric crowd chanted:  'USA!   USA!   USA!'   The president-elect gave a thumbs up, spoke graciously about opponent Hillary Clinton and made a promise:  'Now it's time for America to bind the wounds of division.'"

Smith continues:  "The billionaire businessman's acceptance  speech . . . raised the hope that Trump the president would differ from Trump the candidate.   Today, however, many of those hopes have been dashed.   Critics say he has divided America more deeply than ever, driving wedges between black and white, female and male, rural and urban -- perhaps as a deliberate political strategy."

Looking back to that moment a year ago, Smith says, those "were just words on paper because there has not been healing, no binding of the wounds. . . ."   Charlie Sykes, a conservative pundit who was not a Trump supporter, was unimpressed by the election-night speech.   "He can read a speech written by others that may have some grace notes but his presidency has thrived on division, stoking acrimony and inflaming the culture wars.  No one who paid attention during the campaign should be surprised, but it's still shocking to see a U.S. president behave like that.  Division is the business model for much of the conservative media and it is central to the political strategy of the president."

David Smith says that:  "It was his inaugural address, not his election night speech, that revealed his true colors:  'Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities;  rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation . . . . the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives. . . . This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.'"

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to both Clintons, pointed out the irony.   Although Trump's election night comment -- "binding the wounds of division" -- echoed Abraham Lincoln's similar phrase on the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln was appealing to "the better angels of our nature."   Trump, however, hammered home his negative and divisive message of "American carnage."

Smith reminds us that, just one week into his new presidency, Trump's executive order banned refugees and immigrants from Muslim majority countries -- the first of many orders dividing us "along the fault lines of class, culture, gender, gun ownership, race and religion."

And Smith quotes Blumenthal, a biographer of Lincoln:  "Trump pursues polarization whenever he can.  It's his life raft.  He cannot survive without dividing.  All he has is his base, such as it is, and it can only be held together through constant alarms, emergencies and appeals to its instincts.  Instead of the better angels of of our nature, he appeals to the demon instincts of his base."

Some have suggested that Trump was not always a white supremacist but that is was a persona he created to get elected, and he can no longer tell the difference.   Smith points to the fact that he has "continued to fire up his core support with an average of one [campaign style] rally per month, seeking to delegitimate institutions through 'us against them' rhetoric and claiming to back the common man against the elites."   In West Virginia, he told his supporters that the Russia investigation was an attack on them;  In Arizona, he railed against the "damned dishonest" journalists who "don't like our country."   The crowd chanted back:   "USA!   USA!   USA! . . . CNN sucks!   CNN sucks! . . . Build that wall!   Build that wall!"

Smith continues, quoting Neil Sroka, communications director of Democracy for America, a liberal advocacy group.   When he and his colleagues heard Trump's election night speech, he said:  "There was not a moment of hesitation for us in the room:   we knew he was lying.   This is a man who has spent his life saying what he needs to say to get ahead.  In a moment of shock for him, somebody handed [the speech] to him and he read it. . . .  There has never been a president more focused, more dedicated and more committed to dividing the country against itself over and over again. . . .  The only way he wins is by dividing us further.   It's our job to unify the country specifically against his divisive kind of politics."

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Meanwhile, Bob Mueller's investigation -- and the important evidence that honest journalists are uncovering -- are closing in with new evidence almost every day that shines the spotlight of justice on the Trump Team's multiple ties to Russia.

Either we continue the path of Trump's first 10 months in office, hurtling toward authoritarianism, with a complicit Congress and backed by a more conservative judiciary with each nomination they approve -- or we find a way to slam on the breaks.   And the most likely way that will occur is through the Mueller investigation, multiple indictments of Trump associates, and ultimately impeachment of the president himself.

Ralph