To the Editor:
On Oct. 6, 2020 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden gave a speech titled “Battle for the Soul of the Nation,” addressing the country’s deep divisions and the stark 2020 election choices at stake. Biden s message carried into his presidency.
However, four years later, a majority of voters chose Donald J. Trump for a second presidential term. Since then, the despotic impulses of the first Trump administration have exploded with little containment. Divisions have deepened, society has become coarser, political retribution reigns and anyone out of step with this administration’s demands is brazenly demonized by the president himself. What was abnormal even just a decade ago has now been normalized. There appears to be no end to the vitriol of the administration.
Alarmingly, the United States of America under the present government is no longer the nation my schooling taught me: a Constitutional republic with checks and balances provided by three coequal branches, a beacon of democracy, a welcoming refuge to those seeking the American dream, the leader of the free world based on a moral compass, and yes — an imperfect republic but one striving to follow its better angels. In other words, values, goodwill and honorable aspirations reflected “the soul of our nation.”
We have lost our national soul. This administration either grossly misinterprets the Constitution or is flagrantly ignoring it. Examples abound, but Trump’s launching a war this weekend against Iran flies directly in the face of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1, which says only Congress has the power to declare war. Whatever this war’s outcome, it has been started by the man who said “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why “I alone can fix it” (acceptance speech at the Republican convention on July 21, 2016).
Is this truly what we want? One narcissistic individual with the remarkable ability to intimidate, bully and lie incessantly without regard to anyone or anything but himself and his interests.
Wake up folks! We are at a precarious moment not only for the world but for the soul of the nation. If we do not redeem it through a rebuke of Congressional Trump sycophants at the mid-term election, we will ironically experience on this 250th anniversary of our nation’s independence, the potential loss of what we claim to have won in 1776.
David Low
Philomath