Elbridge Gerry was the 5th Vice President of the United States from 1813, until his death in 1814, serving under President James Madison. Gerry signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. More importantly, he did not sign the Constitution after saying at the Constitutional Convention debates in Massachusetts, “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” If Donald Trump were semi-literate he would emblazon that quote on a Chinese made red hat and sell it to his followers for 30 pieces of silver. Vice President Gerry, I am sure, did not envision a president who would be at the helm of the ship running democracy aground, but he turned out to be omniscient.
Donald Trump has called the U.S. intelligence agencies Nazis, “I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake out. I think it’s a disgrace, and I say that ... that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do,” Trump said at a news conference in New York in January of 2017. He has sent unnamed militaristic emissaries to cities, who have beaten onlookers and rounded up protesters, spiriting them away in unmarked vehicles. This turn back the clock fascism should be labeled, Make the Soviet Block Great Again. Instead of protecting what the Declaration of Independence dictates; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the President in Kenosha, Wisconsin yesterday made a tragic incident about himself. When asked about the mother of Jacob Blake a black man shot seven times in the back, at point-blank range by a police officer, Mr. Trump said, “ I hear she’s a very fine woman, I was going to speak to her—but… then I heard there were a lot of lawyers on the phone…I said I have enough lawyers in my life.”
How much guilt is a man carrying, that comforting a grieving mother, who has called for peace and rejected any violent reaction to her son’s shooting, that he is overcome by fear at the mention of the law?
The President is a man so bereft of history and Americanism that he apparently is not aware he is the President of the Virgin Islands and the Jewish American community as well. "I stood with ‘your’ prime minister at the White House to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," Mr. Trump told a Republican Jewish American group in April of 2019. Democracies are fragile, so fragile that their lifespan is generally between 200 and 300 years before they collapse. As we teeter on the cliff’s edge of ruin we face an election cycle that Joe Biden has repeatedly said: “is for the soul of America.” That soul can easily leave the body politic and become the spirit of a once-great nation—if we choose unwisely. We have a chance to stop the diminution clock from ticking with a vote. Common sense cries out for it and by the way, so does America’s Democratic-Republic. Let us not let America expire, it is 244 years old and counting.
Vote in 2020 for Change.