(Dobbs) If "Trump Is Forever," Heaven Help Us

Roe v. Wade might just be an early sign.

On a newscast just last night, I saw the future: a sign at a rally in Ohio with the chilling words, “Presidents are temporary. Trump is forever.”

And then, within hours, the future came. The news site Politico reported that despite almost fifty years of established precedent, five Republicans on the United States Supreme Court, maybe even all six, have voted to void the legal foundation for abortions in America, Roe v. Wade.

Not to soften it, not to weaken it, but according to the report, to trash it. And not because the Constitution expressly forbids abortions, but because it doesn’t specifically permit them. So if Politico’s exposition is accurate, they will overturn settled law because they wish it weren’t. They will allow states to criminalize a woman’s right to choose.

Trump is forever.

Plenty has been said in the past six years about the dangerous direction of today’s Republican Party, encouraged by Donald Trump: turning the other cheek to racism, turning the other cheek to violence, turning the other cheek to Un-American assaults on fair elections at every level of government, and, in the most perilous part of the party’s de facto policy, not just turning the other cheek but proactively doing their damndest to dismember our democracy.

Now add the Court. If Trump is forever, what other institutions will it uproot? What other rights will it outlaw? 

Maybe voting rights come next.

Last week, two prominent never-Trump Republicans raised alarms. Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey, surveyed her own party’s push for election-denying candidates for Secretary of State in states across the country, an office long ignored but now seen as a gateway to control elections: “This is an effort… to change the rules to make the results come out the way they want them to.” And an influential member of Michigan’s GOP hierarchy named Tony Daunt took off the gloves, calling Donald Trump an “undisciplined loser” and “a deranged narcissist,” criticizing fellow state leaders for “encouraging his delusional lies… ensuring their continued hold on power.”

What they’re talking about are people who are conspiring to destroy democracy. If they’ll conspire about something as fundamental as that, what won’t they conspire on?

And what about the politicians at the party’s forefront? Not just Trump, but the younger copycats and wannabes and acquiescent acolytes who would epitomize that sign saying “Trump is forever?” When Donald Trump is long gone, they’ll still be around. Heaven forbid, these are the kinds of people who aspire to lead us. Heaven forbid, these are the kinds of people who would shape America’s next era.

People like Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has been blatantly racist and homophobic and antisemitic since the day she took office and whose latest conspiratorial outrage, spurred by Catholic support for refugees and migrants, was to declare last week, “Satan is controlling the Church.” If crusades persist to impose conservative “Christian” dominion on this nation— let alone the madness of QAnon— she will be at the forefront.

People like Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida— still being investigated by the way for sex trafficking— who shamelessly gave a thumbs up to the January 6th insurrectionists and said afterwards on a podcast, “We’re ashamed of nothing.” If we lose the principle that justice is blind, he will be the first to remove his glasses.

People like Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, whose passion for firearms is so fanatically strong that in a country where guns already outnumber people, she festooned her young family for last year’s Christmas card not with boughs of holly, but with more guns. Big ones. If common-sense gun reform gets shot full of holes, she will have her finger on the trigger.

People like Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who just can’t stay out of trouble. After claiming a month ago that he’d been invited to Congressional cocaine-laced orgies, photos then emerged of the congressman himself at a party wearing women’s lingerie, followed by his detention last week at the Charlotte airport when he tried to take a loaded Staccato C2 9-millimeter handgun onto an airplane. He’d already been stopped last year for essentially the same thing at the airport in Asheville. When character no longer is a common qualifier for high public office, he will be the poster boy.

And since his name is being bandied about as a presidential candidate in 2024, I have to include people like Fox commentator Tucker Carlson, whose true character was laid bare last weekend in an exhaustive profile in The New York Times by a montage of his soundbites with one theme and one theme only: if you’re a white man in America, you’re in trouble and you’d better fight back. If there’s ever a race war, Carlson will strike the match.

These are examples of what “forever” has in store for us. 

But people like these are just the low-hanging fruit.

There’s also Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, head of the House Freedom Caucus, who just weeks after the 2020 vote was called for Joe Biden, tried to use Government to achieve political goals by getting the National Security Agency to investigate never-substantiated claims of rigged voting machines, then by getting the Department of Justice to overturn the election.

And Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who also abused his authority by threatening Twitter— which of course kicked Donald Trump off its service for inciting violence— with a federal inquisition if it didn’t sell out last week to Elon Musk, who has hinted that he might allow Trump back on.

And one cannot compile this list without the likes of Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, who put an animated video on social media showing him killing New York’s liberal Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who bedecked himself in bulletproof body armor and spoke before Donald Trump at the so-called “Save America” rally on January 6th, assuring the crowd that it was “the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”

That’s exactly what they did.

And of course there’s the would-be Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy of California. He flat-out lied late last month about a news report quoting unflattering comments he’d made about Donald Trump, calling it “totally false and wrong”… until audio leaked proving it totally true and right.

Liars across the landscape. Trump is forever. 

Then there are the forever-Trumpers in the statehouses of America. Like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who in a hyper-hypocritical dismissal of conservative disdain for Big Brother in government, has banned books he deems dangerous. And Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who in a bonehead move that financial analysts say cost his own state more than $4-billion and the United States almost $10-billion, initiated border-blocking “enhanced inspections” on thousands of trucks— legally carrying perishable food for American consumers and high-tech components for American factories— crossing in from Mexico.

This story wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the ten unpatriotic Republicans in Congress who last week voted against legislation that would allow the United States to get more weapons more quickly into Ukraine. Or the seventeen who voted against a resolution vowing support for Ukraine’s neighbor, tiny Moldova, which could be the next sovereign nation in Vladimir Putin’s crosshairs.

President Biden laid out the stakes on March 28th: “The cost of failing to stand up to violent aggression in Europe has always been higher than the cost of standing firm against such attacks.” Sad to say, these congressmen stand up only for themselves.

If "Trump is forever,” and these are the people who perpetuate his legacy, we are in trouble.

Because of the three rock-ribbed right-wing Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, who currently are its youngest members, it will be a while before the Court can be resurrected as an equitable intermediary for the American people. But we have congressional and gubernatorial elections later this year. That is where mainstream Americans, whose sign should say “Democracy is forever,” must take their stand.

Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.