Opinion | Donald Trump's call to suspend the Constitution is too dangerous to ignore

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There was a time, in the naive spring and summer of 2015, when I regarded Donald Trump as a figure unworthy of my attention and therefore refused to write about him. “Why get dirty?” I thought. “Surely he will fade in time.”

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Finally, in July 2015, I relented with this prescient phrase: “Let’s not worry about Donald Trump becoming president”.

There was a time, in the increasingly gruesome months and years that followed, when I found Trump too dangerous to ignore and could not stop denouncing his endless and escalating atrocities against American democracy: the “mexican judges”, the enemies of the State, the “fake news”, the prohibition against Muslims.

Leer en español: Trump’s call to suspend the Constitution is too dangerous to ignore

Even a columnist gets tired of repeating herself. It was for this reason that, during her final stretch of the US presidency and in the years that followed, she largely averted her gaze. I denounced Trump last August, when he grimly warned that there would be “riots in the streets” after the Justice Department raided his Mar-a-Lago residence. And before that, in December 2020when he posted a 46-minute video complaint attacking the presidential election he lost.

But mostly I thought: why bother trying? Embarrassing targets and convincing readers are the columnist’s goals. With Trump, no one would change their minds and neither would his behavior.

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And yet, there are times when attention must be paid, if only to place a mark and for historians—as grand as this sounds—to understand: this went too far. This cannot be allowed not to be denounced.

I could have made this decision after the trump dinner with anti-Semites and Nazi sympathizers Ye (previously known as Kanye West) and Nick Fuentes. Who could have imagined, in pre-Trump days, that a former president of the United States and declared candidate for the presidency would so smear himself and office?

But I feel the need to write today about the most Trump’s recent post on his Truth Social network, because it is at least as dangerous and even more insidious.

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE AND WIDESPREAD FRAUD AND DECEPTION in the close collaboration between big tech companies, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party, do you throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election and announce the rightful winner, Or do you make new elections? published trump. “A massive Fraud of this type and magnitude makes it possible to nullify all rules, regulations and articles, including those found in the Constitution. Our great founding fathers would not want, nor would they condone, phony and fraudulent elections!”

And he continued with: “AN UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES AN UNPRECEDENTED CURE!”.

Let’s pause to take this in. The former president and potential future candidate has suggested suspending the Constitution to support his disturbed notion that he won the election and that his results are subject to change. A man who swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution now kidnaps “our great founding fathers” for the sake of his megalomania.

This is a speech of insurrection through social networks. Nothing —much less an imaginary “Fraud”, so put it in capital letters— “makes it possible to nullify” the constitutional guarantees. Trump is laying the groundwork for a coup.

We could dismiss the post as the latest Trumpian bravado, something he will never be able to implement. Yet the mere willingness to entertain and encourage extra-constitutional action is alarming coming from a man seeking a return to the presidency.

That is why Trump’s words need to be highlighted and denounced. I’m done waiting for Republican leaders to show up. We already know that, for the most part, their guts have crumbled and their courage shrunk to the size of a shrunken grain.

Trump “says a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever going to happen,” was the most that Rep. David Joyce (Ohio), chairman of the Republican Governance Group, said. could stammer in response to questions from George Stephanopoulos of ABC.

The White House did the right thing by rebuking Trump. “Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and must be universally condemned,” spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. In fact, the words should have been issued on behalf of the president himself.

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Others made more baffling decisions. For an entire day, The New York Times, as far as I could find, made no mention of Trump’s post. I assume this was not an oversight but a deliberate decision to not allow Trump to hijack his product for his unpatriotic purposes.

I get it, but I’m glad that the Times has abandoned that strategy with a report on it on Sunday afternoon. The episode illustrates the paradox of having to deal with Donald Trump. We don’t want to give it oxygen, but sometimes we dare not ignore it. This is one of those occasions. It should not be excused or forgotten.