When Barack Obama was in office, Republicans were apoplectic about his use of executive orders. They called them "unilateral edicts" and "power grabs." As Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley once said in a floor speech: "The president looks more and more like a king that the Constitution was designed to replace."
What a difference a week makes.
Now many of those Republicans are as quiet as church mice as Donald Trump pumps out executive orders at a fevered pitch, doing exactly what he said he'd do during the campaign, for all of those who were paying attention: advancing a white nationalist agenda and vision of America, whether that be by demonizing blacks in the "inner city," Mexicans at the border or Muslims from the Middle East.
Trump's America is not America: not today's or tomorrow's, but yesterday's.
Trump's America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.
And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide. That is a vision of America that has galvanized ordinary American citizens in opposition in a way that is almost without precedent. We are inching toward anarchy as both the people and the president refuse to back down.
Not only is Trump a literacy-lite, conspiracy-chasing, compulsively lying bigot, he is also a narcissistic workaholic who now wields the power of the presidency. You could not have conceived of a more dangerous combination of characteristics. He is the paragon of the clueless and an idol of the Ku Kluxers. But Americans are not prone to suffering in silence. America's period of mourning has ended; the time of anger and active opposition has dawned. The greatest two motivators of electoral activism in this country are a desire for change and durable fear: In Trump, those two are wed.
The most recent move to excite and outrage the opposition was Trump's move to "indefinitely suspend the resettlement of Syrian refugees and temporarily ban people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States," according to a New York Times analysis.
As CNN reported Sunday, on Friday night the Department of Homeland Security decided that the travel restrictions "did not apply to people with lawful permanent residence, generally referred to as green-card holders."
The report continued, however: "The White House overruled that guidance overnight, according to officials familiar with the rollout. That order came from the president's inner circle, led by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon."
Yes, that Steve Bannon, the one who was recruited to the Trump campaign from his job as executive chairman of Breitbart News and is now Trump's chief strategist, the one who said of Breitbart to Mother Jones in July: "We're the platform for the alt-right." Alt-right is just a slick, euphemistic repackaging and relabeling of white nationalists, whether they be white separatists, white supremacists or actual Nazis.
Also, as The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, Trump added Bannon to the National Security Council. This is outrageous. What does Bannon know about national security? It is becoming worrisome that in this reign of bigotry, Bannon may be the brain and Trump the brawn; Bannon the spiritual president and Trump the spurious packaging.
America will not stand for this, so if obsequious conservative politicians or lily-livered liberal ones won't sufficiently stand up to this demagogic dictator, then the American people will do the job themselves.
Over the weekend, protesters spontaneously popped up at airports across the country to send an unambiguous message: Not in our name; not on our watch. It is my great hope that this will be a permanent motif of Trump's term. If no one else is going to fight for American values, it falls to the American people themselves to do so.
The New York Times