Just about everything that has gushed out of our Great News Funnels in recent days and weeks seemed to be sounding an all-too-real warning: Our world's greatest democracy was shaking and basically going to hell in a handbasket.
(Whatever that means.) But we know the bottom line about what it all really means: What we really need is a bold, patriotic new movement that transcends old name-calling and is committed to Make America Governable Again.
Our new MAGA movement must be rooted in America's heartland on a foundation that includes millions of you who are patriotic Republicans. Especially those of you who finally began to realize that you've been conned by power-seeking populist politicos who have been feeding you all those feel-good lies that gave you good reasons to hate the other side.
But you'd always felt uneasy when the loud motor-mouths in your crowd saw no difference as they shifted from "Lock her up!" to "Hang Mike Pence!"
Then this week, a social media thing flashed across your news screen—and you hated what you saw. For the first time in history, a former U.S. president was suggesting that a U.S. military chief of staff deserved to have been executed. Yup, your hero: Trump.
In the final days of the Trump presidency, Gen. Mark Milley got word that China feared Trump was so upset at being defeated that he might order the military to attack an enemy. Milley believed he had to reassure China so that Beijing wouldn't go on hair-trigger alert status, miscalculate and erroneously plunge the nuclear powers into unthinkable war. So America's top general assured his counterpart in China he would alert Beijing as to the president's thinking.
Now, Trump's social media called Milley's promise to China a "treasonous act" and declared: "This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH."
You know Trump's comments like that can trigger a violent act by an unhinged follower. We all know that—and so does Trump. So of course, Wednesday night, those of you who are patriotic Republicans tuned to the Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Library's huge Air Force One auditorium to see how the seven Republicans running for president would handle the questions about Trump's potentially menacing declaration. And many of you who are true patriots surely were shocked that the Fox News journalists running the debate never even asked about it. And none of the Republican presidential candidates chose to mention it.
And this forces us all to recognize and confront the urgent reality that confronts America today. Our political leaders—especially those who have long been proud to champion the conservative values of the Republican Party—are failing to fulfill their obligations of governance and leadership. The Grand Old Party populist demagogues dismiss their party's non-demagogic traditionalists as "RINOs—Republicans In Name Only."
But they've got it backward. They abandoned Ronald Reagan's conservative values. In Washington's backward politics today, it is the House Freedom Caucus demagogues who are performing as the de facto RINOs. And it's the traditional Reagan Republican conservatives (the ones the de facto RINOs call "RINOs") who have become so fearful of condemning Trump's illegal and unpatriotic deeds that they fake political laryngitis rather than tell the truth to those of you who still call yourselves Trump followers.
So our best hope is that the best of our people will step forward and lead your Real RINO leaders to do what they haven't had the guts to do. Begin with a ceasefire on all name-calling. Then launch a movement that transcends old politics and has just one simple commitment—let's Make America Governable Again.
Tribune Content Agency