Straight Up? By Al Sikes

Straight up! If whiskey is your drink don’t dilute it. Straight up: do you want this White House, any White House, to have the unilateral power Donald J Trump is exercising? The power to convert hell into heaven by multiple strokes of the pen? That is what MAGA promises.

The power to empty prisons of loyalists regardless of what they did. All it took was the stroke of His pen? The power to change the rules of import, export and deport without going through Congress or the Courts? The power to subjugate our great enemy to the north, Canada?

We should have a Constitutional Convention and put these questions and many more straight to the people. I want to vote on principles shorn of Trump and Kamala Harris. Neither was the equal of a nation that needs to be converted from hell to heaven and especially not the person who framed the election as a transcendent conversion. Madison Avenue is enthralled; most Americans are no longer amused.

Trump is said to be a populist which, roughly translated, means to take the “popular” attitude and convert it to campaign promises. But nobody can, if they admit it, figure out what Trump stands for although I guess tariffs is a clear-cut example. How much time, I wonder, did the average voter, any voter, spend researching or watching debates or reading up on tariffs? Or, more broadly, searching for principles that might suggest rationality?

What Trump did is power through the electorate on the back of the most inept withdrawal from any country, perhaps in the history of warfare, while refusing to adequately defend our own border. And that is the point. We elected somebody to make the border right, not to become a dictator while preening among the internationally wealthy at his private sanctuary. Citizen Kane would be embarrassed.

Congress should give very specific direction by enacting laws establishing the authority the Executive Branch has to put tariffs in place. Yep, that institution, the Congress, which has never skirted the edges of heaven, but is certainly probing the depths of the earth.

Now we learn that that other institution, the Courts, is filled with “left wing maniacs”. Okay, I admit, Trump is certainly beating the Congress on attempts to undermine America. His mission:  infantilize the Congress while scouring the depths of language to characterize and undermine the Courts. The point is simple: only I, Donald J Trump, have the solutions and you must not interfere with me. So, lawyers: stand down. Celebrated economists: stand down. Broadcast news: stand down. Certainly Congress stand down. Mute and dilute are his ways and means.

But, relief is on the way, halting and unsure as it might be. When the President, ours, decides to reengineer the international economy to fit his fantasies a lot of money will be lost. Some never to be found again. And that will make a lot of people very mad and they will demand, and that is what it will take, that their elected representatives do something.

While I might like my whiskey straight up, it takes a thoughtful electorate, led by wise people, to amend the Constitution and we are not up to that. Amending the Constitution is a pre-operative move and we are in the middle of surgery. Today we need Patriots; selfless men and women whose only money or vanity in the game is truly wanting to make America better.

Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.