The Masked Versus the Unmasked
How can
Trump opponents take on people who will stop at nothing?
By Roger Cohen
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 15, 2020
·
Back
in the other world, before all was stilled, a neighbor in Colorado would tell
me it was time for liberals to “gun up.” The other side was armed, he argued,
and would stop at nothing. What would we tell our grandchildren when Ivanka
Trump took office as the 46th president of the United States in 2025 and term
limits were abolished? That we tried words, all manner of them, he scoffed, but
they had the rifles.
I
waved him away. American democracy was not Hungarian democracy, now dead. Its
checks and balances were resilient. Too many guns are an American scourge. No,
he insisted, you will see by June 2020. Civil war, or something like it, is
coming. Gun up, dude, before it’s too late.
My
neighbor did not predict the uniforms of America’s warring factions. How masks
would become normative in Democratic strongholds like Telluride or Ridgway but
be scorned in Colorado Trump country as the giveaway dress of the liberal
egghead terrorized by the virus. The responsible crowd, with face half-hidden,
confronting the unmasked live-free-or-die crowd across the vastness and
fracture of an unled country.
Once
again, in this frayed Republic, there is scant middle ground. The virus is
Godzilla destroying all before it. The virus is a myth, get over it. Biking
onto the Manhattan Bridge I pass a new piece of graffiti: “Bezos made the
virus.”
Nobody
foresaw what a pathogen about one-thousandth the width of an eyelash could
trigger in a society where truth itself has been obliterated by President
Trump, day after lying day. If he could deny the visible, like the number of
people at his inauguration, imagine what he could do with the invisible. Or don’t imagine
it, just look around.
Trump, in a tweet last month,
urges his tens of millions of followers to “LIBERATE” Virginia from the
lockdown and “save your great 2nd Amendment,” which is “under siege.” Or,
roughly translated, grab your guns while you can to fight the liberal virus
conspiracy, just the latest attempt after climate change and all the rest to
emasculate America.
His
languidness, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and go-to person for
every known problem on the planet, is asked by Time magazine whether
he is willing to commit to the holding of the Nov. 3 election. “I’m not sure I
can commit one way or the other, but right now that’s the plan,” he says.
Good to know. Right now, there’s a plan
to hold an election. Gun up, dude, before it’s too late.
For
Trump, this disaster is no more than a deep state conspiracy like the Mueller
investigation or the impeachment proceedings. All of it: the virus death toll,
surely inflated by officials as a means to defeat him; the dented Dow;
the highest unemployment numbers since the Great Depression;
the collapse of his “spectacular” economy; the dire scientific predictions of
the consequences of premature economic reopening. It’s all about him
because everything is.
Followers
of Qanon, a far-right conspiracy movement, provide fodder for the president’s
paranoia, as reported by my colleagues Matthew Rosenberg and Jim Rutenberg.
I hear that the letter Q now appears on T-shirts at far-right protests in
Germany. Signs at a recent demonstration in Stuttgart listed the “worst
dictators” in history: Bill Gates followed by Angela Merkel and, down the list,
Hitler.
Some
German protesters wear yellow stars. They claim that Anne Frank would have been
among them, protesting the “corona dictatorship” that unnecessarily shut down
Europe’s largest economy. Christian Drosten, a top German virologist with a popular podcast,
receives death threats, like Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease
expert. History, science, truth, the Enlightenment are under siege. Anything
could happen in America between now and November.
I
mean, anything. This month, Trump’s
Department of Justice dropped charges against former national security
adviser Michael Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to federal
investigators in the Russia inquiry. A more flagrant demonstration of Trump’s
political cronies at the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General William
Barr, bending to the president’s diktat rather than fulfilling their oath to
the Constitution is hard to imagine. No wonder more than 2,000 former
Department of Justice officials have called in a letter for Barr’s
resignation. He is a disgrace.
So much for those resilient checks and
balances I lauded to my Colorado neighbor.
Back
then, in the bygone era, he wrote to me: “No wonder Republicans are laughing at
us. The billionaire politicians have complete control (besides the military at
this point), no oversight, and most of their constituents are armed, some
heavily, and ready to defend them. Roll over and die? What the hell? Time to
even things up. To save this country. Hopefully, guns will always be a
deterrent, but they may be our last hope to save this country. Time to gun up,
liberals!”
If you prefer, think of “gun up” as get
real, get tough, get registered, get mobilized, get implacable and vote Trump
out. Or you may just want to go down to the range.