Donald Trump on Sunday encouraged Americans to stand up to evil. For once, we are in agreement with him.
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Donald Trump on Sunday urged Americans to stand in his way as he tries to turn their country into an authoritarian regime… it’s either that, or he set a world record in lack of self-awareness.
This might sound strange, but bear with us.
This afternoon, Trump took to social media to fire off a bunch of posts, as one does on Easter Sunday.
Among them were an acknowledgement that his entire governing style is based on bullying, a bizarre Easter message in which he once again drew attention to the fact that he lost the 2020 election and is a sore loser, and a threat to take those to court who want to uphold the rule of law.
What really caught our eye, however, was a self-own of truly Trumpian proportions.
“The World will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but rather by those who watch them without doing anything to stop them,” the president said in a post that echoes the sentiment of those who are trying to rally Americans to oppose him.
That quote is a riff on a statement renowned physicist Albert Einstein once made about the musician and activist Pablo Casals.
Casals, a Spaniard from Catalonia, refused to perform in Nazi Germany and was a fierce opponent of Francisco Franco, the authoritarian ruler of Spain from 1938 to 1975.
When asked to contribute something for a book about the cellist and composer, Einstein wrote that what he most admired about Casals is that he not only stood up to those oppressing his own people, but also all of those opportunists who are willing to make deals with the devil.
Einstein then lauded Casals for having clearly recognized that “the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or abet evil than from those who do evil themselves.”
Of course, Trump, a nationalist, a budding fascist, and a wannabe dictator, is exactly the kind of leader Casals opposed, which makes this social media post particularly ironic.
It does, however, accurately reflect how those in the anti-Trump resistance feel about all Republicans who know that what the president is doing is illegal, immoral, anti-American, and cruel, but refuse to do anything about it.
Whether they are the aforementioned opportunists or because they do not dare speak out against a vindictive leader, they remain silent.
The latter sentiment is reflected in an extraordinary statement Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) made earlier this week.
“We are all afraid,” the senator, who is one of the few Republicans who ever dares to defy Trump, said at a forum with nonprofit and tribal leaders in Anchorage.
“It’s quite a statement,” Murkowski acknowledged. “But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I am oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
Of course, now that Trump has explicitly encouraged Republicans to stand up to him, they can finally get off the sidelines.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
