“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Lord Acton wrote so many years ago.
We Americans should all be afraid that we are becoming a potent corrupting influence on our President-elect.
We are giving him this power over us if we allow him to trump the best conclusions of our intelligence community just by one word: “ridiculous.”
We are giving him this power when he can twitter away the warnings of the scientific community, and the resolve of the community of nations, and call manmade climate change a hoax.
We are giving him this power when he can wave off every legitimate and fact-based news story and complaint about his sexist remarks and actions, or his racist remarks and actions about our sitting President, by simply denying them and then tweeting or shouting that other people are far worse.
Donald J. Trump already has shown an outlandish willingness to bully his way into legitimacy by saying everyone else is wrong and he is right. Republicans leaders, the media, scientists, the intelligence community, the establishment–they are all wrong if they disagree with him. He is right.
The President of the United States is called the “leader of the free world” and the “most powerful person on earth.” We should be loathe to allow him to go beyond even that by usurping all power– by allowing him to trump truth itself. We must not allow him to put us all in the absurd position of closing our eyes and our ears to well-established fact and rationalize his pronouncements.
We must not allow any one man to tell the BIG LIE and leave the rest of us to clean up the Big Mess.
