'Our society would no longer be free' under second Trump term: former Bush speechwriter
David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has published a dire warning in The Atlantic about the end of freedom in the United States should former President Donald Trump win a second term.
To back up this thesis, Frum focuses on plans pushed by Trump allies such as former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down opposition protests.
Should Trump actually go through with such a plan, writes Frum, it would be the death knell of the American republic.
"If a president can summon an investigation of his opponents, or summon the military to put down protests, then suddenly our society would no longer be free," he argues. "There would be no more law, only legalized persecution of political opponents. It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield both the law and institutional violence as personal weapons of power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve."
Frum then argues that, given these stakes, electing Trump to a second term would put America on an historically unprecedented course that has little, if any, blueprint for recovery.
"It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between 'before' and 'after' that a society can never reverse," he writes. "Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021, can never be undone. The long tradition of peaceful transitions of power was broken that day, and even though the attempt to stop the transition by violence was defeated, the violence itself was not expunged."