Imperiling

PREDICTING THE EMINENT DEMISE ot the United States is, andnever has been, uncommon. The founders themselves worried that the new, weak and poor nation of decentralized, disparate loosely confederated States under an entirely experimental form of government might not last a single generation. Jefferson firmly believed that a revolution and a new constitution would be necessary every generation to keep the experiment alive. It worked out better than Jefferson, and most of the founders ever thought possible. The naysaying, however, never abated, and continues today. This year merks the fiftieth anniversary of my father's prediction that the United States wasn't long for the world. He noted how rapidly the world was changing, and proposed a moratorium on change. I was sixteen at the time, and thought his views a bit alarmist, and extreme. I still do. He had fought in World War Two, and was witnessing the black-holish quagmire of Viet Nam, accompanied with masive protests against it all across the fruited plain, protests against the war, againtt white supremacy, and against gender inequality. In the turbulent nineteen sixties, you couldn't swing a dead cat, as we sometimes say, without hitting somebody in the street, protesting something. Every protest was valid in those days. Those turbulent sixties were a bit too much for someone born in 1918. Today, Trump suporters claim that they are desperately trying to save the country from liberalism, and that without Trump the country is at desperate risk of discontinuing, and liberals claim that they are desperately tyring to save it from Trump and his supporters. Into the morass swims Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame (another apocalyptic harbinger event of emminent American doom), with his three volume series on the Trump administration. The third book, "Peril", with co-author Robert Coatas, deals with the final days of the Trump administration, focusing, of necessity, on Trump's ill fated but very real attempt to not only reverse the results of the twenty twenty presidential election, but with his also very real attempt to overthrow the government, by means of a violent mob andhis Vice President Mike Pence, Pence having been the administrative wing of the violent mob. That Trump refused to accept the results of the election and tried to reverse those results cannot be disputed; millions of Americans heard him and saw it everyday on national television, with his big lie, and his phone calls to state's attorney generals demanding that they find or fabricate more votes for Trump, long after the votes had all ben counted. What Woodward and Costa do is explain how very serious and threatening Trump and his treasoous coherts were in their efforts, how close they came to success, and how perilously close the United Stats remains to either tyranny or diestuction because of, if nothing else, the continuing persistance of Trump and his movement. The final words of the book, in fact, are "Peril Remains". Two blocks from the White House stands the Willard hotel, in which, in early Jauary, 2021, an operation command center of Trump insurrectionist planners held meetings, not in secret as they wanted, but known to journalists, including Costas, who spent time outside the builing, wishing he had booked a room. Trump, damanding that Pence refuse to certify the electoral college on January 6, and Pence wanting to do it, but unable to, merely because it would have been illegal. Trump's top aides, Bannon, Guiliani, the usual suspects, planning the insurrection the following day, which went off perfectly, except for the minor detail that the government was not overthrown. The Congressional committee currently investigating the insurrection is using "Peril" as source material for their work, with good reason.