By Gene Nichol

I’ve been speaking, protesting and writing books and articles about the threat to constitutional democracy in the United States and North Carolina for many years. Still, it is astonishing to see, right before your eyes, the difference that can be wrought in one’s notion of his country in two months. I focus (for brevity) on five things.

1. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance ambushed, sucker-punched, one of the 21st century’s most courageous and heroic democratic leaders, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on national television in the Oval Office. Zelenskyy, of course, had too much character, and too much strength, to submit to the dockside bullies — who childishly bleated about thankfulness and the holding of cards. Every decent American was both humiliated and horrified. Trump announced the United States’ betrayal of the astonishing and brutalized Ukrainian people — in favor of the invading dictator. Trump submissively enlisted the Republican Party in the Russian cause — shaming his 45 predecessors. Shortly afterwards, he had his representative vote with Russia and North Korea to effectively condemn Ukraine in the United Nations. He has embraced a theory of international relations that would have demanded the United States enter World War II on the side of the Axis powers. America is no longer to be American.
2. Trump pardoned 1,500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists — hundreds of whom violently attempted to overthrow the United States government. He made unmistakably clear his continuing commitment to any who would use violence in support of his personal power. He then moved to purge and punish those who did their constitutionally commanded duty to enforce the law in the Department of Justice. Any who have the temerity to suggest that Donald Trump is subject to the American constitutional order should be prepared for banishment or prison. Almost all Republicans either cheered or ducked the cameras — opting for submission to a president who declared, quoting Napolean: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
3. Trump authorized his largest campaign donor, Elon Musk, to literally dismantle — chainsaw apparently in hand — the American government, casting away, willy-nilly, many of our protections, assets, resources and essential skills. Musk delighted in the horror — especially as the world’s richest man issued decrees that would assure many of the globe’s poorest children would die. Musk reminded one of the statement from the History of the Peloponnesian Wars: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Especially after the “strong” have received their multi-billion dollar contracts from the federal government.
4. In what is already the most economically unequal nation in the world, Trump, Musk and their Republican colleagues in the Congress prepare to inflict deep, brutal cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, education programs for special needs kids, Pell Grants, affordable housing programs, Title I schools, Supplemental Security Income benefits for disabled children and a massive array of other essential poverty programs to create trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Only morally reprehensible folks could welcome or tolerate such a campaign.
5. Trump’s demand for the elimination of DEI programs in every sector of American life — and to stamp out every utterance about our savage racial past — is but the newest chapter of an historical demand for unfettered and unapologetic white racial supremacy. It means to permanently cast aside Lincoln’s defining, foundational commitment of the nation to “liberty for all.” Elon Musk’s obscene interest in pardoning the murderer of George Floyd is meant to drive a final public stake in the promise of equal justice.

It has become difficult not to be ashamed of one’s country.

Gene Nichol is a professor of law teaching courses in the constitution and federal courts at the University of North Carolina School of Law.