The brilliance of America’s Founders was designing a constitution with checks and balances to ensure that the instruments of power served the people and the Constitution-and limited the Presidency. “So much of what makes our system work is the general fidelity to a democratic ethos on the part of everybody involved.” Trump has proved that “our system has within it the capacity to be subverted,” Kagan said. “We are far too complacent about the durability of our system,” Robert Kagan, a historian at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World,” told me. Scholars and current and former policymakers say that Trump’s historical legacy increasingly appears to be the undoing of American democracy. He went one big step further, demanding that “those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution” must be held accountable. “We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square,” he said. Mattis raged at the President personally, accusing him of deliberately trying to divide the country. Pictures of National Guard troops arrayed in tight rows on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial-a site that symbolizes reconciliation and healing after our Civil War-clad in camouflage, flak jackets, and body armor, added to the sense that America is in the midst of a defining national crisis. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens-much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside,” he said, in a statement to The Atlantic. ”When I joined the military, some fifty years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. military against the American people and the description of American cities by his successor at the Pentagon, Mark Esper, as “battlespace” to be dominated. Mattis described being “angry and appalled” at the use of the U.S. Later that day, James Mattis, the former Defense Secretary, issued a scathing rebuke of President Trump, his former boss. On Wednesday, Pelosi bluntly asked, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “What is this, a banana republic?” John’s Church, on Monday night, for a fleeting photo op where he waved the Bible. The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi-the third most powerful politician in the the land-described the experience of her daughter, a filmmaker and journalist, when men in fatigues used chemical agents and body armor to force her fellow peaceful protesters aside so Trump could walk to St. Over the past week, however, the President’s response to the escalating protests over the killing of George Floyd has deepened the debate about what is happening to America. After the second Presidential debate, in October, Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, countered, “Donald Trump thinks that the Presidency is like some banana republic dictatorship where you can lock up your political opponents.” The phrase has become an undercurrent in the national political debate ever since. “This election will determine whether we remain a free country in the truest sense of the word or we become a corrupt banana republic controlled by large donors and foreign governments,” he told a cheering crowd in Florida. President Trump invoked it in October, 2016. I’ve covered plenty of them, including Idi Amin’s Uganda, in the nineteen-seventies, Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, in the nineteen-eighties, and Carlos Menem’s Argentina, in the nineteen-nineties.ĭuring the heated Presidential campaign of 2016, the term made its way into mainstream American politics, often glibly. Over the past century, “banana republic” has evolved to mean any country (with or without bananas) that has a ruthless, corrupt, or just plain loopy leader who relies on the military and destroys state institutions in an egomaniacal quest for prolonged power. The term-which originally referred to a politically unstable country run by a dictator and his cronies, with an economy dependent on a single product-took on a life of its own. It was based on his experience in Honduras, where he had fled for a few months, to avoid prosecution in Texas, for embezzling money from the bank where he worked. Henry coined the term “banana republic” in a series of short stories, most famously in one about the fictional country of Anchuria. In the early nineteen-hundreds, the American writer O.
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