If Trump was a Nazi, rather than loudly proclaiming opposition to Trump, these opponents would exercise fight or flight options. They'd either actually emigrate to escape (rather than talk about it) or stay silent to avoid attention--or they'd exercise their 2nd Amendment rights while translating the Lithuanian resistance manual into English (and Spanish) and begin the fight against actual Nazis.
That these sad and angry people show no fear that requires them to do anything more than Tweet their so-called despair or march about (with the usual suspect anarchists and ANSWER communists committing violent acts) is all the evidence you need to know that Trump is not a Nazi.
Seriously, people, get real. I managed to avoid descending into crying fits and settling in to a fetal position in 2008 and 2012.
You Trump opponents may learn to appreciate federalism and the division of power in our country rather than advocating putting all powers into the hands of your savior of choice who floated down from Mount Olympus to be "China for a day" or some other autocratic rot that supporters of President Obama have mouthed the last 8 years.
That's how I came to prefer Trump--who I do not like--over Clinton, who would be corrupt from day one.
Congress really will constrain President Trump from going too far, even though the same party controls Congress. Institutionally, the Senate especially defends its powers. And many Republicans are not Trump cheerleaders as the election campaign demonstrated.
The president's own staff will constrain President Trump's options. When Trump arrived on stage, Democrats said that they really didn't believe that past Republican candidates were Nazis but that Trump really is a Nazi who past Republicans would be horrified to see.
Of course, liberals do that two-step every election. But if Democrats really believe what they said, take comfort that a lot of Republicans from past administrations (who you now say really were okay in contrast to Trump) will staff his administration.
The permanent federal bureaucracy below the top appointed leadership offices--which has clearly shown itself to be partisan on behalf of Democrats, will be able to resist Trump. (And I hope that the president can do something to make the permanent bureaucracy more nonpartisan to avoid the shameful politicized work of our IRS, Justice Department, and FBI--as well as other departments with their aggressive expansion of powers beyond what the Congress granted them.)
The press will rediscover investigative journalism to constrain the new president and once more will sanctify the notion that dissent is the highest form of patriotism rather than the lowest form of racism or sexism. Although their blatant cheerleading for Clinton this election will harm their credibility with the new president's supporters.
The military, Democrats will learn, is obliged to only obey lawful orders of those lawfully placed above them in the chain of command.
And the "nuclear button" is figurative. Trump won't accidentally launch the missiles while trying to turn the TV on.
The courts can constrain the president. Democrats may be happy that Republican-appointed judges tend to rule on law rather than from their personal experiences as
Recall, too, that until Trump ran for president as the Republican candidate, Trump was a Democrat! In some ways, this was a win-win election for Democrats. Maybe that's why a lot of Republicans--like me--were dismayed at our choice this year. Democrats might not mind a Trump presidency that much when they notice that they really aren't in internment camps (so Saint FDR in the Democratic Party will remain the only president to throw people into camps on suspicions of disloyalty).
And in two years, if the president has truly offended America, Democrats will have a chance to further constrain him by rebuking him in the mid-term Congressional elections.
Heck, perhaps Democrats can take comfort from the fact that tons of money and a one-sided press as Clinton had did not prevent mere voters from choosing the next president.
And without Clinton's people putting their thumbs on the scales, maybe Democrats actually get Bernie Sanders in four years. You didn't mind his age this year. You won't in four. Or there is always Warren.
The world did not end last Tuesday. George W. Bush did not entrench the Bushtatorship as Democrats once claimed--oddly allowing Nancy Pelosi to take over the House in 2007 and letting Barack Obama become president in 2009.
Trump will not be the new dictator of America.
Go out. You don't need a friggin' safe zone with coloring books and stuffed animals. Enjoy the new Harry Potter movie. Raise your kids. Study hard. Live your lives.
And stay involved in politics and keep voting.
On our first-post election Veterans Day, when we honored those who served to keep us free, I hoped we would remember that we are still a free democracy that isn't going to set up concentration camps or put y'all back in chains.
UPDATE: Although I will say that the protests, riots, and overwrought reactions are really more like an effort to shape the domestic battlefield for the next 2 years, prepping the Left to fight tooth and nail. Unlike calls by Democrats in 2008 for Republicans to submit to the new order, there will be no inclination by the Left to concede anything.
UPDATE: If a Trump supporter has a traffic ticket, it taints all Trump supporters. But when left-wing scumbags are front and center of the protests and violence? Silence.
But the far left's role in protests is longstanding:
Along with the anarchists, core organizers of the protests have included the ANSWER Coalition, a group with roots that trace back to supporting the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the 1950s, and the Socialist Alternative, a Trotskyist group on the other side of those forgotten Communist civil wars. Those groups’ organizing muscle has long made them important, if controversial, elements of the US left (they were central to protests against the Iraq War in 2003), and they now find themselves marching with Bernie Sanders supporters, civil rights advocates, and thousands of Democrats shocked at Trump’s election.
I've noted these thugs in both the Iraq War protests and the Occupy Wall Street Filthapaloozas. Here we go again.
Tip to Instapundit.
UPDATE: This column by Kevin Williamson is awesome (because it raises points I've droned on about but with less skill in many posts the last week--and even longer). One bit:
We conservatives sometimes get bored of pointing out double standards, but recall that when well-behaved Republican protesters gathered to criticize some aspects of the Florida recount in 2000, the media described it as a riot — the “Brooks Brothers riot” — and Democrats such as Representative Jerry Nadler wailed that there was a “whiff of fascism” in the air. If the election had gone the other way and crowds of angry Trump voters were out in the streets beating people (they aren’t, though there are hate-crime hoaxes aplenty) there would be klaxons of alarum sounding 24 hours a day — and zero talk of how the protests were “mostly peaceful.”
Do read it all. Now.
UPDATE: George Takei warns against Republicans setting up internment camps for Moslems using his family as an example, perhaps blissfully unaware that Saint Roosevelt of the Democratic Party actually put his ethnic Japanese family in internment camps.
