With Wisconsin race, NC Republicans should learn Musk can’t buy America | Opinion

I think most folks, even most Republicans, know we’re barreling towards a cliff we’ve never before seen in American life.

Last week, the brilliant conservative author, Anne Applebaum, again traced Donald Trump’s worshipful embrace of Viktor Orbán’s game plan for tyranny. Orbán, she notes, replaced Hungary’s civil service with loyalists, used economic and regulatory power to crush a free press, robbed universities of their independence, politicized justice and judicial systems and aligned himself openly with Russia. Trump has just moved faster.

My old friend, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley law school, wrote in these pages that Trump has issued executive orders punishing an array of the country’s most powerful law firms — suspending security clearances, ending government contracts with clients and barring access to federal buildings. “No firms can survive these sanctions,” Chemerinsky noted. So many have quickly caved — like universities, newspapers and non-profits before them. “This is the playbook of a dictator, not a president in a democracy,” he said. That it is. And we all know it.

At almost the same moment, Trump and his crew fired about 20,000 federal workers at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an act of national suicide. Immediate dismissals were sent by email with orders to clear the building as if long-time, skilled civil servants were dreaded terrorists.

Students were picked up on the streets and shipped to distant prisons for writing op-ed pieces.

And this week, Trump imposed the most expansive tariff regime in modern American history, which even Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president deemed “the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history.” And just so we knew the tariffs were his, Trump based his “reciprocal” claims on figures economists said were “bonkers.” Assuming even international markets will, like all else, bend to his lies.

Who would believe this could come to pass in the 21st century, without objection, by the U.S. Congress and the political party controlling all three branches of the federal government?

Something else occurred as well. Liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford overcame $25 million spent by Elon Musk, in what he deemed a race to save the fate of humanity, to defeat her Trumpian opponent by 10 points. Ten point statewide races don’t happen in Wisconsin. The Badgers cast aside Trump and Musk authoritarianism — saying, at bottom, “We’re Americans, get the hell out.” On Wisconsin.

I was thinking about what this means for North Carolina. Maybe for the first time in a decade, our Republicans won’t feel certain they have to cower before the tyrant. Maybe he’s not as powerful as they’ve feared. Maybe they could, once again, begin to act like real people.

Real people don’t think it’s fine to stir an insurrection where acolytes assault heroic policemen, defecate on the U.S. Capitol and then receive presidential pardons and, perhaps, reparations for the sedition.

Real people don’t think it’s okay to seize a man from his family, ship him to El Salvador’s most brutal and notorious prison with no process whatsoever, concede it was a mistake, yet say you aren’t going to do anything about it. The fear is the point.

Real people don’t pretend — amid a world of crushing challenge — our most urgent need is to demonstrate a national hatred for already marginalized transgender folks.

Real people don’t behave as if our national mission — constitutional democracy that has been sacrificed for through centuries of blood and sweat — is no more than, in former Vice President John Nance Garner’s words, “a bucket of warm spit” to be cast aside in someone’s crazed lust for power.

I think acting like a real person might be a start.