Trump Is a Threat to the Constitution? Really, General Mattis?

The accusation that President Trump in some way threatens the Constitution is the most disgusting expression of hypocrisy that I have heard in nearly half a century of journalism–no exceptions. It is so monstrously false that it is shocking to hear it from the likes of Gen. James Mattis and Gen. Colin Powell.

A conspiracy to drive Donald Trump from office through lies, leaks and larceny began before he took office and continues to the present day. Alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was an outrageous hoax. The spurious charges against Gen. Mike Flynn have been exposed as a concoction of FBI officials working for the Hillary Clinton camp. The entire disgusting business has been a lie of whole cloth from the outset. And it constitutes the most grievous threat to the US Constitution in our lifetimes–in fact, since the Confederate insurrection of 1861. A clique of bureaucrats and politicians conspired with the major media to frame the president of the United States, with the objective of nullifying the will of the American people as expressed in the free and fair of election of November 2016.

And now Gen. James Mattis and Gen. Colin Powell have the effrontery to call President Trump a threat to the Constitution. Said Mattis: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. 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.”

Violate constitutional rights? How? George H. W. Bush sent 4,000 soldiers and marines into Los Angeles in 1992 to suppress riots that ensued on the acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King case. The elder President Bush used the same authority–the 1807 Insurrection Act–that President Trump cited. No-one ever accused Bush of violating the Constitution for deploying troops. How did President Trump violate the Constitution by warning that he would deploy troops if state and local governments failed to protect life and property?

There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticize Trump’s policies as well as his abrasive style. But we are well past that. The issue boils down to whether a self-appointed elite of universities, corporations, think-tanks and major media outlets has the right to rule us, or whether the American people have the right to decide who will sit in the Oval Office. I’m an always-Trumper not because I agree with the president about everything–although I agree with most of what he does and proposes–but because the survival of American democracy and the integrity of the Constitution are at stake.

The putschists and coup-plotters in the liberal Establishment, aided and abetted by seditious Republican turncoats, are a gang of yellow-bellied, backstabbing, bushwacking, dry-gulching, reprobates. It’s sad that a man like Gen. Mattis, who served his country with distinction, has joined this gang. It’s legitimate to disagree with the president about the use of the military for riot control; the military, after all, is designed to inflict mayhem on our enemies, not control civil disturbances. But to claim that Trump threatens the Constitution is hypocrisy, when the threat to the Constitution comes from the conspiracy to bring Trump down.