Eugene Robinson: Trump is temporary, but hes doing lasting damage
As the saying goes, you don’t miss the water until the well runs dry: This deeply aberrant presidency threatens to cost the nation much more than even some of Donald Trump’s harshest critics may realize.
From 1988-92, I was The Washington Post’s correspondent in Buenos Aires, covering all of South America. It was a time when countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Chile — emerging from years of authoritarian rule — were struggling to re-establish democratic norms, and I learned one important lesson: It’s easy to lose the habits and values of democracy, but incredibly hard to get them back.
Perhaps most difficult of all is to recover lost faith in the rule of law. That is why Trump’s very public desire to use the legal system as a weapon against his political opponents is so damaging. “Lock her up” is more than a call to imprison Hillary Clinton. It is, potentially, a tragic epitaph for the consensus view of our legal system as a disinterested finder of fact and dispenser of justice.
In the countries I covered, military rulers had imprisoned, exiled and assassinated their internal foes. It was understandable that democratically elected governments would struggle — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — to find ways to hold the murderous generals and admirals accountable. Decades later, however, the pattern still persists.
http://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/robinson-trump-is-temporary-but-hes-doing-lasting-damage/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=a29432db01-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-a29432db01-228635337
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especially with the judges - starting with Turtle McConnell's theft of a seat on the Supreme Court!
