Aug 5, 2017 5 min read

People in the United States are very much upset about efforts by Republicans to dismantle Obamacare. I sympathize with all of their concerns.

But there is a larger issue in play, more important to our republic, and even more broadly significant to health care itself. President Trump has shown himself eager to become a dictator, and if he becomes one, even in some small way, we will get whatever form of health care he decides.

Dictators do not like dissent. Those who publicly protest now may later find themselves in jail or worse, depending on the level of dictatorship Trump achieves. Those who still support Trump will disagree, but I can provide good evidence to prove my case.

Trump has often expressed admiration for Russia’s murderous dictator Vladimir Putin. It is human nature to emulate people we respect. From the beginning of his presidential campaign, Trump disparaged the press. The first thing any dictator does is delegitimize or destroy a free press. There is not a lot of free press in Russia.

Dictators will often seek to destroy those who first supported them, but who now are seen to be disloyal. Think of Ernst Rohm, the leader of the paramilitary Brown Shirts, Adolf Hitler’s first Nazi supporters. During a few days in the early summer of 1934, Rohm and many others were extra- judicially executed. Even the anti-Nazi former German Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher was murdered.

Trump hasn’t had anyone killed yet, but there is political death by character assassination. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was an early and very strong supporter of Trump’s campaign. He worked tirelessly for Trump and was a key member of the transition team. Because he was a member of the transition, when he became attorney general, Sessions did the morally and legally correct thing by recusing himself from the investigation of Russian ties to the Trump campaign. Trump sees this as disloyalty and is trying to metaphorically “kill” Sessions with his disparaging tweets.

When the FBI Director James Comey refused to pledge personal loyalty to Trump, he was fired. Dictators demand personal loyalty from all those serving their government. But in our republic, an oath of office involves swearing loyalty to defend and uphold the Constitution, not loyalty to any person. As a career Marine, each time I re-enlisted, I took an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution. I was not asked to swear personal loyalty to my battalion commander, the president or anyone else.

When I was hired as a police officer after my retirement from the Corps, I was again required to take an oath. This oath did not require personal loyalty to the chief of police, the mayor or anyone else. I was again swearing to defend and uphold the Constitution. Exact wording of various oaths taken by government officials may vary slightly, but none require loyalty to a person. In Nazi Germany, even the lowest-ranking members of the military were required to take a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. I wonder if Trump remembers his own oath of office, or if he even understood what it meant while he took it.

Our nation is now on the verge of a constitutional crisis, if not a train wreck. It is apparent that Trump will continue to disparage Sessions and then try to remove him when the Senate goes to recess. This would allow Trump to appoint any compliant person he would like to be attorney general without Senate confirmation. This new attorney general would then be able to dismiss Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Russian entanglements, and quash any further efforts to find evidence of collusions with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

This would amount to a first step toward dictatorship.

I don’t see a way out of this. Constitutional scholars, both on the right and the left, with more knowledge about this than I’ll ever have, say that a sitting president cannot be criminally indicted. Impeachment must precede any criminal action. The way the House and Senate are configured now, with Republican majorities, I don’t see the House bringing articles of impeachment, and even if they did, the Senate would never convict. The Republicans in both houses want the president to stay in place purely for partisan reasons. They believe Trump will sign any bill they put in front of him.

So much for placing one’s country ahead of one’s party.

And please, don’t say it can’t happen here. That would be the height of hubris. No nation is immune from electing a demagogue. We just did.

I am not confident in the future of my republic.

Bloom is a former Marine, a former police officer and a resident of Lawrence.