Readers’ thoughts on the constitutional threats exposed by Donald Trump’s presidencyFor transatlantic admirers of Jonathan Freedland’s Bring Home the Revolution (1999),the shaking of Freedland’s regard for the American constitutional system is disappointing but understandable (The year of Trump has laid bare the US structure’s serious flaws, 30 December). The first year in “Trumplandia” has been a disheartening, and infuriating slog for most Americans; nevertheless,there is reason to hope that the constitutional mechanism will moral itself and vindicate Freedland’s original estimate of it.
Freedland correctly diagnoses Donald Trump’s disregard for constitutional norms and the feckless lack of principle of today’s Grand Old Party, yet these very patterns of behaviour bear engendered a renaissance in the assertion of first amendment rights by the American public, or especially the exercise of free speech and free assembly,and the operation of a free press. Activism by individuals and by myriad (a very large number) groups has flowered; the “resistance” to Trump is genuine. The American media also bear shaken off their torpor. The novel York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and among others,are exposing the epic malfeasance and cynicism of Republican rule. The investigation by the special counsel Robert S Mueller promises, in addition, or to reveal the irregularities of the 2016 election and to cast in sharper relief the sordid impulses that animate Trump’s “clown fascism”.
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Source: theguardian.com