Republicans’ hatred for America is showing

Remember when the right wing exploded because presidential candidate Barack Obama’s pastor once yelled “God damn America!”?

Well, take a look at the hatred against America coming from today’s right led by former President Trump.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), is on tape saying that America is “so dark and depraved.” Trump famously described America as sick and defined by “American carnage.”

As we enter the 2024 election cycle, columnist William Galston writes in The Wall Street Journal that he “shivers” with fear that a Trump return to the White House will “trigger the biggest threat to constitutional governance [in the U.S.] since the Civil War.”

Long ago, hatred led the southern states to break away and form an anti-American confederacy. Today, we are watching Trump encourage his own rebel hatred of America, and it poses the biggest threat to constitutional democracy since the Civil War.

There is no way to downplay Trump’s disdain for the pillars of America political stability.

The Washington Post and New York Times now report that Trump is already planning to use the U.S. military against political opponents who demonstrate in the streets if he returns to the White House. Those plans include going after former staff who now express alarm about him.

He wants “the Justice Department to investigate …[former]allies who have become critical of his time in office…,” the Post reported. 

Last week, Trump seemed to confirm those stories when he said that once he is back in power, he will “root out” what he called “vermin” in the U.S. He specifically targeted people willing to deny his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Trump is constantly undermining public trust in the nation’s courts by lashing out at judges, prosecutors and even court officers involved in the four indictments he faces on 91 criminal charges. That includes the First Amendment protection for a free press.

Trump was recently quoted as saying American should “take my words to heart. I believe the press is the enemy of the people.”

“He’s using this language,” said ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl, who spoke to Trump for a new book. “This language out of the Third Reich — ‘enemy of the people.’”

Karl said Trump “is talking about a campaign of revenge and retribution.”

Trump’s hatred of modern America is also evident in his claim that recent immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country…coming in with disease…”

The head of the League of United Latin American Citizens compared Trump’s comment to Nazi propaganda about Jews, according to the Washington Post.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, agreed.

“We have seen this kind of toxic rhetoric inspire real-world violence before in places like Pittsburg [at a synagogue] and El Paso [at a Walmart],” Greenblatt told CNN. 

Trump’s hatred for America fits with his imitators’ efforts to undermine Congress. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a big Trump backer, has an anti-American agenda that boils down to stirring so much chaos — including nearly a month without a Speaker — that the House is now so broken it fails to even pass an annual funding package. 

The GOP majority’s disrespect for America was evident in the embarrassing, schoolyard-type elbowing incident between former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).

The same Trump-inspired disdain for American democracy was on display when a GOP senator invited a witness at a public hearing to engage in a fistfight. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) had to be reminded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that “you’re a United States senator!” 

That was in line with the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters to stop Congress from effecting the democratic transfer of power to a newly elected president.

According to the Capitol Police, threats by the public of violence against members of Congress have skyrocketed from fewer than a thousand in 2016, when Trump was elected, to more than 7,000 last year.

Those threats come amid ominous occurrences, such as the vicious hammer assault on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul, which Trump still jokes about at his rallies.

In September, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who polls second behind Trump for the nomination, complained that the Proud Boys were getting “excessive sentences” for rioting at Capitol and promised to “look at all those cases,” if he is elected president.

The FBI reports that far-right domestic violent hate groups like the Proud Boys — which Trump famously called on to “stand by” — now constitute the biggest domestic threat to the security of the United States. 

This disdain is on display in Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) blocking promotions for hundreds of U.S. military officers for months because of the Pentagon’s abortion policy, interfering with an essential government operation and revealing more disdain for American democracy.

Hatred of America and Americans, fueled by the incitement of violence and stochastic terrorism, is winning in the Republican Party.  

It is the real platform for Trump, the party’s front-runner for its presidential nomination.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.