By Alan Menius

Today, Jan. 6, 2025, I am sitting down at the keyboard with a heavy heart and a weary mind. Four years ago, the world watched as the rule of law died in the United States of America. Our democratic experiment has lurched from an (imperfect) aspiration of freedom and equality for all to hate-filled demagoguery, and back, throughout its 250 years.
For two and one-half centuries, the legal and political guardrails served to keep the ship in the channel. Lies were exposed, public light was shone on corruption, justice brought to bear on blatant illegality, and an insurrection was put down, even at a cost of lives equal to that of all subsequent wars combined.

Yet, beginning on Jan. 20, 2017, an erosion of all civic and legal guardrails began that metaphorically dwarfs hurricane Helene’s damage to our western N.C. neighbors. Our infrastructure of trust and belief in the common good was washed away as easily as hundreds of backroad bridges were in September.

How could this happen? Like a flood of historic proportions, it began with a trickle, building on small untruths woven into the campaign rhetoric leading up to November 2016. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, your eyes are lying to you, not me. First ignored by those who stood to gain from such an upheaval in the norms of government only to later be embraced and amplified by them, untruth became truth, up became down, black became white, and bizarre became normal.

Lies were spouted without any evidential support. “Alternative facts” entered the lexicon. No one had the courage to say, “now, wait a minute” (a phrase equally dreaded and ridiculed by my direct reports over 35 years as a law firm manager). What we discovered was that those who would gain from the chaos and destruction outnumbered those who cared exponentially.

Fast forward with me to December 2019, the first of two impeachments of Donald J. Trump. That one was a bit of a “he said-they said,” albeit with a multitude of insider guard rail attendants making a compelling case that he held foreign policy hostage for personal benefit. Arguably that was defensible based on precedent (see Nixon and the Paris peace talks and Reagan and hostage negotiations). So, I give the republicans a very weak and sad pass on that one.

However, the second impeachment evidence was blasted live for every American to see with their own eyes, in a real time live broadcast of the first armed insurrection since the Civil War. Virtually every republican leader in the congress and around the country saw it and said it for what it was. Notwithstanding what they saw and what they said while the iron was hot, within days they again knelt before the would-be king and kissed the gold ring. I presume they received a substantial discount for a group spinectomy (fortunately politicians have great health care).

Even as the subsequent bipartisan select committee on Jan. 6 hearing paraded scores of republican insiders testifying under oath to the actions and inactions of the then president to incite, enflame, and perpetuate the acts of insurrection, the republicans blocked justice in the Senate trial.

This brings me back to my obituary for the rule of law. With the reelection of Donald J. Trump, the American people have acquiesced to the premise that the rule of law is no longer a fundamental tenet of the American way of life. Our soon to be president has been convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 felony counts. But for the intervention of the U.S. Supreme court (dominated by his appointees) in a bizarre immunity ruling, his trials for election interference, inciting the insurrection and the pilfering of classified national security documents (and doing who-knows-what to profit from them) would have proceeded, likely to conviction before the November election.

Perhaps, even despite that, he could have run for election, and perhaps, the American people may have still elected him again. However, it should be profoundly clear that adherence to the constitution, the laws derived from it, the norms of American history, and the assumption of a fundamental necessity for character, honesty, and competence in our leader has had a stake driven through its heart. RIP to the bedrock of our republic.

Alan Menius is a resident of Salisbury.