Alan Zendell, August 14, 2023

As we enter the most important and potentially catastrophic election season in my lifetime (which is likely considerably longer than yours) two questions stand out. Amid all the hype fostered by both broadcast and social media, very little has been said about either of them, although both portend serious consequences if they are not addressed responsibly. The more general question is what happens when Americans lose confidence in their government. The more specific and directly related one is how we can ever have confidence in and move on from the results of Donald Trump’s criminal trials, however they turn out.

For contrast, I’d ask how we would have survived the Great Depression if not for the confidence Americans had in the Roosevelt administration. I grew up listening to stories about how my parents, aunts, and uncles sat around their radios listening to FDR reassure them about the future. That would never happen today, and this isn’t the first time Americans have a crisis of confidence in our leaders. The lessons of the 1960s and 70s make the point unambiguously. The Vietnam War shattered the faith of a majority of Americans that our government was acting in the best interests of our country, or that our leaders even had the vaguest idea what they were doing.

Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford could not have been more different politically, yet all four failed abysmally in what may have been their most important responsibility: prosecuting an ill-defined war we were ill-equipped to fight with no clear justification or goal, that went on for more than a decade. The conflict resulted in more than 50,000 American military deaths and more than 150,000 injuries, and those numbers don’t reflect the tragic long-term effects on our country. Anti-government protests, riots outside the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the contempt shown to returning war veterans by an angry population all had impacts that foreshadowed the divisiveness we live with today.

If Vietnam wasn’t bad enough, we learned that a sitting president was behind an attempt to rig his re-election that included a massive attempt at covering up his crimes and led to a series of constitutional crises that could have permanently wrecked our government’s ability to function. What saved us, fifty years ago, was the underlying integrity of the federal judiciary and Congressional leaders like Barry Goldwater, who were able to put aside their political differences to act in striking bipartisan fashion to force Richard Nixon’s resignation. As awful and frightening as those years were, what pulled us back from the brink was the recognition by all sides that the future of our nation depended on adhering to our Constitution and the rule of law.

But that was before Roger Ailes and Ruppert Murdoch combined to create Fox News, which was unabashedly dedicated to spinning a politically polarized version of truth, and journalistic integrity be damned. It was before Trump senior advisor Kelly Ann Conway coined the phrase “alternate facts” which seems to have taken over our national discourse. Seriously? What does alternate facts even mean? It was and is as gross a contradiction in logic as Orwellian Doublethink that has exacerbated the divisions stoked by Trump himself. It has also brought us to a crisis that will determine whether our grandchildren’s America looks anything like the one we grew up revering.

Bluntly stated, politics aside, if as a nation we are unable to move past the indictments and upcoming trials of Donald Trump, our stability, our respect internationally, the future of democratic government everywhere, and our steadying influence that has avoided nuclear conflicts since World War 2 are all in jeopardy. All of the above dim prospects for a unified, productive future. Our discourse has become so toxic that reasonable-seeming Republicans at the Iowa State Fair said things during televised interviews like, “Why should we believe anything the government tells us about Donald Trump?”

The short answer is that if we don’t, we might as well be living in Sudan or Cuba. And before we even reach the trials, we’re going to face a crisis of confidence in our jury system. Suppose we apply the latest polling to the jury pools in New York, Florida, Georgia, and DC. Is there anyone left whose views of Trump and his behavior have not been tainted? Can we believe prospective jurors who claim they can be objective? Obviously not, which implies that any jury hearing evidence about Trump is likely to consist of five Trump supporters, five Trump haters, and if we’re lucky, two independent thinkers. What if, like those Iowa Republicans, the jury simply refuses to believe the facts uncovered by the state and federal investigations?

This is not a prediction of doom, but a warning to all of us. We can get this right if we possess the integrity showed by Barry Goldwater forty-nine years ago. Do we?