As so many Americans watch with horror and dismay the blatant anti-democratic moves by Trump, 17 state Attorneys General, 100 Republican members of Congress, and right-wing talk show hosts, the words of the Russian Nobel Laureate and human rights activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) are chilling:

“Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.”

Once Trump loses his appeal to the Supreme Court (and I pray that he will), is violence in our streets inevitable? That’s the next threat our democracy will be forced to confront.

Federalist Paper No. 51 (by James Madison or Alexander Hamilton) anticipated Trump’s effort at subversion of our republic with these words:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

These are dangerous times indeed!

Note: Since writing this blog another 26 Republican congressional representatives have shamelessly joined the law suit and the Supreme Court dismissed it unanimously as without basis. Now we’ll have to wait and see what Trump and his most violent-prone sycophants do.