Last Oct. 24, an earlier Guest Commentary of mine entitled “On Saving America” appeared in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. In it, I implored anyone who would listen not to believe the Republican claim that voting for Donald Trump would “Save America” and make the country “great” again.

The last two months have made clear what I was warning about. The lives and careers of thousands of people have been destroyed by arbitrary and illegal mass firings. The capacity of the United States to ensure the health and safety of its citizens and to respond effectively to emergencies like natural disasters and pandemics has been permanently crippled.

We have lost our constitutional freedoms of speech, of the press, of religion and from unreasonable searches and seizures, with birthright citizenship next on the chopping block. Decades of “soft power” international humanitarian work have been summarily suspended. The courts are under attack. A nation that was a beacon of hope and liberty for the entire world for over 200 years is now on the International Human Rights Watch List. And the Trump administration, as USA Today recently put it, “is just getting started.”

These developments, however, horrific as they are, are mostly a distraction or smoke screen to prevent the American public from noticing the deeper destruction that is unfolding behind the scenes. It is exposed and detailed in Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein’s important new book “The Assault on the State” (2024), which appeared just before last year’s election.

We are experiencing, the authors explain, a “stark [worldwide] challenge to modern governance based on the rule of law.” The “key warning signs” of this attack are “the promotion of the ruler’s family and cronies to politically powerful positions, direct attacks on the staff of state agencies and the independence of judiciaries, and the denigration of professional expertise as a criterion for political promotion in favor of loyalty tests.”

What results is a shift away from a “proceduralist” form of government, as provided, for example, in the U. S. Constitution, to a “personalist” (or “patrimonial”) form built on arbitrary rule by leaders “who run the state as a family business of sorts, staffed by relatives, friends and other members of the ruler’s ‘extended household.'” This is a deeper problem than “democracy vs. autocracy,” a dyad which obscures this more fundamental shift leading to a catastrophic erosion in a nation’s quality of life, as sketched just above. “Mr. Trump,” as Hanson and Kopstein put it, “aims not to streamline modern state bureaucracies, but rather to replace them with a much older form of rule based on personal loyalty to the ruler.”

It was just this older form of arbitrary personalist rule by kings and emperors that America’s founders revolted against in creating a proceduralist system of government which had the potential to include everyone in the process. Though the original Constitution was written by wealthy, propertied white men and largely protected their interests, the numerous amendments that were added over the next 100 years testify to the nation’s ongoing commitment to ever-widening public participation in the enterprise. America’s example electrified the world, inspiring revolutions for freedom around the globe which continue to this day. It’s truly what made America great.

So the Trump/Musk juggernaut is not about cutting costs and eliminating bureaucratic deadwood (an even bigger lie than election denialism). Rather, we are now reenacting the Jan. 6 insurrection not just for an afternoon at the capitol building but 24/7 on a nationwide scale supported by the full power of the White House. It “takes America back[ward]” by erasing 300 hundred years of struggle to build an inclusive proceduralist government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” and replacing it with a throwback personalist “plantation capitalism” model where wealthy white elites rule unmolested over a vast underclass who lack both economic and political power and where elections, if they exist at all, are a mere formality.

Our historical precedent for this is the derailment of Reconstruction after the Civil War and the subsequent imposition of Jim Crow throughout the south which relegated black citizens to second-class disenfranchised status. This has now resurfaced as Trump’s vicious anti-DEI template for the whole country. It’s what his so-called “Golden Age” really looks like.

Once we have cut through the lies and distractions, the way forward becomes clear. The frontal assault on the American system of government by a sitting president that we are now witnessing is the most outrageous act of treason in the nation’s history, a “crime and misdemeanor” so high that in former times it carried the death penalty. We need not put up with this for the next four years, helplessly wringing our hands while America as we’ve known it is being destroyed. It is time to demand that the Congress assert its constitutional power/authority and immediately impeach, convict and remove both Trump and Vance (as his co-conspirator) from office, while putting Mike Johnson on notice to reverse their treasonous agenda (for which there is no “mandate”) or suffer the same consequences.

This is the bulletproof remedy the founders put in place for dealing with a rogue president. The U. S. Senate could have stopped the current mayhem in its tracks years ago by simply convicting Trump in one of his two impeachment trials. Spineless (or conniving), they failed to do so. Now they have another (possibly final) opportunity to step in and instantly end this craziness. Such a move would pull treason’s plug, restore the separation of powers, and put the proceduralism that has hitherto made America great back in the driver’s seat.

This is a drastic measure, but this is a drastic time of national crisis. If we can’t muster the political will, if we can’t for once put country over party or personality and act accordingly, we will find to our sorrow (and the world’s) that as the old saying goes, “a free people that finds lies acceptable will not remain free for long.”

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John Radigan lives in Saranac Lake.