Conservative Icon George Will: A “Gangster Regime” Now Runs Our Country
Yes, the United States is polarized across every conceivable dimension, including its perception of the president himself. At this point, 40% of America continues to believe that Trump is the best thing that’s every happened to the country, that he’s the only thing standing between where we are today and lawlessness, economic collapse and poverty, racial dilution, and socialism.
On the other side of the road is George Will, one of the best-informed, most intelligent people in America, telling us that the United States is now being run by a “gangster regime,” a criminal enterprise. Chief among his supporting evidence are the following, taken from this article:
Will claims that the United States “is in a downward spiral” and faces “disdainful condescension” from the rest of the world.
Will asserts that one reason for this are the highly disparate COVID-19 pandemic results between America and much of the rest of the developed world: “Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of COVID-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300.”
Another example of the Union’s decline is that it is “unable to… even reliably run elections,” citing the Hoover Institution which finds that “there has been a rising tide of voter suppression in recent U.S. elections.”
Will posits that the decline has gotten so serious that “worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected.”
By this Will means that the more egregious Trump’s presidency becomes, the more apparent the need for voters to remove him from office will become.
As an example of the “worse” that Will affirms America is seeing, he next calls the Trump administration a “gangster regime.”
He claims that Roger Stone “adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not ‘roll on’ Donald Trump.”
And Trump “show[ed] gratitude for Stone’s version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence)” by commuting his sentence.
The take-away for me isn’t that the country is being run by criminals; most of us knew that before we read the article. What this brought home is that “worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected.” Each act of criminality makes the next one that much worse, and that much more likely.
