The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
The odds that I would share a meal with America’s most famous racist were surely infinitesimal, and yet there I was staring across the table at presidential candidate and Alabama Gov. George Corley Wallace.
It was 1975 and we were attending a statewide meeting of Oklahoma Democrats. I was the traveling companion that year for my own presidential hopeful and mentor, Rep. Morris K. Udall.
After Udall had finished one of his characteristically funny, folksy, wisdom-laden speeches, Wallace rolled his wheelchair to a lowered mic and began one of his pseudo-populist rants that tore into the “liberal power structure” that had left ordinary American to suffer while left-wing activists and “pointy-headed professors” pandered to whole groups of underachievers.
Three years earlier, he had been shot at a Maryland shopping center howling the words, as now he did, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Before Wallace finished his speech, one of his aides approached me and asked if Mo and I would join the governor and his wife Cornelia for dinner. Against my wishes, the always genial Mo said yes.
I was shocked by Wallace’s charm. Perhaps following the admonition “ know thy enemy,” Wallace talked in detail about Mormon settlers and asked Mo how he fit in.
Wallace professed to be a liberal who had lost his first statewide race because as a judge he had given early parole to black prisoners he believed to be falsely accused. Over coffee and pie, he argued that he was not a racist, but a state-rights advocate.
Later that evening, Mo reminded me that fascists always attached themselves to some “higher cause” of their own making.
I recalled that long-ago evening recently when I read the text of President Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore.
Speaking from a teleprompter, the president raised the specter of a violent left-wing army of revolutionaries marching on one of America’s most iconic monuments. “I am here as your president to proclaim before the country and the world: This monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed ...”
On he went, at tiresome length, declaring himself commander-in-chief of a new revolutionary army that with the backing of the Second Amendment declares war on the civil rights activists, the human rights propagandists, and borrowing a favored target of Wallace, the professors who were poisoning the minds of young Americans.
Trump’s call to arms was cleverly crafted by aides to include every imaginable patriotic trope known to our literature. “Our country is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, and indoctrinate our children.” Really? Sound familiar?
I have believed for some time that Trump would disappear like a bad dream come November. After nearly 50 years of conservative deregulation, the case for Republicanism has run out of steam.
The last strong Republican President, in my view, was George H.W. Bush, and he achieved stature by violating fundamental principles of late 20th Century conservativism.
We look back now on Bush’s wisdom in turning back Saddam Hussein from his invasion of the Kuwait oil fields, and then against all advice stopping short of invading Baghdad — an inestimable mistake his well-meaning son would make 11 years later.
The senior Bush then used his popularity to enact a needed tax increase that ultimately handed the presidency to Bill Clinton. Sometimes the price of patriotism is electoral defeat.
Trump’s accidental presidency has been an outrage from day one.
His greatest claimed achievement, the economy, was one-part a gift from President Obama and one-part the unleashing of a torrent of federal deficit spending unequalled in non-wartime history.
His vaunted tax cut ended up sharing 80% to 85% of the benefit with the top 1% of Americans.
It so embarrassed many that they returned the money or gave it to charity.
His foreign policy has been to destroy every multinational treaty that has maintained the peace since World War Two. And he has bowed prostrate to Putin and made book with strongmen across the globe.
Lacking any argument for reelection, Trump’s response is to protect the boulders of Mt. Rushmore against an invading army of leftists.
His campaign would be funny were it not so serious.
Fascism, Udall told me that night, arrives on a wing and leaves with us in a pine box.
They say “power to the people, but what they mean is power to the following people.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King described Wallace, the charming dinner companion, as the most dangerous man of his time.
Perhaps Wallace has been replaced in our time by Trump.
