OPINION:
The drums of conflict grow louder by the day. Never-Trump demonstrators and their rioting factions are mustering their forces to mortally wound Donald Trump’s presidency before it gains further momentum. The battle is broader than opposition to an unconventional chief executive.
It’s a struggle between competing outlooks — a secular vision of a borderless world ruled by left-wing opportunism or a divinely inspired America that Ronald Reagan compared to “a shining city on a hill,” hope for a darkling world. As in the time of Reagan, it’s once more “a time for choosing.”
The stunning loss of their champion left Democrats in disarray and disbelief, and that quickly turned to anger at Donald Trump and his thoroughly mainstream belief that America should belong to Americans. Resistance is their battle cry, and it echoes from Congress to the faculty lounges, to the newsrooms and to the streets.
Congressional Democrats turned the dial to resistance when 73 of them refused to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration. They followed last week by scorning several hearings on Capitol Hill where confirmation votes were scheduled on Mr. Trump’s Cabinet nominees. Republicans had no choice but to suspend rules and approve the nominees without a single Democrat yea or nay. The Democrats must now decide whether to commit further offense by staying away from President Trump’s first State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 28.
At a protest of a scheduled speech at the University of California at Berkeley by Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay conservative iconoclast, rioters dressed in the black favored by anarchists, smashed windows and set fires while police watched from a distance. The sight of the law handcuffed by a policy of non-intervention is catnip for the rioters, emboldening them to malice. When 200 demonstrators vandalized stores, set fires and stoned the police at Mr. Trump’s inauguration, they were charged with felony rioting and face the prospect of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Prosecutors should not hesitate to appropriately punish the evildoers. Orderly demonstrations are protected speech, but rioting is a crime.
In the Never-Trump playbook, no good deed undertaken by the new president or his family must go unpunished. A thousand demonstrators marched on the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., where the family was entertaining a fundraising gala for the American Red Cross.
Rosa Brooks, an Obama official of the Defense Department, recommends bad deeds. She suggests in Foreign Policy magazine that a military overthrow of the Trump administration might be appropriate: “[One] possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” The unprecedented betrayal is made more unsettling by some 12,000 other tweets calling for someone to assassinate Mr. Trump. “Progressives” and other liberals lecture everyone who will listen that bullying is a no-no. Murder, however, might be OK.
When agitators have finished their day’s dirty work, they strip their masks and black garb and go home to their families, safe within their homes protected by the nation they would destroy. If America is made great again, the millions who put Donald Trump in the White House must speak up for the nation others would destroy.
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