Musings on the Rule of Law: Is It Based on the Constitution or Trump?

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., May 10, 2025

When Trump took office as President he swore to support and defend the Constitution.  Now he’s not sure what that means for due process requirements for deported migrants.  Trump says that he has “excellent lawyers” to guide him on his Constitutional obligations; but the issue remains unresolved, with Trump remaining uncertain on what rule of law he must follow.

Trump’s actions deporting illegal immigrants have been considered unconstitutional, but if U.S. forces become directly involved in the Middle East war and/or in the Russian-Ukraine war, Trump would likely impose martial law and avoid peacetime Constitutional limits on his rule of law as commander in chief of U.S. forces in wartime.

If the U.S. military forces become involved in a war and Trump becomes a wartime commander in chief, he could arguably impose martial law and avoid accountability for peacetime due process.  Abraham Lincoln did that in the U.S. Civil War, and indications are that Trump would favor reducing Constitutional limitations on his power.

Trump may be evil; but he has been evil like a fox in avoiding Constitutional limits on his power.   He has so far avoided accountability for violations of Constitutional due process of those he has ordered deported, and it should be expected that Trump will continue to limit any restrictions on his executive powers.

So far the federal courts have been the only limits on Trump’s power to defy the rule of law, but the power of the courts to hold Trump accountable has been limited to contempt proceedings.  Impeachment seems to be the only real power to enforce the rule of law against a sitting President, and impeachment is not feasible until we have a new Congress.

America can hope that the 2026 midterm elections will produce a Congress that is not controlled by Trump, and keep Trump out of a war and hold him accountable for peacetime Constitutional standards of due process.  Otherwise Trump could commit  U.S. forces to a war such as that in Ukraine or Israel, and as a wartime commander in chief and impose martial law.

Don’t expect humility or respect for the Constitution fromTrump.  Based on his obsession with concentrating his power and his doubts as to whether he is subject to the Constitution and the checks and balances of Congress, he’s likely to favor a war that would enable him to impose martial law and restrict peacetime standards of due process. 

 Only a reinvigorated Congress can save the checks and balances in the Constitution.  Until then America will have to depend on its federal courts to define the limits of constitutional due process.  As a former elected official and an Army Officer I have had to swear to support and defend the Constitution, and I believe that Trump has the same obligations.      

      

Notes:

When asked if he needs to uphold the Constitution, Trump says: ‘I don’t know’

“I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said,” the president said.  He went on to say that “I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”   https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/04/i-dont-know-trump-constitution-00326040.

See also, “Trump says he doesn’t know if he backs constitutional due process rights in a new interview.”  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-he-doesnt-know-if-he-backs-constitutional-due-process-rights-in-new-interview.

Musings on the Inexpressible Evil of Trump

By Rudy Barnes,Jr, May 3, 2025. See Beyond the chaos of Trump's authoritarianism, taken from the article by Jeffrey Franz, published April 24, 2025 in Progressive Christianity at https://progressivechristianity.org/resource/the-inexpressible-evil-of-trump-2-0/. 

In a word, Trump is an evil force in U.S. Politics.  To understand the levels of evil and the unending darkness of Trump 2.0, it’s important to understand some of the background that explains Trump’s behavior.  We can begin with Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor, who was abrasive, corrupt, and immoral to the core.

In 1973, Donald Trump and his father, Fred, were in trouble.  The U.S. Department of Justice had sued both father and son, along with their multi-million dollar business, alleging racial bias with their real estate dealings.  The government was able to get multiple employees to confess the wrong doing.  The advice of the Trump lawyers was to settle and move on, but Trump resisted doing this, seeking the counsel of Roy Cohn, the notorious attorney for Senator Joseph McCarthy during the “Red Scare” of the 1950s.  As it turns out, Trump developed his “playbook” for politics from the mentoring he received from Roy Cohn. 

When they first met, Roy told Trump, “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.  Go after the Justice Department.  Don’t ever admit guilt.”  Cohn advised him to “fight back” and countersue the federal government, which is what the Trump company ended up doing.  The lesson here for the young Donald Trump was clear: you can turn a situation around just by ignoring the facts and going after your attacker.  Early on, Cohn’s mantra to Trump was attack and counter-attack, attack and counter-attack.  Never admit any wrong-doing, and never apologize. 

In a recent documentary on Roy Cohn, he is described by people who knew him as “a snake,” “a scoundrel” and “a new strain of a son of a bitch.”  One of the questions the documentary seeks to unveil is how much of him and his “savage,” “abrasive” and “amoral” behavior is visible in the behavior of Donald Trump.  Over his career, Cohn had  been indicted for stock-swindling, obstructing justice, perjury, bribery, conspiracy, extortion, blackmail, and filing false reports.  Like Trump, Cohn was famous for winning cases by delaying, denying, and endlessly lying.

More evil than evil

“In trying to understand these times (the third decade of the 21st century), we should point out that we have never had a president who was remotely as evil and as corrupt as Donald Trump.  The depths and levels of his evil are seemingly endless.  We almost need a new word for something that is “more evil than evil” in order to capture the darkness of his spirit.  Even more amazing is that, assuming it was an honest election, the American people who elected him President of the United States share culpability for supporting his evil.”  

Let’s take a look at who we put back in the White House a few months ago: “A twice impeached, four-times indicted, convicted (on 34 counts) criminal. A convicted rapist (according to the judge in the case) and sexual predator. A man who was having sex with a porn star when his wife was nursing his new-born child at home. A man who openly ridicules and mocks disabled people. A man who calls veterans who served in our armed forces “suckers” and “losers.” A man who is an incurable, pathological liar and a malignant narcissist. A man who, unwilling to accept his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, inspired a treasonous insurrection at our nation’s capital seeking to overthrow the 2020 election results. 

Trump is a nasty narcissist, and he has never been reluctant to show his evil nature. “Trump took our country out of the Paris climate change accords, canceled the treaty with Iran to prohibit them from developing nuclear weapons; and is threatening to terminate our participation in NATO. He is weakening our national security through his sycophant support of Vladimir Putin in Russia, coupled with his bullying disrespect and lack of support of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, a democratic ally of ours in Europe; Trump only obeys court orders he agrees with, and just defied the 9-0 decision of the United States Supreme Court to mediate the return of Salvadoran Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was legally in the United States and then unlawfully deported to a notorious Salvadoran prison.”

Notes:

“By the grace of God, America, what were we thinking?

To this day, Trump will not hire anyone or allow anyone to work in his administration who is not an election denier.  In other words: someone who does not agree that he was grievously denied the presidency in the 2020 election.  Building on Trump’s incurable animus in all of this, his only clear policy positions thus far (first 100 days) are retaliation and retribution against all of his perceived enemies.  Directly, or indirectly, these dark motivations are what animates Trump.

So, what do we do?

In the illuminating light of Christian values, one hardly knows where to begin.  We do not have words that adequately the level of evil embodied by Donald Trump.  We need a new vocabulary to define his evil concept of political legitimacy.  Can we begin to imagine the sheer ugliness and hatred that stir in this man’s heart? 

In his excellent book, “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness,” the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted that “evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole.”  This is Trump to a “t.”  Niebuhr goes on to point out how evil leaders are evil precisely because they know no law beyond the self.  Such leadership becomes morally cynical in its declaration that “a strong nation need acknowledge no law beyond its own strength.”*  (*The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, pages 9-10)

In response to this evil, “we the people” must do everything we can to get organized and push back.  In recent weeks, protests are already wide spread across the country.  They are literally happening everywhere and with increasing numbers of protestors. It may come to the point where millions of Americans will have to storm our nation’s capitol and demand the return of the rule of law and the full-granting of our constitutional rights.

Throughout the Bible, the voices of social and economic justice sound out.  In the face of evil, again and again, prophetic voices have shouted out their truth.  Now is the time for these voices to ring out across our great country and for us to rise in protest until our nation is rid of this demonic presence.     

Musings on the Increasing Irrelevance of Christianity to Politics and the Economy

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., April 26, 2025

On April 9 the stock market rose by 3,000 points based on Trump’s decision to pause most of his tariffs.  It confirmed materialism and greed as priorities in American politics and religion, with Trump seeking to take credit for cleaning up his tariff mess ahead of the midterm elections.  Any altruistic moral priorities have been lost over economic concerns.

The stock market has remained unstable, and for the first time polls indicate a majority no longer support Trump’s economic policies.  Trump has since threatened to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell--even though the President doesn’t have the authority to fire him.  Trump seems determined to ignore the law in his efforts to control the economy.

It seems that Trump staged the dramatic comeback of the stock market on April 9 with a planned pause of his ill-conceived tariffs, just what you would expect from a shyster showman, and Trump has always been a showman.  Thomas Friedman said it well: “When you hire a bunch of clowns to run the government, You can expect to have a political circus.” 

Most of Trump’s supporters claim to be Christians, but they ignore the altruistic teachings of Jesus in the greatest commandment to love God and our neighbors as we love ourselves.  It summarizes the altruistic teachings of Jesus and the moral imperative to provide for the common  good in politics.  While Christianity has long shaped American politics, it has not overcome the pervasive greed that feeds the materialism and hedonism of American culture. 

America’s Constitution represents the foundation of the rule of law that has been ignored by Trump and his Republican regime.  The Constitutional rule of law must be enforced to provide the universal altruism essential for good governance: We can only love God by loving others as we love ourselves, including those of other races and religions.

As the world’s myriad religions continue to evolve, they must become more universal and altruistic to conform with reason and advances in knowledge.  When ancient religions cling to the inerrancy and infallibility of ancient scriptures they are doomed to the dustbin of history, as are fundamentalist church doctrines never taught by Jesus.  For Christianity to survive, its  exclusivist church doctrines must be subordinated to the universal altruism taught by Jesus.

For Christianity to become relevant to our times, the church must promote the common good over partisan objectives.  That will require Americans to diversify their current polarized Congress with more partisan diversity to promote the common good.  That will require the church to promote the universal and altruistic moral teachings of Jesus.

Trump, Netanyahu and Putin are demagogues who have exploited their nationalized religions to promote their political power.  Jesus never asserted his divinity, or that God favored one religion or nation over others.  He called his disciples to follow him as God’s universal Word, not to worship him as a Trinitarian God; and the Crusades illustrated how Christian religious exclusivity has promoted religious hatred and violence among Jews, Christians and Muslims.   

Notes:

On Trump and Netanyahu Steering Toward an Ugly World, Together, see  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/opinion/trump-netanyahu-united-states-israel-autocracy.html.

On Musings of a Maverick Methodist on a Journey of Faith to Universalism, see  https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2025/01/musings-of-maverick-methodist-on.html.

On How Trump is turning American politics into a circus, see What Trump Cost America at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/opinion/trump-tariffs-pause-china.html.

On Why Criticism of Netanyahu’s Militant Zionism is not Antisemitic see

https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2023/12/musings-on-why-criticism-of-netanyahus.html.

Richard Rohr is a universalist who has described “the horrible impact the doctrines of original sin and blood atonement of Jesus have had on Christian faith, including how God is depicted as a sadistic deity that needs payment before He can love His creation, and that nothing Jesus said, did, or taught in his lifetime means anything because his death is all that matters for our salvation.”  Rohr asserts that “we must reject any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion.” See Christian Universalism, meet The Universal Christ at https://christianuniversalist.org/2021/02/christian-universalism-meet-the-universal-christ/ 

On the Greatest Commandment as a Common Word of Faith, for Jews, Christains and Muslims, see

http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2015/01/the-greatest-commandment-common-word-of.html.

Universalism can reconcile progressive Christians, Jews and Muslims.  While universalists are a minority in competing Abrahamic religions, they could be a reconciling force in promoting a universalist common word of faith.  On universalism, see Universalism: A theology for the 21st century, by Forrest Church, November 5, 2001, at Universalism: A theology for the 21st century | UU World Magazine.

The Teachings of Jesus and Muhammad on Morality and Law is an interfaith study guide based on the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad taken from  the Jefferson Bible.  It’s  posted in its entirety in the  Resources at  https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com.

Thomas Jefferson considered “the teachings of Jesus as the most sublime moral code ever designed by man,” and Jefferson detested exclusivist church doctrines.   https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com.

In 1831 Alexis deTocqueville toured America and observed that its many Christian sects shared a “Christian morality” that produced common standards of political legitimacy that defined what is right, and imbued American politics with its moral authority.  On the views of Thomas Jefferson and Alexis deTocqueville on the moral values of religion in American politics, see Religion, Moral Authority and Conflicting Concepts of Legitimacy (July 1, 2017) at http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2017/07/religion-moral-authority-and.html. See also Musings of a Maverick Methodist on a Universal and Altruistic Jesus, August 19, 2023, at http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2023/08/musings-of-maverick-methodist-on.html.

Carl Krieg has distinguished between The Political [exclusivist] Jesus and The Real [universal] Jesus at https://progressivechristianity.org/resource/the-political-jesus-and-the-real-jesus/.

The title of Robin Meyers’ book says it all: Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus (HarperCollins Publishers, 2009).  Meyers spoke on this topic at the Barnes Symposium at the University of South Carolina on April 12, 2019. While Meyers is critical of the church, he was pastor of Mayflower Church, a large UCC congregation in Oklahoma City, for over 30 years.  

For more emphasis on following the teachings of Jesus as the Logos and the universal word of God rather than limiting salvation to exclusivist Chritian beliefs in Christ as the alter ego of God and the atonement supports religious universalism and reconciliation.  See Musings of a Maverick Methodist on Jesus as the Logos in John’s Gospel at http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2023/02/musings-of-maverick-methodist-on-jesus.html; see also, Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Irony of the Logos in John’s Gospel at http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2023/02/musings-of-maverick-methodist-on-irony.html.

Dr. Rick Herrick has opined that “Jesus and God are one in the Gospel of John.”  Most Christians believe that salvation is limited to those who believe that Jesus Christ was God in the flesh.  It’s a deal most Christians can’t pass up since correct belief is all that’s required.  “The first problem with this approach is that it’s an invention of the first century church with no ties to the Jesus of history; yet for 2,000 years the vast majority of Christians have based their faith on such exclusivist beliefs as the only means of salvation; but it has no historical validity.”  An even bigger problem is that it’s an ideology with no connection to the heart.”  It’s all about me, me, me and feeds the ego rather than helping to transform it to make it more open to the needs of others. Jesus is worshiped as a God, but not followed.  This has made the church more a part of the world’s problems than a solution to them.” See https://progressivechristianity.org/resources/sadly-the-bible-is-the-problem/.

The Apostles’ Creed is taken from church doctrine and affirms exclusivist belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ as a requirement for salvation.  A Modern Affirmation is based on the universal and altruistic teachings of Jesus and emphasizes the service of love as God’s Word:

The Apostles’ Creed affirms belief in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; the third day he rose from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

A Modern Affirmation affirms belief in God the Father, infinite in wisdom, power and love, whose mercy is over all his works, and whose will is ever directed to his children’s good. We believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of man, the gift of the Father’s unfailing grace, the ground of our hope, and the promise of our deliverance from sin and death. We believe in the Holy Spirit as the divine presence in our lives, whereby we are kept in perpetual remembrance of the truth of Christ, and find strength and help in time of need. We believe that this faith should manifest itself in the service of love as set forth in the example of our blessed Lord, to the end that the kingdom of God may come upon the earth. Amen.

On Musings on Whether the Atonement Doctrine Is God’s Word, or a Christian Myth, see  

https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2024/09/musings-on-whether-atonement-doctrine.html (9/21/24). If Jesus didn’t sacrifice himself to atone for our sins or to appease the Father, what did he sacrifice for?  I think Jesus sacrificed for the same causes or values as did other prophets over the centuries.  For what MLK Jr. died for; or Mahatma Gandhi; or Abraham Lincoln; or Sojourner Truth; or other victims of war defending one’s family or community:  For the cause of justice; for the cause of compassion.  Jesus was killed by the Roman Empire (as were thousands who opposed its values) and with the help of some people in his religious tribe who were in cahoots with the Empire.  He was inviting people and especially the poor to their own dignity and nobility; and Empires as a rule do not remind the subjugated how noble they are, and how to love themselves deeply, and others as well. 

Jesus was aligning himself with the prophets of old who talked about justice flowing like a river and the coming together of all peoples, rich and poor alike.  He sacrificed for the sake of awakening us all to our powers of compassion, a divine attribute and the “secret name for God” in Judaism.  Thus, “Be you compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate” (Lk 6:36).  He was calling us to our divinity therefore and looking ahead to a time when humans would choose to be god-like, to be lovers, to practice forgiveness and moving beyond hatred and vengeance and war and power-over into a realm (a “kingdom”) of power-with, of caring and of creativity, another god-like attribute that humans share as “images of God.” He obviously resisted his premature death, his prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane prove that.  So he did not choose to make himself a sacrifice but he was committed to bringing about a new realm, a new vision, a new “kingdom/queendom” of the divine and he was not naïve enough to think it would be welcomed by all, least of all by the powers that be in politics (the Roman empire) or in religion insofar as they sided with the empire. The Last Supper demonstrates how he linked his coming death to the great stories of his ancestors around Passover and Exodus and liberation which come at a price.  His (or the gospel writers or both) invoking Psalm 22 on the cross testify to this. As Gustavo Gutierrez puts it in the Conclusion of his book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent: “The final words of Jesus—‘My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?’ (Matt.27:46; Mark 15:34)—speak of the suffering and loneliness of one who feels abandoned by the hand of God.”  He “makes the rest of the psalm his own and one can search the whole psalm to understand the meaning of his lament.”  The psalm “expresses the cruel loneliness experienced by a man of deep faith....an innocent man  who has been treated unjustly.  ...Jesus did not compose this psalm, he inherited it....The important thing is that Jesus made it his own and, while nailed to the cross, offered to the Father the suffering and abandonment of all humankind.  This radical communion with the suffering of human beings brought him down to the deepest level of history at the very moment when his life was ending.” (pp. 97-101) 

The promise of Resurrection puts him and us on the side of hope overcoming despair and on the side of Resurrection, not death, having the last word.  (Dr. Matthew Fox)

Musings on Preventing the Trump Regime from becoming a Nazi Regime

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., April 19, 2025

Religions have influenced and shaped politics, none have neutralized nationalism and demagoguery like that promoted by Donald Trump.  I’m convinced that God does not support Trump despite the assertions of his misguided supporters; and recent editorials by David Brooks and Thomas Friedman reflect an urgency to end his corrupt regime.

Trump is a 21st century vestige of Hitler, and the religious and political demographics of Germany during the rise of Hitler were similar to those of America today; but the church and German people failed to stop Hitler’s corrupt regime.  It took a World War to end Hitler’s Nazi regime, and it may take another civil war in America to end Trump’s immoral and corrupt regime.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian leader who gave his life opposing Hitler, who was never elected Germany’s leader, but who skillfully maneuvered his Nazi regime around Christian opposition to Hitler’s Third Reich and gained absolute political power as Germany’s chancellor.  I don’t know of any dictator more relevant to Trump’s politics today than Hitler.

The success of Trump’s regime in the midterm elections of 2026 would end libertarian democracy in America and affirm Trump’s objective to end the rule of law in the Constitution.  He has already made Congress impotent as a check and balance on Trump’s power, and has appointed cabinet members who are more loyal to Trump than to the Constitution.

Democracy is only as strong as the people in it; and when an unprincipled politician like Trump finds a willing audience for his political abominations they can end freedom and democracy, much like Putin and Netanyahu did in Russia and Israel.  While God is not known for political and military interventions, the church has been party to many of them.

America already had a Civil War, but it was based on the noble goal to end slavery.  There is nothing noble about giving billionaires like Trump and Musk the power to berate their political opponents and exploit the public with their narcissistic policies.  Democracy and freedom don’t have a future if public officials fail to support and defend the Constitution.

I’m a retired Army lawyer who wore a green beret and taught the Law of War and international humanitarian law.  I deeply grieve over Trump’s tendencies to follow Putin’s despotic policies, and I have witnessed an impotent church put popularity above moral principle.  I’m not optimistic that a morally complacent public can terminate Trump’s power. 

     

But America has two more elections to save America’s Constitutional democracy from ourselves and Trump’s corrupt regime.  I’m an old man who has seen too much evil in the world, and too many complacent voters who have accepted Trump’s immoral regime in our democracy; but I’m not ready to accept the end of American freedom and democracy.  Wake up America!  Let’s elect Trump nullifiers in 2026 who can restore Constitutional democracy before it’s too late.  

Notes:

Trump’s danger to Constitutional democracy is nothing new: In 2016 Richard Cohen predicted a similar scary scenario: “Weimar is the charming German city that gave its name to the parliamentary democracy that was created following World War I and which Hitler crushed in 1933. It was never a robust democracy, but it nevertheless was the government of Europe’s most important — and, in many ways, advanced — country.  Berlin in the early 1930s was a tolerant and liberal city. Many a Hollywood filmmaker got a start in Berlin. In a relative snap of the fingers, all that changed. Weimar’s intellectuals, artists, actors, writers, architects (Bauhaus) and others fled. The precipitating event was, of course, Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor. That was Jan. 30, 1933. Almost exactly a month later, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was consumed by fire. A Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was accused of setting it. (He was subsequently guillotined.) Hitler, declaring a vast communist threat, asked President Paul von Hindenburg for emergency powers. He got them. He kept them until he died.  Here is the relevance of Weimar. Trump has shown a daunting disregard or ignorance of the Constitution and of law. Regarding the use of torture, he has said that the military must follow his orders — even if they are illegal. More recently, he declared that flag-burning should be a crime and that flag burners be punished by “perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail.” The remark was one of his off-the-cuff inanities — since 1989, flag-burning has been protected political speech, and citizenship, we’d like to think, is forever. The tweet — so few words, so much meaning — spoke to Trump’s abysmal lack of knowledge but, more important, contained an emotional truth. Trump despises dissent and often reacts emotionally to setbacks or challenges. Yet, I wonder if a compliant Congress and an even more compliant American people would balk at giving Trump any emergency power he seeks. His election was a stunner — an eruption of anger and resentment that is putting an epochally unqualified man in the White House. So great was the urge to trash the status quo that Trump’s lying, bragging, cheating, insulting and breathtaking ignorance did not disqualify him.  Indeed, his very unsuitableness for the presidency immensely credentialed him. He is loved by many because he is loathed by others.  I have too much faith in America and its institutions to think that Weimar is the future. It is, however, a warning, not something that shouldn’t be discussed, but something that should be mulled. The differences between Weimar Germany and contemporary America are significant but so, increasingly, are the similarities.” See Trump isn’t Hitler. But the United States could be another Germany at 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-isnt-hitler-but-the-united-states-could-be-another-germany/2016/12/05/9f026004-bb15-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?

David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman are two mainstream and respected  columnists for the NYTimes who have written current opinions that echo Cohen’s concern. David Brooks has said, “What’s happening Is not Normal.  It’s time for an Uprising.  That’s not Normal.”  Brooks went on  to say, “It’s time for “a mass civic movement.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-harvard-law-firms.html.

Thomas L. Friedman said “I have never been so afraid for America’s future in my life.” See https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/opinion/trump-administration-china.html.

William L. Shirer has written a comprehensive history of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, copyright 1959, 1960 by William L. Shirer. 

Denise Giardina has written a historical fiction account of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s German activities opposing Hitler that’s more fact than fiction.  Saints and Villains, W.W. Norton, NY, NY, 1998.  

On Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology, see The Cost of Discipleship, 1966, Mamilan Paperbacks.