If you don’t think America is in terrible trouble in this Era of Trump, you’re not paying attention. And so if you’re not paying attention, you also may not realize that, in fact, the resistance is gaining ground, and Donald Trump is weaker than you may think.
I’ll talk more about that in a moment, but first I have to tell you a terrible story about how imperiled our fundamental right to free speech really has become. This, by the way, is what happens to me a lot of days – and maybe to you, too: a plunge back and forth between despair for America and hope for its resurgence.
Here’s the despair part: Maybe you haven’t heard about Larry Bushart Jr. of Lexington, Tennessee, who spent five weeks in a jail cell, until last week, only and entirely because of something he posted online. Here’s what I learned about Larry Bushart by reading The Intercept, a valuable nonprofit investigative newsroom.
Bushart is 61; he’s a retired cop and prison guard, and he’s pretty active on Facebook and other online sites on behalf of progressive ideas. He is no fan of Donald Trump – he has posted regularly about Trump’s move toward authoritarianism, and Bushart worries about the growing assault on free speech. So when the right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk was murdered, Bushart got upset that Kirk was being lionized, and he posted about that – including one post drawing from Trump’s response to the mass shooting last year at an Iowa high school, when the president said, “We have to get over it.” That is, according to Trump, you can’t do anything to restrict guns, so these things like school shootings are just going to happen. Bushart reposted a meme using Trump’s words, and added, on the day after Charlie Kirk was murdered, “Seems relevant today.” Yeah. I guess so.
And that’s what got him in trouble. The Perry County sheriff, a Trump partisan, read that, and then sent officers to knock on his door. And Larry Bushart – ex-cop, anti-Trump keyboard warrior – was led out of his home in handcuffs, locked up and charged with “threatening mass violence at a school.” That was on September 22nd. He was incarcerated until October 29th in lieu of $2 million bail – released, and charges dropped, only after national media attention. Yep: He was locked up for five weeks for what he wrote on Facebook.
The First Amendment is the fundamental right of Americans. The right to free speech, a free press, the free practice of religion, to assemble, to petition the government – these are foundational to free government. In another administration, an earlier time, a guy getting locked up this way would prompt the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene on behalf of protecting those rights. Not now, of course; not with the Justice Department just another outpost of MAGA heads eager to do whatever satisfies the enormous and fragile ego of Donald Trump.
I hope you’re as outraged by this as I am. But I hope you also note this: Trump is not a popular president. Even Republican polls show his net approval rating underwater at this point, and a look at 10 recent polls show his disapproval exceeding his approval by a range of 5 to 23 points. People don’t like his handling of inflation, his murder of supposed “drug traffickers” in the Caribbean, his tariffs, even his teardown of the White House East Wing. Last month, seven million people took to the streets to demonstrate against him. And his supporters are falling away over some of these issues – like the Midwestern farmers whose markets Trump has destroyed, even as he is taking away their food aid.
And we all need to know this: He and his disciples are not invulnerable. A lot of us believe that the polls are telling us that Trump’s apologists will get their comeuppance from voters next year. We need to make sure more people believe that, and share our confidence that we can stop this slide into authoritarianism – the awful stuff, like what we see in Larry Bushart getting locked up in Tennessee.
There’s a new book out by Steven Pinker, the noted Harvard psychologist, called “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…”. Pinker notes, in part, that organized resistance can grow as people realize that everybody else recognizes what they do – like, this administration’s corruption. Listen to Pinker’s words: “As the pluralistic ignorance unravels, the protest can snowball and take in a growing number of defectors who had been falsifying their loyalty.”
That sounds right to me. So, yeah, when an ex-cop is locked up for posting his views on Facebook and the First Amendment is under attack, and the people sworn to uphold the Constitution look the other way, we’re undeniably in a bad way. But people are paying attention, and our concern is getting through. So as we plunge daily or hourly between despair and hope, I’d offer this: We’re making a difference, folks. Keep at it. Keep hope alive.
Rex Smith, the host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
