SALON -- Aaron Belkin is director of Take Back the Court and professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. He wrote this opinion piece for Salon.
“President Trump, of course, poses an extreme threat to the rule of law. But President Trump is not the root of the problem. Nor is the GOP’s willingness to destroy ‘democratic norms’ the root of the problem,” Belkin writes. “Both Trump and GOP norm-breaking are symptoms, not causes. The root of the Republican radicalism is the triangular relationship among capital (e.g., the Koch brothers), the right-wing media (e.g., Fox News) and resentment voters (whom Hillary Clinton accurately labeled ‘deplorables’), the latter being the roughly 40 percent of the public who still believe Trump is doing a good job.”