‘The Constitution and the rule of law in the United States are the political religion of our nation. No other power could threaten us — come drink water from the Ohio River. But lack of learning and vigilance could make us vulnerable to the great danger of hyper-emotionalism in politics and mob violence. We can be destroyed by social disorder … common to the whole country… at what point shall we expect the approach of danger? … is there some trans-Atlantic giant to crush us at a blow? No grievance should be redressed by mob law. We can be destroyed by social disorder. Our forests of giant oaks, can they be preserved?”

This stern rumination comes not from a Democrat protesting Trump excesses, but from an 1838 Lyceum speech by 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln. He was condemning the growing and threatening expansion of slavery. The practice of slavery was then near a peak in the country. Lincoln’s words seem relevant to present assaults on constitutional rule and public order.

Lincoln was a lawyer, his practice in a case before him always firmly rooted in the Constitution. When, in 1861, South Carolina led 10 other Southern states in secession from the Union, Lincoln declared war, not upon their slavery, which he abhorred, but on firm legal ground. The Constitution does not allow states to secede.

What we have in the present is a man of very dubious character, seeking the presidency in 2016 to enhance his personal wealth, having attained office only because the Founders composed a Constitution that advantaged the wealthy with its Electoral College system of selecting a president, rather than popular vote. No accident: The Founders were men always looking out for themselves.

How have we managed to get to this place with a marching cult delivering despair and strangulation with global impact? Nearly every leadership post has been filled with an unqualified, vindictive person, and approval by compliant senators. Punishment and harm of innocents is beginning.

Privatization — making Social Security a corporation like Elon Musk’s Tesla — could make a fatality of the greatest elderly survival benefit ever created. The Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Musk claims that 150-year-olds are collecting monthly checks are lies created for dramatic effect — another money scheme.

The way it goes is this: The lie is created, then copied as fact, then multiplied by website repetition. The $66.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine, rarely acknowledged as largely a U.S. arms industry gain, becomes Trump’s lie, that it was $350 billion. Repetition makes the lie factual, as it comes quoted from the previous week.

Enough that Trump is broadly keeping his promises to rid the country of immigrants (who he personally hates and slanders), works to eliminate valued government workers and programs, allows illegitimate Musk to posture with a chain saw to demonstrate how he will make illegal cuts, and himself postures openly as a Mussolini-like figure.

From abroad he is viewed as dangerous, unreliable, weak-minded and odd, one who will undo important defense, health and service the U.S. has long provided to needy countries. This, and his pending legislation on taxes, takes us back to his initial interest in the presidency — to generate wealth for himself and those around him.

Storms and fires may rage, earth warming increases. He will pay no attention. Such attention and any such regulations limit corporate profit. His personal merchandise is still hawked on the internet.

Biden failed to arrest broad aggression of Israel’s Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Where ethnic cleansing has taken the lives 47,000 Palestinians (counting all who are under the rubble, some estimates are as high as 117,000), Netanyahu is poised to seize all remaining Palestinian land for his design of Greater Israel. Trump will stand cheering.

We must wonder at Merrick Garland’s long delay in bringing forward legal actions against Trump. This attorney general had been illegally denied a hearing to obtain a seat on the Supreme Court by then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and well knew the litany of 88 criminal charges in four jurisdictions against Trump that needed to be judged. He knew the posture of a court majority put in place by Trump.

Having sexually assaulted and otherwise abused women, incited a riot to assume a presidency he had clearly lost, been compellingly charged in four state and federal venues with falsifying records, conspiracy, election interference, forgery, international security violations, espionage, other crimes, and convicted in one case on 39 counts, Trump should now be serving a lengthy sentence, not threatening the rule of law Lincoln labeled “the political religion of our nation.”

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an investigative journalist and historian, currently editing his newest work, “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning the American Narrative.”