Roger Stone, coronavirus, and the 192 days that may destroy America as we know it Will Bunch
From the Electoral College to structural racism, America is feeling painfully aware of its inherent flaws these days. None looms more ominously now than that awkward moment that is the presidential transition. In the momentous winter of 1860-61, the United States literally split in two during the haze between the failed presidency of Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan and the first-ever Republican administration of Abraham Lincoln that terrified the slave-addled South.
Now consider this scenario: A seemingly unending crisis has ripped millions of jobs from the U.S. economy, with a growing homelessness problem — and a stubborn lame duck president with his head in the sand about the radical government intervention required. Those problems appear to loom in 2020, and they were also all too real in the first two months of 1933.
At the absolute low point of the Great Depression, with a rash of bank failures worsening the sense of doom, outgoing GOP president Herbert Hoover clung to his ruinous mix of free-market capitalism and private charity, refusing to work with incoming Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt on anything that might speed up his proposed intervention known as the New Deal. As America stared into the abyss, what’s alarming about 1933 isn’t the fear that FDR would become a dictator (as Adolf Hitler was doing in Germany that January) but that a lot of respectable folks seemed to want one, including a New York Daily News editorial that breezily noted that “[d]ictatorship in crises was ancient Rome’s best era.”
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/roger-stone-commuted-end-of-trump-presidency-20200712.html?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
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