This isn’t about what I’ve been up to here in Kalamata, but it has its roots in Greece because it was here, in Ancient Greece around 2,500 years ago, that the concept of democracy was born, viewed as the foundation for modern democracies everywhere. Government by the citizens.

Right now in the US it appears that the swing of Trump’s wrecking ball is doing the very opposite and that democracy there is in poor and steadily worsening health. It might even be dying. 

Yesterday, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a likely contender for the job himself one day, gave a powerful speech in which he said that the moment many have feared has arrived, describing Trump as a president who wants to be bound by no law or constitution. 

In just over 140 days he’s fired government watchdogs that could hold him to account for corruption and fraud, and declared war on culture, history, science and on knowledge itself. Databases are quite literally vanishing, as are people.

He’s delegitimizing news organizations with threats to defund them. He’s dictating what universities can teach, targeting law firms and the judiciary and even made calls for Newsom himself to be arrested for no other reason than, in Trump’s own words, “getting elected.”

Worst of all were the scenes he described in LA where unmarked vans are descending on car parks by stores and schools, their doors sliding open from which ICE thugs emerge, whisking people away with no due process, children separated from parents etc. It’s a terrifying spectacle, as was the time described below. The US is on a very dark and dangerous path.

Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.

Diary of Anne Frank 13.01.1943

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Footnote

For context, despite the poor quality of the image below, the red circle shows the area in which the LA protests are taking place. Trump has justified the deployment of 4,000 National Guards and 700 troops there as a response to an “invasion” and to prevent the city being “conquered by a foreign enemy.”

This is the first time in more than half a century that a president has mobilised the National Guard without a governor’s consent. There are now more US troops deployed to LA than are serving in Syria and Iraq, and he has indicated a willingness to send more to other cities, all run by Democrats.

On Tuesday in a speech at Fort Bragg, the largest military base in the world, Trump encouraged troops to boo journalists.