By Mike Weland
Boundary County is Trump Country according to a sign on Highway 95 leading into Bonners Ferry that so proclaims, the assertion given credence by the many U.S. flag-flying pickups, “Go Brandon” and “@!$* Biden” signs proliferating here through this era of Trump, and mostly by the overwhelming support this county has tendered the most divisive president ever to have held the office each time his name has appeared on a local ballot.
And for most of the decade he’s been in U.S. politics, very few in Boundary County who questioned his contrary ways dared speak out … it wasn’t received well, especially if you owned a business or served the public. To lend a contrary opinion disputing contentions that the Lyin’ King was and is the best president ever was frowned upon by most MAGA.
For a liberal heretic to point out proof backed by evidence was (is) to subject oneself to ridicule and threats at best, boycotts and ostracism both overt and veiled at worst, from people who answered pointed criticisms based on empirical truth with far-fetched conspiracy theories and/or “you got TDS.”
Trump derangement syndrome.
But there is a growing contingent who question if Trump’s actions better reflect those of a tyrannical and self serving would-be king enamored of the perks and powers of office rather than those of a U.S. president with the responsibility to serve his constituents.
On Saturday, while Trump was looking glum as his birthday parade of military might rolled down the streets of Washington, DC, churning million-dollar rut in the streets with negligible numbers yawning alongside the sycophants obligated to show proper obsequiousness, out in the hinterlands, millions said “enough.”
It is good to talk straight, to make promises. It is not okay to lie and/or break the law in the attempt to live up to your promises.
People in Boundary County seem to be waking to the fact that the divide isn’t about conservative or liberal, right or left — those being distinctions made up and applied by Trump — but about right and wrong.
And they are no longer reticent to say so.
Most civics books teach us that there are three equal branches of government; the legislative, the executive and the judicial. On Saturday, peaceful protestors in their millions, including many who challenged the Trump Country thesis walking on the Kootenai River Bridge, sent notice to those of the judiciary who’ve lost sight of the law, to legislators who’ve forgotten to what they swore fealty and to a criminal executive who thinks he’s above the law and that he’s suborned the government by emasculating those branches with constitutional oversight over his overreach …
There is a fourth pillar of government to which all U.S. citizens belong, even he declared wrongly above the law by a supreme court made subservient to his attempt at tyranny and the Deep State machinations of the Heritage Foundation, a group dedicated to overturning every hard-earned gain in equality wrested through honest protest from a cabal swathed in an unearned and unmerited idea of supremacy.
Under our constitution, unlike any other, it is we, the people, who have the ultimate authority, for it is we who elect representatives, not rulers … we subject ourselves not to fallible men but to an infallible ideal laid down in a living constitution by which we dedicate ourselves not to power or privilege, but to ever forming a more perfect union. For all men, not a privileged few.
We, the people, stood peacefully on a bridge in Bonners Ferry Saturday, on streets, lanes and boulevards in cities and towns across our nation, asserting our constitution, our rights … being right.
