The president is not a king. Let’s make America democratic — with a small d — again | Opinion

Here’s what’s happening in the U.S. today: Everything is on the chopping block. Everything.

So far, there seems little limiting a president who is probably feeling unbound because enough Americans decided preserving democracy was less important than returning power to those with whom they align ideologically.

Now, more than 600,000 needy North Carolinians might lose access to health care.

Now, historically Black colleges and universities might lose federal funding for cultural studies, as N.C. Rep. Alma Adams recently said. North Carolina and South Carolina are among the five states with the most HBCUs and North Carolina has the most HBCU students.

And now, small and large family farms are in jeopardy.

The feds were providing assistance to cattle ranchers fixing watering systems, corn growers trying to prevent wind erosion, and potato farmers in Oregon. That will hurt white American farmers more than Black farmers because they have control of more farmland. The irony is that’s happening while President Donald Trump is giving white farmers in South Africa special treatment. He’s offering to put them at the front of the immigration line to the United States because of a falsehood that those farmers are being mistreated because they’re white.

Even funding for those struggling in western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene is no longer certain. Trump has threatened to get rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose disaster response has been indispensable. And the funding freeze affects programs that help families whose homes were destroyed by the worst natural disaster in state history.

Everything, including funding for cancer research and other scientific developments, is up in the air.

Trump and his most ardent supporters will tell you that’s not true.

They’ll point to the fine print in his seemingly endless series of executive orders.

They’ll proclaim that uberbillionaire Elon Musk and his crew of little known, even less accountable engineers having our most sensitive information — Social Security numbers included — is legitimate because they are searching for “waste, fraud and abuse.”

They’ll say Musk has the power to do this.

Malarkey.

Just know not to trust the words coming out of Trump’s mouth. He says whatever is necessary in the moment to appease the particular crowd he wants to convince or calm down. He has no morals. Principles are as foreign to Trump as Mandarin.

His most ardent supporters, aides and appointees have proven time and again their primary loyalty isn’t to this country; it is to Trump. And Vice President J.D. Vance has intimated the administration might be poised to ignore the judiciary, which is supposedly a governmental check to ensure presidents can never secure king-like powers the way Trump has. That’s not an overstatement. On Monday, a federal judge said the Trump administration has already defied a previous order to unfreeze billions in federal funding.

That’s why everything is on the chopping block.

They used Americans’ fear and hatred of transgender people, who make up a fraction of a percent of the population, to blind Americans to what was to come. They used anti-Black racism in the form of DEI demonization to pretend they just wanted a return to an era of pure merit that never existed. Tens of millions of Americans fell for that lie. The most vulnerable among us are now paying for it.

But we really got here because enough Americans took in what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, and after the initial shock of it, they simply yawned. They looked at men and women violently attacking the Capitol as part of a coordinated plan led by the sitting president to undo election results, and they essentially declared that day not all that important.

Because that mob was primarily white people rather than Black people.

Had it been Black people scaling those walls and breaking those windows and forcing elected officials to flee for their safety, law enforcement might have done the beating, rather than been beaten.

Once a country accepts a violent insurrection, it can accept anything.

That’s how we got here. It’s going to take Americans to table their personal priorities and grievances to make America democratic again.

This story was originally published February 11, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "The president is not a king. Let’s make America democratic — with a small d — again | Opinion."