When I landed in Chicago last week, returning from two weeks in Germany and Austria, the first Kentucky stories that appeared in my news feed were the devastating, deadly tornadoes and that state senator Robin Webb had changed her party registration. Webb said, in part, that she chose to leave the Democratic Party and become a registered Republican because, “First and foremost, I’m a mother, a rancher and a lawyer” and that her core values have not changed.
I thought a lot about the core values of being an American while outside the United States.
It was impossible to be in Munich, to spend hours at the Dachau concentration camp with a history professor, and to walk the same streets where the Third Reich began and implemented their hate-filled, authoritarian rule, and not see obvious, frightening parallels to what is happening in today’s United States.
To be clear, I am not someone who thinks our current president or anyone else is Hitler. All despots come to power and rule in their own unique ways. Hitler was Hitler, Stalin was Stalin, Mussolini was Mussolini, Russia’s Putin is Putin, Hungary’s Orban is Orban, and so forth.
But I was also in Budapest in August 2014 when the Hungarian people hoped that Prime Minister Viktor Orban would rule as a moderate. That is not what happened, and I would not travel to Hungary today. Orban is now “in his fourth consecutive term as prime minister. In that time, he and his allies have dismantled democratic checks and balances, taken control of the country's media, civil society and universities, and consolidated power in himself and his Fidesz party.”
Sound familiar?
President Trump was inaugurated less than 5 months ago. He has spent the entirety of that time using the power of the presidency to enrich his family, ignore Congress and the courts, punish his perceived political enemies, sue powerful law firms and news organizations, threaten our most revered universities, make us economically unstable with ill-advised, off-and-on tariffs, deport hundreds of prisoners to El Salvador without due process, use the world’s richest man (whom he’s now tossed aside) to gut federal agencies with a metaphorical chainsaw, and more.
In a few days, he’s throwing himself a full-blown military parade in Washington D.C. on the same day as his own birthday.
President Trump is 24/7 shock and awe and chaos, this week sending the National Guard to Los Angeles, CA — with Marines also ready to deploy — after being informed by Governor Newsom and local officials that this will inflame the situation.
Imagine there being an incident here in Bluegrass in which the governor, a mayor, senators and/or representatives, and local law enforcement specifically tell the president not to send the Guard or troops because doing so will inflame the situation, and him doing it anyway?
Do states’ rights still exist?
On the economic front, folks here in Kentucky are very worried about how the GOP’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill will strip Medicaid coverage from the commonwealth’s most vulnerable and kids and that the president’s inconsistent tariff statements are going to kill our bourbon industry.
And yet, from that great big huge powerful GOP supermajority in our state legislature we have heard crickets when what we need are cicadas.
Before I left for my trip overseas, I spent a lot of time talking to friends and neighbors about fears around traveling internationally right now. Some said they would take a burner phone so they wouldn’t have anything critical of the president on their phones for customs to see. Others were deleting social media apps from their phones. Some were canceling trips altogether out of fear of encountering ICE agents at passport control. I was advised to install a location app on my phone and connect it with my attorney and my adult kids so that they would always know where I was and, when returning, that I was safely through customs (I installed the app).
When I got home, I received an email asking if I felt safe traveling and wondering if they should cancel a trip to Europe to see their relatives (I urged them to go). One friend told me that he and his wife had planned to go to Europe late summer with their kids but are waiting until next year “to see if things will be calmer by then.”
So much for the land of the free, even here in Kentucky.
State Senator Robin Webb is, and has been, in a safe seat for years. Her decision to switch parties from Democrat to Republican, after more than 25 years in the Kentucky statehouse, is shocking not because she changed parties but because she changed parties now.
In her statement, Webb said she was first and foremost a mother, a rancher, and a lawyer, so let’s talk about that.
How does a mother look at today’s Republican Party — Trump IS the Republican Party — and say yes, this showman’s constant chaos, his hateful rhetoric online and on camera, and his potential catastrophic damage to Medicaid (which provides healthcare to half of Kentucky’s kids) is I want for Kentucky.
How does a rancher look at the president’s inexplicable and waffling tariff policies and think oh yes, this sounds like it will help businesses in Kentucky, sign me up.
How does an attorney — someone who has dedicated their life to the rule of law — look at the mass deportations of human beings without due process, the president thumbing his nose at judges and suing law firms because he does not like the clients they represent and say heck yes, this is what it means to follow the law.
If Sen. Webb wanted to change her registration to Independent, if she wanted to leave the Democratic Party because, as she said, the party left her, I would understand. I get that. I respect independence. I would simply wish her well.
What I can’t fathom is making a statement that as a mother, a rancher, and a lawyer she is proudly hopping aboard the Trump train when abject, subservient loyalty to one man — not the country, not the Constitution — is the sole requirement.
Trump is not Hitler. Trump is Trump, our own uniquely American Frankenstein built on an obsession with celebrity, wealth, whiteness, and a sickening disdain for the poor. Trump is an American. Our American. We built him, and we will pay the hefty price for giving him power.
I returned to the United States from Austria and Germany with a pit in my gut for the obvious parallels I witnessed between their history and our present, and I got here just in time to see German Chancellor Friedrich Merz sitting in the Oval Office with President Trump.
When Merz brought up June 6 as D-Day, the president chuckled that it was “not a pleasant day” for Germany because they lost WWII. Merz had to explain to Mr. Trump that D-Day was a good day because it ended Hitler’s rule, marking the start of the Allied campaign to liberate Nazi occupied northern Europe. Mr. Trump shrugged and guffawed.
What a choice you’ve made, Senator Webb.
What a choice.
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