This contempt was signaled in his inaugural speech when Trump said, “The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.” No, the president’s oath is to “preserve, protect
and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It is to the law not the “volk.”
Barnett Rubin, a political scientist and Afghanistan expert who served at the State Department, recalled to me in an email how he never thought of the oath he took to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign
and domestic,” even when confronting the Taliban, but that these days the words have acquired meaning.
I am a naturalized American, and so I took the oath to “support
and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
This column about contempt amounts, in a way, to fulfillment of that oath.
Fried had this to say in his parting remarks: “Few believed
that Poland’s Solidarity movement could win, that the Iron Curtain would come down, that the Baltic States could be free, that the second of the 20th century’s great evils — Communism — could be vanquished without war.
We have, imperfectly, and despite detours and retreat along the way, sought to realize a better world for ourselves and for others, for we understood
that our prosperity and our values at home depend on that prosperity and those values being secure as far as possible in a sometimes dark world.”
There could be no finer rebuke to Trump’s dangerous contempt.
This amounts to a dramatic break with American policy as superbly articulated last month by one of the departing diplomats, Daniel Fried, who joined the Foreign Service in 1977
and served with great distinction, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.