United we stand, divided we fall. So the saying goes.

It’s become crystal clear that Donald Trump wants to divide us so we can fall — and so he can rise to attain a level of power reserved for despots, not presidents.

Taunt and blame. That’s his M.O. Then use the division and the anger that he creates to distract us so he can fill the void and maximize his own power. Many have been hesitant to compare Trump’s vision for America to Nazi Germany, but when a four-star general does it, you have to sit up and take notice.

That’s exactly what Gen. Jim Mattis was doing when he quoted the “divide and conquer” slogan used by the Nazis against Americans, then, in the very next paragraph, saying that Trump “tries to divide us” through “deliberate effort.”

The logical conclusion is that he’s trying to conquer us.

Think about that for a moment.

There were those who feared that Trump might start a war with some foreign power to bolster his poll numbers and gain re-election. That would have been depraved enough. But I don’t many who thought he’d declare war on “we the people of the United States of America” in order to destroy our “more perfect union.” Yet that’s exactly what he’s doing — not just with destructive and defamatory tweets, but with the force of the U.S. military directed at peaceful protesters

Precedent

We’ve seen this strategy before, during the impeachment hearings. We brushed it off as “just politics,” but we can’t afford to do that anymore. That “just” involved a few civil servants losing their jobs because they dared to tell the truth about Trump. Now it involves tear gas, iron fences and batons.

Back then, Trump dared his opponents to impeach him. They goaded them into it, first by his brazen behavior, and then by his schoolyard taunting on Twitter.

Trump gave his opponents an impossible choice: If Democrats failed to impeach Donald Trump, they gave him a pass. They excused the inexcusable: a president withholding taxpayer dollars while demanding that a foreign power announce a bogus investigation against his political rival. If, on the other hand, they went ahead and they failed (as they were sure to do in the Republican-controlled Senate), they gave him license to do the same, or worse, in the future.

Now, he’s doing the same and worse.

He’s upped the ante, as he always does. This time, he isn’t targeting a foreign power, he’s targeting —and taunting — American citizens. He’s accusing peaceful protesters of being “thugs” and “terrorists,” dousing them with tear gas so he can have his precious Bible-prop photo-op. Then he blames them, falsely, when opportunists break windows, deface property and loot businesses. Believe me, he knows exactly what he’s doing.

George Floyd

These protests began because a police officer knelt on the neck of a black man until he died. George Floyd was not resisting arrest. He was crying out for his mother, panicking that he couldn’t breathe and that he was about to die. But Derek Chauvin didn’t stop, and the three officers with him didn’t stop him. Three others knelt on other parts of George Floyd’s body, and they all kept bystanders who wanted to intervene from doing so.

While a Floyd and those who witnessed his senseless death were pleading for help, the officer provided “law and order.” He was the law, and “order” meant killing a man so he could no longer pose a threat by allegedly trying to pass a $20 bill after he’d been laid off in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

Now, we as a country are pleading for help amid this same pandemic and amid the economic crisis that has followed. Yet Trump is, in a very real sense, kneeling on our collective necks for the sake of “law and order.” Tear-gassing protesters. Threatening those who oppose him with political retribution. Calling for military intervention against American citizens.

Donald Trump is our Derek Chauvin, and Republicans who refuse to stop him — men who once called him a “delusional narcissist,” a “pathological liar” and a “con artist” — are just like the officers who stood by and did nothing as George Floyd died.

Cowards all: so-called civil servants serving nothing but their own interests; more concerned with own political survival than with the survival of our Republic. And make no mistake, if we don’t heal the divisions Trump has inflamed and raise our voices to unite against his toxic provocations, that Republic may soon be dead.

Divide and conquer

A short time ago, I questioned whether Trump wanted COVID-19 to spread so he could use it to divide us. I wondered whether his response was so inept that it might just have been intentional: a way of pitting us against one another — those of us desperate to pay the bills against those scared for our lives in the face of a global pandemic. Another means to divide us.

We may just have our answer, because he’s doing the same thing now: Using the divisions between us as an excuse to seize broader power on the road to dictatorship, and actively working to deepen those divisions — to fuel our mutual mistrust — so he can accelerate the process. Again, as Gen. Mattis noted in his statement this week, “The Nazi slogan for destroying us ... was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’”

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists may support Donald Trump, but there is no place for such tactics in a free nation. We can’t afford to say police brutality is “just a black problem,” because abuse of power is a problem for every single American who values life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Oppression is colorblind: It can happen to any of us or all of us, if we let our guard down.

We cannot let race or political persuasion or anything else divide us as a people. We must find the strength to unify, because the stakes have never been higher.

There’s never been any question that Donald Trump wants division, and now it’s equally clear that he wants violence, because it plays right into his hands. The minute people become so frustrated, so infuriated, that they lash out against his policies with any semblance of force, he can strike them down, say, “I told you so!” and impose martial law. That’s where we’re heading.

“Unite without him”

And if they don’t take the bait? If they stay calm and peaceful? Well, he’ll find some excuse and blame them anyway — just like he blamed peaceful protesters for looting and violence they didn’t commit.

So, what do we do now?

Democrats couldn’t find an effective counter-strategy to Trump’s taunting on impeachment, but it’s imperative that we find one now.

We cannot simply react to Trump. We cannot fall into the trap he’s set of resorting to violence. That’s exactly what he wants; it will give him the very excuse he craves to proclaim himself a dictator. But we must continue to raise our voices, ever louder, until we’re not only heard, but acknowledged. Until action — peaceful but definitive — is taken to end this nightmare. We cannot allow Trump’s goading and taunting dictate the language or direction of our national conversation.

We can’t let protests simply “run their course” until we become so exhausted the we just accept the status quo. Because Trump will just up the ante again, and the new status quo will be even worse than what we’d grown resigned to accepting.

We cannot let Trump make the rules and divide us. On the contrary, we must, as Gen. Mattis said, “unite without him.” This is no longer about partisan politics; it’s about preserving the values that are the foundation of our union.

Our very freedom is at stake.

Photo: George Floyd protests, May 30, Washington, D.C., by Rosa Pineda, CC BY-SA 4.0.