Op-Ed: George Washington's Message to His Disheartened Soldiers Applies Perfectly to the Trump Indictment Era
It’s no accident that America’s previous president was indicted the same day Congress disclosed evidence of the current officeholder’s corruption.
Nor is it by chance that the former was charged under the Espionage Act to frame him as disloyal to the United States, while the latter is alleged to have accepted a $5 million bribe.
The even more troubling fact is that federal law enforcement’s efforts to cover for the man now occupying the White House by implicating his predecessor is setting the country on a course for conflict.
Americans have never seen anything like what is now unfolding before us. The recent allegations of rank corruption are astonishing.
For more than six years, the Justice Department and FBI have been hiding evidence implicating Joe Biden and his son Hunter in a criminal enterprise to leverage the former vice president’s position to pry money from foreign officials and enterprises.
Instead of bringing Biden to justice, federal law enforcement authorities have spent that time carrying out an unlawful campaign to frame Donald Trump as a foreign agent. And thus, for the first time in our history, a former president, and the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, has been indicted on federal charges.
What would our Founding Fathers have made of it? How would those who built the pillars of our nation look on the current heirs to the Constitution?
The Founders were scholars and men of worldly wisdom who understood human nature in all its manifestations from high to low — how man has the capacity to make the noblest sacrifice on behalf of his countrymen and plot the most vicious conspiracy against them.
Knowing that all men seek power, the framers of the Constitution built a system of checks and balances to deter any one institution, any one man, from becoming too powerful.
What would they say today when it seems that all our once seemingly solid institutions have melted and behind the marble facades are nothing but vulgar schemes to satisfy the coarse ambitions of cruel and mendacious men and women? What is our defense when those tasked with enforcing the supreme law of the land lay siege to the Constitution to satisfy their appetite for power? These are trying times.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine. The famous opening words of his pamphlet “The American Crisis” were first published at Christmastime in 1776 when victory in the fight over tyranny seemed uncertain.
Gen. George Washington’s troops were disheartened, and he had Paine’s words read aloud to his men to fortify their courage:
“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”
Paine’s message to us today is this: In truth, it is we who are the pillars of the republic, freeborn men and women who revere God, the foundation on which our country was built. It is we for whom the laws were made, the institutions created. And it is we who are now being called to defend our country, our families, our communities from tyranny.
In the coming time, all of us will waver, all of us will be tempted by despair — and that’s when we must reach out in fellowship to loved ones, families, friends, patriots.
These are meaningful times, times that try men’s souls. We will stand, we will fight, and we will win.
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