Do you know the day America died? Do you want to celebrate it?

During a visit to my brother's house in the mid-1980s, a fellow house guest brought up Donald Trump as an example of a fraudulent businessman.  It was a time when Trump was launching his first book about himself.  The house guest was a retired commercial banker from Chicago and I was the former business editor for a newspaper.  We got into a discussion about how unscrupulous business people tarnished the reputation of the business community for ethical businesses. That's when he brought up Donald Trump.  Some of his associates had encounters with Trump and had definite opinions about him.  They loathed him.  They wanted no part of him or his schemes.

Since that time I have never heard a good word about Trump from anyone with knowledge of him.  Those who support Trump automatically put themselves in the category of the stupidly malicious.  People who have known Trump say he has always played the schoolyard bully, lauding those who fawn over him, insulting and denigrating those who don't.  The retired banker said his associates claimed that it was impossible to have a substantive, coherent conversation with Trump.  His conversational efforts were devoted to self-inflation and self-promotion.  And when he wasn't defaming other people, he was telling lies.  

He is loathed by conservatives within his own party.  Columnist George Will has conceded that Trump and his cohorts have pretty much destroyed America:  "Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation’s highest office, this nation is in a downward spiral. This spiral has not reached its nadir, but at least it has reached a point where worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected."

Other Republicans who formed the Lincoln Project are issuing warnings about the demise of America.  But there are  others who think America has been irreparably damaged and will never again be the country it once was in leading the world in extending the benefits of democracy.  For many people, America has been declared dead.  It has ceased to function.

Trump's "news conference" Tuesday evening, July 14, in the White House rose garden  was actually a declaration of death for the nation.  For Richard Nixon, it took some time before the general public and members of his own party decided he had to go, but that time came.  He resigned when he realized impeachment was inevitable.  While Trump was impeached in the House, the Republicans in the Senate endorsed his corruption and incompetence.  When a party in power gives support to a depraved and deranged president, it sacrifices the basic virtues of honesty and decency for that power.  Rather than engage in a bipartisan effort to restore the integrity of our democracy, the GOP has thrown itself on its back with its legs in the air like a post-World War II Berlin street whore when the Hershey Bar truck rolled by.  

It is not Trump who has betrayed America. It is the political party who chooses to keep him in office.  In its loyalty and obeisance to Trump, the GOP, except for a few like Mitt Romney, has given up the essential virtues of our republic.  It has taken three years for Trump to kill America.  July 14 was the day he showed us the country was dead.  On what is Bastille Day in France, the day the French Revolution, turned in favor of democracy, the United States was pronounced dead in the Rose Garden.

But it might be the day that causes Americans to launch their own version of Bastille Day.