Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Issues Stark ‘Virus’ Summary Of America Right Now

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe warned this weekend that America’s democratic foundations are being eroded not by a single explosive crisis but by a slow, insidious decay that’s now speeding up under President Donald Trump.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Tribe cautioned against waiting for a dramatic turning point. “Looking for an explosion, a kind of moment of crisis ― what physicists like to call a singularity in a kind of unique episode of presidential defiance of a court order ― that’s misleading,” he said. “It frames what we are experiencing in the wrong way.”

Tribe cited T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

“For years, we have allowed the body politic to be hollowed out by a virus,” he said. “A virus that attacks the very foundations of the rule of law on which the government really rests. It’s a virus we have to fight with all our energy, without waiting for just the right moment. You know, it’s a disease if you think about it.”

That disease, Tribe said, “reached fever pitch around the Jan. 6 insurrection,” when Trump escaped consequences. Now, the situation during Trump’s second term has deteriorated to the point where even independent judges cannot “fully keep pace with the mayhem.”

“So that’s what we’re facing,” Tribe concluded. “Looking for the moment of crisis is like looking for the shiny object and taking our eyes off the disease that is spreading and that we really have to fight, the virus we need to fight.”