Kentucky Democrat boards the Trump train

When I landed in Chicago last week, returning from two weeks in Germany and Austria, the first Kentucky stories that appeared in my news feed were the devastating, deadly tornadoes and that state Sen. Robin Webb had changed her party registration stating, in part, that she chose to leave the Democratic Party and become a registered Republican because, “First and foremost, I’m a mother, a rancher and a lawyer” and that her core values have not changed.

I thought a lot about the core values of being an American while I was outside the United States. 

My great grandmother immigrated from Germany and my great grandfather from Austria, hence the reason for my trip. I wanted to get a feel for my ancestors who, as teenagers who did not speak a word of English, had the courage to leave everything and everyone they knew to come to the United States — land of the free, home of the brave — and build a life.

It was impossible to be in Munich, to tour the Dachau concentration camp with a history professor, and to walk the same streets where the Third Reich began and implemented its hate-filled, authoritarian rule, and not see some of the obvious, frightening parallels to what is happening today, this minute, in the United States.

Let me be clear, I am not someone who thinks our current president or anyone else is Hitler. All despots come to power and rule in their own unique ways. Hitler was Hitler, Stalin was Stalin, Mussolini was Mussolini, Russia’s Putin is Putin, Hungary’s Orban is Orban, and so forth.

But I was also in Budapest in August 2014, and I can tell you how hopeful the Hungarian people were that Prime Minister Viktor Orban would rule as a moderate. That is not what happened, and I would not travel to Hungary today. As NPR reports, Orban is “in his fourth consecutive term as prime minister. In that time, he and his allies have dismantled democratic checks and balances, taken control of the country’s media, civil society and universities, and consolidated power in himself and his Fidesz party.” 

Sound familiar?

President Donald Trump was inaugurated less than five months ago. He has spent that time using the power of the presidency to mostly ignore Congress and the courts; punish his perceived political enemies; sue powerful law firms; threaten our most revered universities; make us economically unstable with ill-advised, off-and-on tariffs; deport hundreds of prisoners to El Salvador without due process, and use Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to gut federal agencies with a metaphorical chainsaw. 

And this coming weekend, he is throwing himself a full-blown military parade in Washington, D.C., on the same day as his own birthday.

It is all shock and awe and chaos, all the time, including when he deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles after being informed by the governor and local officials that this would not only be unhelpful, but that it would inflame the situation. He sent the Guard anyway and followed that by sending 700 Marines.

Which brings me back to Kentucky. 

Imagine there being an incident here in the Bluegrass in which Gov. Beshear, the mayor, senators and/or representatives, and local law enforcement specifically told the president not to send the Guard or troops because doing so would inflame the situation, and him doing it anyway? 

Do states’ rights still exist in the Trump administration?

Everyone — and I mean everyone — is talking about fear, chaos, and how the GOP’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill will strip Medicaid coverage from the commonwealth’s most vulnerable and kids and how the president’s inconsistent tariff statements are going to kill the bourbon industry. 

Meanwhile, from the great big huge powerful GOP supermajority in our state legislature we have heard mostly crickets when what is called for are cicadas. 

Before I left for my trip overseas, I spent a lot of time talking to friends and neighbors about their fears — founded or unfounded — about traveling internationally right now. Some said they would take a burner phone so they wouldn’t have anything critical of the president on their phones for customs to see. Others were traveling but deleting social media apps from their phones. Some were canceling trips altogether out of fear of encountering ICE agents at passport control. I was advised to install a location app on my phone and connect it with my attorney and my adult kids so that they would always know where I was and, when returning, that I was safely through customs (I begrudgingly installed the app).

When I got home, I received an email from a fellow Anderson Countian asking if I felt safe traveling and wondering if they should cancel a trip to Europe to see their relatives (I urged them to go). Another said he and his wife had planned to go to Europe late summer with their kids but thought they should wait until next year “to see if things would be calmer by then.”

Does this sound like the land of the free?

Sen. Robin Webb has been in the legislature for almost 30 years. Her decision to switch parties from Democrat to Republican is shocking not because she changed parties but because she changed parties now. 

In her statement, Webb said she was first and foremost a mother, a rancher, and a lawyer. So let’s talk about that.

How does a mother look at today’s Republican Party? President Trump does not lead today’s Republican Party, he IS the Republican Party. Does a mother want this constant chaos, his hateful rhetoric online and on camera, his potential catastrophic damage to Medicaid (which provides health care to half of Kentucky’s kids)? Is that what a mother wants for Kentucky’s children, for the future?

How does a rancher look at the president’s inexplicable and waffling tariff policies and think, oh yes, this sounds like it will help businesses in Kentucky, sign me up.

How does a lawyer — someone who believes in the rule of law — look at the mass deportations of human beings without due process and the president suing law firms right and left because he does not like the clients they represent and say heck yes, this is why I became a lawyer.

If Sen. Webb wanted to change her registration to Independent, if she wanted to leave the Democratic Party because, as she said, the party left her, I would understand. I get that. I respect independence. I would simply wish her well.

What I can’t fathom is saying that as a mother, a rancher and a lawyer, she is purposefully joining Trump’s Republican Party in which abject, cult-like, subservient loyalty to one man — not the country, not the Constitution — is the No. 1 and only requirement.

Trump is not anyone but Trump, our own uniquely American Frankenstein built on this country’s obsession with celebrity, wealth, whiteness, and a sickening disdain for the poor. Trump is an American. Our American. We built him, and we will pay the hefty price for giving him power.

I returned to the United States from Austria and Germany with a pit in my gut for the parallels I witnessed between their history and our present, and I got here just in time to see German Chancellor Friedrich Merz sitting in the Oval Office with President Trump. When Merz brought up June 6 as D-Day, the president chuckled that it was “not a pleasant day” for Germany because they lost WWII. Merz had to explain to Mr. Trump that D-Day was a good day because it ended Hitler’s rule, marking the start of the Allied campaign to liberate Nazi occupied northern Europe. 

Mr. Trump shrugged and guffawed.

What a choice you’ve made, Sen. Webb. 

What a choice.