Rep. Jared Golden is wrong about the threat to American democracy we now face.

Golden recently wrote in a widely-circulated column that he expects and is “OK” with a win by former President Donald Trump in November because America’s democracy is strong enough to endure another four years of a Trump presidency.

Golden concludes that “we should reflect on the history and strength of our great democracy, safe in the knowledge that no one man is strong enough to take it away from us.”

He may be right that no one man can do so, but Trump is only a frontman for a largely coordinated and multifarious assault on our democracy. What we face is one Republican presidential candidate, supported by a supermajority on the Supreme Court, by the Heritage Foundation, millions of voters who get their “news” from TikTok and Fox, foreign interference, the millionaires and billionaires behind Project 2025 and all the Republican lawmakers who have become the puppets of the candidate.

We must recognize that the America we knew, the America that Golden speaks of as if it still existed, has been whittled away until it stands like a tree gnawed to a pencil point by beavers.

Who would have thought that, in America, a president would be allowed to commit murder without fear of legal consequences as long as he gave the order as “an official act” of his presidency?

Or that Roe v. Wade would be overturned and states would make abortion a crime even when the health of a woman is at stake? Who would have thought we would watch our Capitol attacked and ransacked by a mob incited by the president who simply watched it happen on TV? No, 20 years ago the idea that our American democracy could be lost in an election would have seemed preposterous.

The America we knew then is not today’s America.

Golden once stood against a ban on assault weapons. He changed his mind when he recognized (after the Lewiston tragedy last October) that America had changed. He explained that “a false confidence that our community was above this, and that we could be in full control, among many other misjudgments” had allowed him to believe assault weapons were not a real threat in Maine.

It is now time for Rep. Golden (and all of us) to recognize that a false confidence that our country is above self-destruction and that we the people can remain in full control, among many other misjudgments will lead to another great tragedy: the end of our American democracy.