A hallmark of the late Soviet period was that no one actually knew who was running the country. Leonid Brezhnev, who supposedly ordered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, could barely speak in public. There was a concerted effort by the Politburo to hide his decline, to the extent that they could. By the final few years, it was clear that Brezhnev wasn’t actually making any decisions at all. Then, when Brezhnev finally died in 1982, he was replaced with Yuri Andropov — who, from the moment he took office, was suffering from severe kidney failure that often led to his complete incapacitation. Of course, that fact wasn’t disclosed to anyone at the time. But after Andropov died a little over a year into his term, the Soviets released medical files revealing he had been on dialysis practically the whole time he was in office. At that point, Andropov was replaced by someone named Konstantin Chernenko. And you can probably guess how that went. For his part, Chernenko was *also* suffering from debilitating health problems — including heart failure and emphysema — from the moment he took over. And once again, these problems were hidden, at least until he died while in office after 13 months on the job. And once again, in those 13 months, he spent a lot of his time in the hospital, unable to perform his duties. Yes, the Soviet Union cycled through three mostly unaccountable, incapacitated leaders in rapid succession, all while hiding their respective conditions from the public. You don’t need to be a student of history to know how that worked out, or what happened to the Soviet Union a few years later. Everything collapsed.
For many years, it’s gone without saying that, in this country, we don’t want to emulate the Soviet model of governance. Instead of being governed by a shadowy Politburo or an unelected bureaucracy of some kind, we’ve always understood that it’s critically important to have a competent, healthy president at the head of the federal government. That’s why members of the Cabinet, as well as members of Congress, have a constitutional duty to remove the president if, during his term, he becomes incapable of serving. It’s also why White House doctors release regular reports about the health of the president. Any effort to subvert this model of transparency — to revert to a Soviet style of governance, where no one knows who’s in charge — can only be interpreted in one way: It’s an attempt to undermine and ultimately destroy the foundations of this country, just as the Soviet Union was destroyed. And the people responsible for any kind of effort like that should be imprisoned as traitors to this country, because that’s exactly what they are.
.png)
.png)
