Lately, the lyric “we have all been here before” from the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, “Deja Vu,” keeps floating through my brain. The cause of this is the reaction of President Donald Trump’s administration and of leading Congressional Republicans to the “No Kings” protesters, whom they have been quoted describing as people who hate the United States.

Around the same time as that song was popularized in the 1970s, protesters against the Vietnam War were derided by President Richard Nixon’s administration as bums and subversives. Police and armed troops were called out to suppress dissent. Anti-war protesting students at Jackson State University and Kent State University were shot and killed.

My father-in-law was a World War II combat veteran. He fought fascists and helped open concentration camps. Years later, he watched the news on television, with video footage of assaults on Vietnam War protesters by people proclaiming that the marchers should “love [the USA] or leave it.” He told his daughter, now my wife, that he had not gone to war to preserve a government which encouraged beating on people, who were exercising their right to protest.

Now, we have a president who openly says that he hates those who oppose his policies, and who proclaims that the Democratic party is the enemy of the United States. His press secretary has said that Democratic party supporters are mainly “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.” The Speaker of the House, the Secretary of Homeland Security and Republican members of Congress denounce those who protest the attempts of the Trump administration to turn the Office of the President into an autocratic force unhampered by any restraints imposed by laws or by judicial decisions – the checks and balances of our Constitutional system – as people who hate America.

This is not new. We have been here before. Or, as Yogi Berra put it, this is “deja vu all over again.”

Except, this time it feels much worse.

Garry Geffert, of Martinsburg