THIS IS NOT A DRILL

US democracy is under imminent domestic threat. The once unthinkable is happening under our noses. There is election interference and the threat is coming, not from Russia, China or Iran, but from the most imponderable of sources—the forty-fifth president of the United States and the highest offices of his administration. They are, in essence, seeking to orchestrate a virtual coup and to spark civil insurrection by creating a false scenario that they are maintaining with lies, innuendo and false testimony.

The threat is very real, although so far the country’s judicial system—not its Department of “Justice”—is staunchly resisting the attempt. It is only a matter of time until we see which of the two forces will win out, since “all the president’s men” in Congress are complicit in this fabrication. But in the meantime, every true small-d democrat needs to stand up and be counted, or, failing that, admit—whether internally or overtly—that he or she is on the side of autocratic rule.

This is not a drill.

Up until the recent intervention of Attorney General William Barr in the president’s delusional attempt to deny reality and pretend that he has even a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the current election, the futile actions being taken by the Trump administration’s campaign team were legal, if questionable in their legitimacy. If, on a county by county level, the Trump campaign team had reasonable doubts—the key word here being “reasonable”—about this or that ballot count, then, under the law, they could legally take those doubts to the appropriate court. They have done this multiple times already, and have overwhelmingly had their cases judicially dismissed for lack of any legal merit whatsoever. They have a right to persist as long as Judges accept hearing their filings. But the courts, despite uncommon pressure from the administration and the GOP, are doing their job and their patriotic duty to democracy by demanding facts, not hearsay. As in the case of a Trump filing that quoted a postal worker as claiming he had been pressured to hold up delivery of probable GOP-voted ballots, only to have the “witness” recant once he was standing tall before the court.

While legal, such attorney interventions have been a clear slap in the face to Democratic and Republican election officials alike, who have done a phenomenal job in their role as the last line of defense for democracy, by ensuring absolute transparency and meticulous ballot-counting in one of the most contentious elections of all time. Nor have they been concerned about the questions that the Trump campaign legal team has posed, standing by the clarity of both the polling procedures and the count, and assuring the public that results can be questioned as often as the candidates like, but will be what they are, because they are authentic and Trump has lost the race by a very decisive margin.

That margin is currently predicted by reliable poll-watchers to be no less than five million popular votes and, perhaps, as many as seventy or more electoral votes. In other words, the 2020 election is all over but the gnashing of teeth and bawling for Team Trump. And Donald Trump’s refusal to concede (as every other candidate in recent memory has done by this point) and the GOP’s continued tolerance of this puerile, narcissistic presidential whim, promise to go down in election history as a profound embarrassment for the Republican Party and as a potential source of very real shame for American democracy. Especially since the US is not some remote, inconsequential nation whose political comings and goings can pass totally unnoticed, but a powerful country once looked up to as the leader of the free world, but increasingly viewed under the influence of the Trump phenomenon as a tin-pot banana republic hiding behind First World cosmetics.

That perception was vastly augmented this week when the administration’s all-out effort to circle its wagons and refuse to surrender to the overwhelming tide of democratic outpouring meandered out of the territory of illegitimacy and into the realm of questionable legality. This happened when Attorney General William Barr cavalierly overlooked his appointed role as overseer of the rule of law in America and—as he has already done on no few occasions since taking office—used the sobering power of his post and taxpayer dollars to launch a partisan defense of the Trump campaign in detriment to the will of more than seventy-five million American voters. Never before in the history of the United States, has an attorney general abused his power in this way, by preemptively announcing the launching of probes into alleged election irregularities prior to final and official certification of the election results. Particularly on the basis of such factually thin accusations and hearsay.

And while the attorney general was busy aiding and abetting Trump in his ruse to call the validity of the election into question, the president himself was making moves unmistakably similar to those that I’ve witnessed as a foreign correspondent in no few coup attempts in other parts of the world. A lame duck with only two months to go before the democratically inevitable transfer of power—for the first time in American history we have doubts about how peaceful it will be—the president, in his role as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, is shaking up the hierarchy at the Pentagon. Some news sources inside the military have referred to “the beheadings” that have taken place this week, in which the president has replaced career higher-ups with Trump loyalists.

And Trump has further doubled down by making sure that, so far, the Biden transition team has received no sign that it will be given access to data, intelligence and procedures to which it must be made privy before taking office in January. The idea being, why should they when neither the president nor his nefarious enablers will admit that Biden has won. Fortunately, Biden’s forty-seven years in public service and eight years as the nation’s vice-president—one of the most engaged vice-presidents in history—make him less vulnerable to these stumbling blocks than a less experienced president-elect would be. But it is still an astonishing attack on American ideals and traditions, as well as on the spirit of the Transition Act of 1963.

And yet, there can be no sincere denying that Biden has won. Indeed, specialized voting statistics experts estimate that, in an election that garnered massive turnout, when the last vote is counted, President-elect Biden will have won by the largest margin of any challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Again, if this sort of thing were happening in any country but the United States of America, US intelligence would be observing it as an impending coup d’état.

But let’s return to Attorney General Barr, who has edged out even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the ad hoc post of Enabler in Chief. Shortly prior to the election, there were those who sought to defend the AG’s restraint. Not only had he incurred Trump’s fury by telling the press that he didn’t figure the Durham Investigation would turn up any prosecutable wrongdoing against former President Obama or former Vice-President Biden in the 2016 election, or with regard to a probe into the activities of Biden’s son Hunter, but he also refused to open a separate Justice Department probe into the Bidens when the president promised his base that there would be one.

Earlier this week, however, Barr’s Trumpian restraint ended when he issued a memorandum providing authorization for a federal probe into President Trump’s clearly and provably false claims of “widespread nationwide voter fraud”. Trump’s fevered ego, which has never been able to accept defeat, thus got a booster shot of steroid-like vigor from none other than the country’s chief law enforcement officer, who, through his memo, gave credence to the president’s absurd claims that, for instance, anti-GOP voter fraud had been perpetrated with the acquiescence of the Republican secretary of state in Georgia and with that of the Republican city commissioner of Philadelphia, based entirely on the fact that the incumbent was losing in both places. In Trump’s specious “logic”, how on earth could a Democrat win where a Republican was in charge of the vote? 

All Barr had to do was tell his boss that it happened because the US is a democracy and election results are a fact, not a whim. But instead, he decided to use taxpayer dollars to indulge the president’s hissy fit, not even bothering to wait for final certification of the election outcome or for lower court decisions regarding any and all claims of possible fraud. As such, the AG used his powerful office, which is supposed to serve and protect the interests of every American, as a key piece in a conspiracy theory created and perpetuated by the president and his corrupt enablers at the highest levels of the GOP.

As a result, Richard Pilger, the Justice Department official charged with overseeing all investigations into election crimes, resigned his post on the spot. “Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote in an internal office message, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” His resignation was accompanied by a letter of protest signed by some one thousand six hundred DOJ attorneys. Pilger’s  reasons for resigning and for the attorneys’ protest were clearly based on the fact that Barr’s memo ran counter to longstanding Justice Department best practices that include never investigating election fraud until local officials have completed all counting and certified the vote. The whole idea behind this practice is to prevent any federal administration’s bringing pressure to bear on local officials as a means of changing the outcome of an election. The fact that Barr is doing precisely that appears to make his motives crystal clear. 

Barr’s move comes against a murky background in which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—with whom the AG met the same day that he issued his memo—defended incumbent Trump’s supposed right to challenge the election totals even as they are still being counted. McConnell is clearly, like the president, subordinating what is best for the United States to his own political ambitions. He thinks he needs the unbroken support of the Trump base in order to maintain a Republican majority in the Senate during run-offs set for January 5, and that, to him, is worth burning the institution of American democracy to the ground. The theory being applied by both Trump and his surrogates is the same one that drove the Nazis rise to power in Germany in the nineteen-thirties: namely, that if you tell a big lie often enough, long enough and loud enough, it will eventually gain acceptance as “truth” among the masses.

Prior to McConnell’s tribute to his Caesar, in this fateful week for American democracy, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper with whom he has been on the outs ever since Esper rightly refused to obey a call from the president to deploy US troops against citizens protesting the George Floyd murder on the streets of American cities. There are rumors that “the beheadings” might continue, with CIA Director Gina Haspel’s and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s potentially being the next ones in line to roll.

Since Election Day, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the president of the United States has gone full-blown, bat-shit crazy, raising the imminent-danger level of his previous conspiracy theories and unmitigated prevarication to that of a national security risk. Especially since it is playing on the paranoia of the most violent fringes of his base supporters, to the point that a scenario of armed civil insurrection is not at all unimaginable. The president is, in effect, seeking, no matter how insane it may seem, to ignore the clear outcome of a valid democratic election and to install an autocratic regime in the United States of America. And while this sci-fi-like phenomenon of a rogue president trying to overthrow American democracy should have always at least been a contingency we needed to contemplate, what never should have been in the cards was the adherence of any of the country’s other institutions to one man’s insane ambitions. But here we are...  

As for my own reaction to all of this, I’ve been a journalist, political observer, researcher and commentator most of my adult life and, at age seventy, have never before witnessed the astonishing phenomenon currently unfolding in the US in any major democracy on earth. That it is taking place in my own country which, like many other people worldwide, I have always seen as one of the greatest democracies on earth, and indeed as the founder of modern democracy as the world knows it, is a source of unfathomable pain and sadness to me.

I continue to respect the ideas and ideals of conservatives, liberals, libertarians, democratic socialists and many other shades of political philosophy in between. And as always, I am ever open to the lively exchange of ideas and to the democratic idea of finding a middle ground on which we can all work together for the common good. But I no longer consider Trumpism to fall within these boundaries.

The fact that anyone who fervently believes in democracy might have voted for Trump in 2016, and even again in 2020, might challenge my own sense of suspension of disbelief, but I will, to paraphrase Voltaire, “defend to the death” their right to vote for the legal candidate of their choice. But what I can no longer abide is anyone’s attempted defense of President Trump’s move to discredit a properly conducted election, his refusal to accept the proven results and concede the victory of his rival in the best American spirit of a peaceful and democratic transfer of power, or his clear and continuing attempts to breed false doubts about the election and to incite sedition and potential violence as a means of rejecting the voice of democracy and illegally and illegitimately maintaining his grip on power.

Nor can I any longer tolerate anyone’s claim that this is an election like any other or that Donald Trump was ever “just another president”. His consistent rejection and/or subversion of every notion of American tradition and ideals, of everything that has ever been right or decent or fair about the American constitutional system renders him, to my mind, incomparable not only to his Democratic predecessor, but also to former Republican presidents including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and even Richard M. Nixon, all of whom served, in their own way, in the name of the American people and respecting the authority and sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Donald Trump is not an outlier. He is a wrecker and destroyer whose actions only serve his own ambitious purposes. Be forewarned that I, for one, will no longer tolerate the perpetuation of his lies as “alternative truth” or his autocratic designs as “politics as usual”. This election is “the hill I will die on” for American democracy.