THE DEFINITION OF SEDITION

Question of the day: How much more flagrant do the actions of Donald Trump and his entourage have to become before there is a general admission on the part of Americans, and especially among all of the country’s remaining small-d democrats on either side of the aisle in Congress (not just Mitt Romney), that the forty-fifth president is, and always has been, a would-be autocrat? And that it is only thanks to the continued institutional integrity of the US Supreme Court, of the federal and state judicial systems, of state election boards, and of the Armed Forces of the United States that his presidency has not spelled the end of America’s two-hundred-fifty-year experiment in democracy.

We now know—his refusal to accept the legitimate outcome of national elections confirms it—that Donald Trump wasn’t kidding, as his apologists always tried to claim, when he expressed his admiration for dictators from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un, or when he heralded Chinese strongman Xi Jinping’s appointment as president-for-life by saying, “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot here someday,” or when he was campaigning for a chance at a second term and quipped that he was already thinking about a third. Donald Trump is a would-be autocrat who unrealistically (surrealistically) continues to refuse to believe that the people of the United States have refused him four more years after his disastrous first four..

And before I take up the subject of Team Trump’s latest anti-American machinations, I think it would be relevant to define the word SEDITION: Overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or rebellion against, established authority.

Please bear this definition in mind.

This past weekend there were credible reports from several major mainstream investigative news sources, who quoted executive staff members, regarding a meeting at the White House in which the outgoing (and trying desperately not to) forty-fifth president of the United States got together with at least two high-profile conspiracy theorists who are advocating “limited martial law” as a means of “overturning November’s election results”. One of these subversives—let’s be honest, there’s no other name for them—to whom Trump gave audience is convicted (and presidentially pardoned) felon General Michael Flynn, who, having gotten his get-out-of-jail-free card from the president, is now bent on launching a coup to show his gratitude.  The other is lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who basically just seems to be bat-shit crazy and thinks that former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez—who has been dead for seven years—somehow reached out from the grave to mess with American voting machines in the last election. Her delusions are so extreme that even the president’s zany attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani side-lined her from the legal team that has been leading Trump’s baseless and futile court efforts to overturn the election results. She too is espousing the martial law idea.

Flynn explained his theory further this weekend, saying that martial law was nothing new, that it had been declared dozens of times in US history. He’s right. But it has always, with the exception of the Civil War, been declared on a limited basis under highly unusual and dangerous circumstances, such as not only the Civil War, but also the Great Chicago Fire, earthquakes and other grave natural emergencies, rampant rioting and looting, uncontrollable racial violence, briefly during events surrounding Nine-Eleven, etc. It has never been declared because a sitting president and his party couldn’t deal emotionally with losing an election. In the federal legal code, martial law has been limited by several court decisions handed down between the Civil War and World War II, including the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits involvement of the military in domestic law, except when approved by Congress.

Michael Flynn’s suggestion, then, is tantamount to sedition, since it calls for inappropriate use of presidential powers to promote insurrection against the established order. And it should be considered a violation of his oath to defend the Constitution, as a retired general officer in the US Army—a rank which, somehow, despite his disgraceful performance to date and his conviction for felonious lying to the federal authorities—he has managed to retain.

Powell, for her part, continues to maintain her groundless accusations about rigged voting machines in swing states (apparently everything worked just fine in the states where Trump won)—despite assurances by election officials, governors and attorneys general from both parties that results have been checked and double-checked—and in the case of Georgia, a GOP-governed state, triple-checked—and that there are no widespread, systematic or systemic irregularities to report. This has been reconfirmed in at least sixty court cases, many brought in swing states by the legal team of which Powell formed part, and all brought by Trump-or-die supporters at the president’s behest, as well as two cases taken to and flat-out rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States. Still, for no other reason than her own gut-lunacy Powell is pushing for the president to take Flynn up on his martial law proposal so that she can get the voting machines confiscated and have a look at them—to see if the ghost of Chávez is haunting them, perhaps?

What both Flynn and Powell—and indeed the president—are saying is, “You people in the swing states that voted for Biden didn’t vote right. So we want to take over your states by military force and oblige you to vote again...and again...and again, until Trump wins. Why? Because we don’t like Biden and want Trump to keep on being president. Your choice and US democracy be damned! And the majority of the GOP’s members are either keeping their mouths shut in the face of this inexcusably seditious behavior or they are actively participating in it.

So Flynn and Powell are not the only two conspiracy theorists—if you don’t count the president—seeking to use the power of the presidency to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Not by a longshot. Another of the more prominent ones at a local level who has nevertheless gone viral nationally, is Amanda Chase. Chase is a member of the Virginia Senate who aspires to becoming governor of the state.

But that’s not what Chase is best known for—or perhaps “notorious” would be a more appropriate term. Two years ago, she walked into the Virginia Senate, open-packing a loaded .38 revolver. And she was wearing it on her hip while presenting draft legislation to a State Senate committee. Asked why she was carrying a loaded gun to the Legislature, she said it was to act as “a deterrent for over-exuberant folks.”

Chase has also repeatedly posed for photographs with political militant and gunman Antonio Lamotta, who is a promoter of the conspiracy-theory crazies of QAnon. It should be noted that Lamotta, who Amanda Chase seems to admire and want to emulate, was arrested in Philadelphia and charged with a third-degree felony last month, shortly after the general election, for being caught carrying several pistols, an AR-15 assault rifle, and over 150 rounds of ammunition without a valid Pennsylvania firearms permit.

Recently, Chase herself was seen toting an AR-15 at port arms while at a far-right, white supremacist, political rally where she was surrounded by Boogaloo Boys. The Boogaloo Boys, as you may remember, emerged last year from the murky undergrowth of extremist fringe sociopaths that the Trump era has spawned, or at least encouraged. They are sometimes referred to as a militia (the National Guard is a militia, this is just another tribe of would-be felons), but are actually a loosely organized far-right, anti-government, and extremist political group, better described as domestic terrorists.

Bearing her past behavior in mind, it should come as no surprise that Chase last week also called on Trump to impose martial law in her state, making the patently false claim that there was “extensive fraud here in Virginia” and that Democrats had “cheated to win.” Her statement drew immediate condemnation from Republican lawmakers and former lawmakers including Denver Riggleman, Barbara Comstock and David Ramadan. Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Kirk Cox called her statements “absurd and dangerous”, and Virginia Democratic Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton said Chase was “unhinged”.

Sidney Powell has been spreading her ridiculous fantasies to anyone who wants to hear them in Trumpland, apparently having taken a real shine to grabbing a mic and standing up in front of a (maskless, non-socially-distanced) crowd and, in doing so, actually manages to make Rudy Giuliani look marginally sane. Flynn, for his part, has been seen protesting outside of the Supreme Court with QAnon members and other extremist lunatics, as if their un-righteous outrage could change the views of the highest court in the land, whose decisions are founded on the rule of law and, hence, final, since there is no higher court to appeal to.

Meanwhile, in Congress there’s a covey of coup-mongers who say they may try and throw a monkey wrench into the transition when the
Legislature convenes on January 6^th, by seeking a vote on whether to accept or reject the Electoral College’s final count. What do they hope to accomplish when Biden hammered Trump by a margin of seventy-four electors? Well, a good “what’s-in-it-for-me” indicator came from former jock and college football coach, now-Senator Tommy Tuberville, who must be missing his former days of gladiator glory in the stadium and is looking for a new Caesar to impress, since, according to Trump, Tommy Tuberville credited the president with making him “the most popular politician in the United States.” (Careful there, Tommy, The Don doesn’t like being outshined). Which is why Tuberville now appears willing to call for a vote on the EC count, and, in doing so, go against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who has way-belatedly accepted President-elect Biden’s legitimate win and has asked his colleagues to help move the country smoothly to the inauguration.

Everybody wants something from Trump in return for their futile attempts to overturn the elections. But mostly they want to avoid being pilloried by him on Twitter, or having him give them a thumbs-down so that his base feeds them to the lions at the polls—this last being the case of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the run-offs that they must still face in Georgia.

In the lower house, it’s Republican Representative Mo Brooks who is leading a plot to reject Biden's Electoral College victory. The congressman has said he wants to reject the electoral votes certified by states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania that had what he calls “flawed election systems” a notion already quashed by the Supreme Court and dozens of lower courts.

Republican Representative Riggleman, whom I mentioned earlier, had pretty much the same appraisal of all of this as I did in describing Sidney Powell, saying that “the technical term for it is bat-shit crazy.” Trump’s own former National Security Advisor John Bolton—who is historically and famously known as a right-wing hawk but who, in the era of Trump sounds moderate (or at least sane) by comparison—termed the call for martial law by Flynn and those including the president who have actually listened to him instead of laughing him out of the room, “appalling” and “unprecedented”, as was the president’s continued refusal to accept the reality of his loss.

The most outspoken GOP member by far has been Republican Senator Mitt Romney who called these latest flirtations with authoritarianism “really sad” and “embarrassing”. Romney said that just when the president could have been taking one last big victory lap for the speed with which the country had come up with two vaccines with which to fight the COVID-19 epidemic, he is instead hunkered down denying the results of a free and fair election. Said Romney, “He could be championing this story (about the vaccines) but instead he’s leaving Washington with conspiracy theories and things so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their heads, wondering what in the world has gotten into this man. I think that is unfortunate because he has more accomplishments than this last chapter suggests he is going to be known for.”

And Romney is right. Rather than being known for the success of Warp Speed, Trump will go down in history as the president who encouraged the people to deny the science, a denial which has been the direct cause for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. And given the course so far of his last seventy days in office, he will also be known as the first leader in US history to abuse presidential power and actively seek to overthrow democracy and disenfranchise the American voter. 

Try as I might to keep my sense of humor and make light of the insanity in the grip of which the United States continues to find itself, despite the fact that the election is over, certified state by state and re-certified by the overwhelming results of the Electoral College vote, the continued denial in which the president and his cohorts are submersed is worthy of genuine concern. Particularly since, having run out of legitimate legal options through which to try and build a case for which he has absolutely no corroborating evidence, he has now surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists, coup-mongers, violent fringe groups and political opportunists who are seeking to ride on his coattails and, no matter what the cost to the country, to grab some of the dissipating populist power than he once clearly commanded.

What we should pay attention to here is the euphemistic language being used to describe what we are witnessing. What Trump and his now unadulterated far-right fringe entourage are trying to do can no longer be called “seeking to overturn the election results.” After a legitimate, free, fair and duly certified elections and with Inauguration Day less than a month off, the current machinations in the Trump camp are a blatant attempt to overthrow the established order in the United States of America. If the same thing were happening in any African or Latin American nation, no one would think twice about calling it what it is: an attempted overthrow, in short, an attempted coup d’état.

Many people are thinking that it doesn’t really matter. That it will soon be over. That Trump is history. That a new dawn is coming in which everyone will come to his or her senses and say, we have to start mending our fences and healing the divisions. We have to make amends, realize that what has happened here is grave and that it must be avoided in the future. We have to start working together across the aisle and throughout the community for the good of America.

But a great deal has been broken over the course of the past four years—and of the four years before that. And once the ideals and principles of a democracy have been shattered, it is a monumental task to put them back together again, a task that requires selfless and eager cooperation. In a United States in which people no longer see each other as Americans first and foremost but where they tend to divide sharply between right and left, it’s hard to see that happening any time soon. But hopefully it eventually will.

In the end, this will either be seen merely as one of the darkest chapters in the political history of the United States that is now, thankfully, coming to an end, or it will be seen as when “the new normal” began and political hatred and in-fighting destroyed a two and a half-century-old democracy, the greatest the world had ever known.