JANUARY SIXTH – A CRITICAL CHAPTER IN US HISTORY

 

January 6, 2025 - election certification

Today is an important day.

No, I don’t mean the day that Congress certifies yet another in our long history of democratic elections. That, though fundamental to America’s democratic process,  is a mere formality. Always has been…Except for once.

No, no, I’m not talking about what was once the mere formality of a peaceful transfer of power. I’m talking about the time that it wasn’t.

Today, then, is the fourth anniversary of the January Sixth Insurrection. That’s how it needs to go down in the history books. Although, it could also very fairly be dubbed The January Sixth Trump Sedition. I mean, when some historian with excellent research skills writes about it many years from now, and recalls it as the point when American democracy began to unravel.

The entrance to the Capitol, January 6, 2025

The president—I’m talking about President Biden; he is still the president even though he seems to be allowing the president-elect to suck up all the oxygen in the room—has mentioned how we should never forget the day that Trump and his crew tried to overturn a free and fair election “and democracy prevailed.” The thing is, it didn’t. Nor did the criminal justice system. Nor, then, did the rule of law.

Granted, today Democrats followed the rules, upheld America’s constitutional  tradition, adhered to democracy. They didn’t stir up trouble, call up swing-state colleagues and pressure them to  “find votes” that didn’t exist. They didn’t  attack Congress, doing millions of dollars in damage and hounding legislators in those sacred halls, threatening to harm or kill them. They didn’t call for their own vice president to be hanged or gang up in a violent mob on overwhelmed Capitol Police with bear spray, fists and clubs, killing one of them and sending one hundred forty others to the hospital, some with very serious injuries. Nor did they bitch and rant that the umpire was blind or that the game was fixed.

Democrats play the game with every ounce of energy they’ve got, and if they lose, they quietly go home, figuring they’ve been licked fair and square. That’s because modern-day Democrats are what their name implies: democrats. They live, advocate and uphold democracy and the rights of the people. They don’t simply use democracy as a meaningless buzzword.

Capitol entrance, January 6, 2021

Meanwhile, Trump-Republicans are becoming ever greater proponents, not of the American Republic imagined by our forefathers, but of what is known as a “banana republic”. Not the dictionary definition for the term banana republic, which is, “a small nation dependent on one crop or the influx of foreign capital.” No, I use the term in its political sense. That is, a badly ruled and corrupt country led by an autocratic or dictatorial government, which pretends to be democratic and to represent the people, while only representing itself.  

So how do I explain the dissonance between that depiction of the soon-to-be-ruling party and the unquestionably democratic process that took place today?  Attempting, as I always do, to be,  in every way, an independent and objective voice, objectivity dictates my bias in favor of anything but MAGA when it comes to democracy, fair play, and the rule of law. And today, democracy, in a certain sense, became its own victimizer, since it was Vice President Kamala Harris’s sad democratic and constitutional duty to certify an election whose winner will, indubitably, undermine the very democracy that, incredibly, returned him to power for a second time.  

The scene inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

When it comes to who is committed to democracy and who isn’t, the proof is in the pudding: On the day of the January Sixth Insurrection, Trump Republicans sought to twist history, to pretend they hadn’t lost when they had, in fact, been trounced. They had taken their case to more than sixty courts, to the Supreme Court (which, despite its Trump bias, refused, on the basis of merit, to hear it), and even to then-President Trump’s own Justice Department, and their false claims of fraud were rejected at every turn.

So MAGA did what banana republicans do—denied they’d lost—denied the truth, in other words—even though they knew they had, and backed their authoritarian leader in mounting a protest that turned into a riot, that turned into a full-blown insurrection, for the purpose of preventing that election from being certified, as if halting certification made it any less true that their candidate lost by an unquestionably large margin. In the process, they violated one of the most sacred and fundamental traditions of American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power.

That is huge. That is historic. And it should be marked every single year as the historical enormity that it is.

But compare, if you will, what happened today, on this particular January sixth, a quiet, snowy winter’s day, when the certification process, headed up by Vice President Harris, and thanks to the ungrudgingly democratic spirit of her party, came off without a hitch and Donald Trump’s second term as president was formally certified, unquestioned by any member of Trump’s opposition. Democrats simply did what was right, what constitutional law and American tradition expected of them.

But it is unlikely that this will be appreciated by any supporter of a man who considers even America’s heroes to be “suckers and losers” for keeping their oath to support and defend the Constitution and the country with their very lives, if necessary. Donald Trump’s reaction to that sort of display of patriotic loyalty, while standing on the consecrated ground of Arlington National Cemetery?   "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" 

That brings me to why I say that, historically speaking, the January Sixth Insurrection should be recalled as the day when American democracy began to unravel, not when it prevailed. Because is was, and democracy is indeed unravelling.

There is simply no way that the US should be on the verge of inaugurating yet another Trump presidency. I’m not questioning the election figures. I don’t doubt that the election process was as free and fair as it was in 2020. (Let the delusional MAGA crowd still claiming that Biden didn’t win in 2020 take that as they will). I may be utterly baffled by, but do not question the choice made by American voters between the two candidates.

I do, however, question the democratic logic behind the Republican Party’s having chosen Trump as their 2024 presidential candidate. Thanks to the GOP’s leaders, we are about to re-inaugurate a felon, an insurrectionist, a man with as much respect for the rule of law and for the Constitution as for a roll of toilet paper.

But that’s not the only reason I believe that American democracy is unraveling. It is also unraveling because justice, in the case of Donald Trump, has not been served. Trump has been inadvertently enthroned as the prime example of what has until now been a general perception, and that, thanks to Trump, is now an indisputable fact: that “equality before the law” is a mere myth. The rule of law, the Republican Party and their Trump-laden Supreme Court have demonstrated, by endorsing the immunity of such a flawed and openly corrupt man—for a second time—is only for the powerless. If you are powerful enough, you are above it, and are entitled to a get-out-of-jail-free card. And if you are a friend of the most powerful people, you get a pardon, no matter what you’ve done. The probable consequences of that now open fact have even seeped into the current presidency, prompting Joe Biden to go against everything he has ever stood for, and to provide a blanket pardon to his own son for fear of unjust reprisals under a new and ever more lawless Trump administration.

But the GOP, no matter how MAGA-hijacked and democratically bereft it has become, is not solely to blame for the stunning materialization of yet another Trump regime. Blame also rests on the shoulders of current Attorney General Merrick Garland, who dragged his feet for a year before ever even entertaining the idea of an investigation of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, and then slow-walked the process afterward so that the possibility of prosecution was perceived as “election interference”, and was rendered, in the end, academic.

As a result, the Justice Department has suffered a humiliating defeat. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and the federal courts have been forced to back down in the face of Trump’s return to the presidency, which hasn’t erased the serious crimes with which the president-elect has been charged, but which has rendered his prosecution moot.

Attorney General Garland has suggested that he might release Prosecutor Smith’s full investigative report to the public. Personally, I can only shrug and ask, so what? Is that supposed to be a consolation prize? Will we get to read the report—I mean, unless Trump’s lawyers are successful in suppressing it—to know “what might have been,” if only Garland had done a better job at defending democracy and the Constitution? Because the truth is that if the attorney general had, from the outset, made keeping a would-be autocrat from ever getting near the Oval Office again, Donald Trump’s candidacy, rather than the rule of law, would have been the moot point. Trump would already have been tried, convicted and sentenced before the election cycle began. He would have been in prison, or, at the very least, banned from ever holding public office again.

Instead, here we are once more…

The next four years are a puzzle, both predictable and an enigma. Trump clearly won’t change. A narcissistic megalomanic can’t change his stripes, so expect more insanely undemocratic and ally-alienating behavior. Indeed, we’re already hearing the most outrageous of rants emanating from Mar-a-Lago about “buying Greenland” and about “making Canada the fifty-first state.” But more serious considerations are inevitable: Questions like, will Donald Trump seek a way around the two-term rule and go for a third, perhaps citing FDR’s mandate as a precedent? And if he can’t swing that, will he again attempt to refuse to leave office at the end of his term and spark an insurrection to back the perpetuation of his reign? And as his autocratic bent becomes more problematic, what will the GOP do? Keep embracing MAGA and kissing Emperor Trump’s ring, or come to its senses and find ways to limit Trump’s quest for authoritarian power?

At this critical point in American history, we have little choice but to watch and see.