THE THIRD INDICTMENT OF DONALD TRUMP

This past week, former US President Donald J. Trump was arraigned pursuant to the third criminal indictment brought against him in the past few months. This is, perhaps, the most consequential of the three indictments, since it involves Trump’s refusal to concede defeat in the 2020 election and his repeated attempts to subvert, disregard, corrupt and overthrow the lawful democratic process by which he was defeated as the incumbent candidate.

I feel that there are two ways of looking at this piece of news. One, that it is one of the saddest days in modern American history—though surely no sadder than the events encompassed by the indictment—and, two, that it is the most hopeful day in our most recent history in which democracy and the rule of law have been (and continue to be) under direct attack.

The sorrow encompassed in this turn of events is, basically, that it has come to this. It wasn’t a sudden turning point. It is the end result of a monstrous social experiment that began with Trump’s demagogic election campaign as of 2015 and ended with his refusal to accept the results of what was arguably the most transparent and highly scrutinized election in US history, when he ran for a second term in 2020 and was beaten handily by current President Joe Biden.

That refusal came in the form of his, first, insisting on specific recounts, and then exhausting all legal recourse to try and prove election fraud, which ended with more than sixty courts rejecting his campaign’s false claims, the Supreme Court refusing to hear the case, and his own Attorney General William Barr admitting that, no matter how hard they looked, they could find no widespread fraud. Clearly, no matter how unjustified it might be, that is the legal right of any and all candidates for public office.  And Trump is certainly not the first, and very likely will not be the last candidate to question an election outcome.  

But in the case of Donald Trump, for the first time in US history, when legal action was exhausted, he still refused to concede defeat. From that point on, he initiated—as borne out in recordings of his own voice and words—an active attempt, with the collusion of his campaign and several of his attorneys, to corrupt election officials, to widely spread falsehoods and conspiracy theories which he and his cohorts knew well to be spurious, and to install fake electors parallel to the authentic Electoral College. And finally, when nothing else worked, Trump called on the most fanatical and violent elements in his slavish base to turn out and defend his seditious continuation in power by refusing to allow Congress to certify the true election results. This incitement ended in the historic and now infamous January Sixth 2021 attack on the Capitol, violating the sanctity of one of the nation’s most basic institutions, and endangering the lives of lawmakers including Trump’s own Vice President Mike Pence in his role as Senate president. This spurred an hours-long insurrection in which at least five people died as a direct or indirect result of the violence—this does not include four Capitol Police officers who later took their own lives as a consequence of the mental and physical trauma they suffered—and in which at least one hundred fifty people were seriously injured (the vast majority police). The attack also resulted in at least a million and a half dollars in damages to the Capitol itself.

While these facts are well-known to the general public, they bear frequent reiteration, since again and again, Trump sycophants in Congress and elsewhere have sought to minimize the events of January Sixth, which, with the exception of the American Civil War, was the most serious and violent attack on US democracy in the nation’s history. These include high-profile Republican politicians who, in the immediate aftermath of the insurrectionist violence, heaped scathing criticism and blame on the former president, characterizing the riot as the grave upheaval that it was, only to later recant in accordance with their own personal and party convenience and proportionate to their cold-sweat cowardice in the anticipation of retaliation from Trump and his radicalized base.

But hope springs eternal, as Alexander Pope once wrote, and the upside of what is an otherwise sad day, is that the rule of law, which Donald Trump has so sorely disrespected with the necessary collusion of far too many right-wing politicians in Congress, and of the GOP leadership in general, is apparently alive and well. None other of the indictments against Trump so far is more significant of this fact than the one leading to the former president’s formal arraignment last week for his part in attempts to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to remain in office as a de facto president.

While Trump and many of his enablers continue to disrespect this process, in their persistence in deluding the most blindly loyal and gullible of the former president’s followers—even while, without a doubt, knowing that what they are telling those Trump fanatics is patently false—both the Justice Department and, in particular, Special Counsel Jack Smith have been nothing if not transparent and meticulous in the pursuit and presentation of their case.

Special Counsel Jack Smith

The indictment handed by Smith to the Federal Court in Washington DC is a faithful reflection of the legal efficacy and scrupulousness with which the prosecution is presenting the case. Smith and his team have penned their charges in the clearest and simplest terms possible. The Special Counsel has, additionally, invited the public at large to read the indictment, knowing full well that the basis for criminal proceedings against the former president will, through its reading, become crystal clear to anyone but the most indoctrinated and disingenuous of Trump supporters. 

It is worthwhile noting that Smith has prudently avoided, at least for the moment, prosecution of Trump’s undeniable part in the January Sixth Insurrection itself. That might well take shape as a separate indictment in the future. But for right now, Smith is concentrating entirely on trying the former president for using his powerful office to perpetrate election fraud and to coopt the civil rights of voters who opposed his candidacy and won, as well as conspiring to spread disinformation among his followers. As Princeton political history professor Julian Zelizer pointed out this past week in an interview with CNN, it’s important to note that “this isn’t a question of presidential power, but of presidential abuse of power.”

The fact that those efforts to steal the election would indeed spark a violent insurrection, which Trump unquestionably egged on, and that claimed lives and destroyed property, is an issue that is being left for another day. It is a prosecutorial strategy that appears wise, since the soundest of proof gathered pertains to efforts by the former president and his lieutenants to falsify an election win, while his responsibility for the insurrection itself will require a much more meticulous case-building effort, despite the fact that many of the perpetrators already convicted and sentenced have made it clear that they truly believed that they were answering a call to battle by the former president.

As someone who, in my work as a researcher, translator, ghostwriter and editor, has frequently been called on to write up simplified executive summary versions of particularly dense legal and political documents, I can tell you, without the least doubt, that my services would have been required by no one reading this forty-five-page list of charges. Smith has taken great pains to eschew legalese and to present the case in layman’s terms and in the most starkly plain sentences possible. It is, without a doubt, an impeccable piece of writing in the common American vernacular.  Plain English, in other words.

As part of their strategy to plant overwhelming doubt in the minds of Trump’s supporters, his enablers among the GOP leadership have sought to convince the public that the former president can’t possibly get a fair trial in Washington DC. And yet, there could be no more natural place for it to occur. The court is the same one that has already successfully tried and either convicted or released a number of the active participants in the January Sixth rioting. Furthermore, Washington is the seat of the federal government of which Trump is the former head. And it is the place where the bulk of the felonies described in the indictment were allegedly perpetrated. Finally, as the nation’s capital, it would seem the appropriate venue in which to try crimes perpetrated not only against Congress but also against the people of the United States as a whole. If the former president’s attorneys should ask for a change of venue—and it seems likely they will—it is, then, highly unlikely that the court will grant the defense such a request, nor should it.

Donald Trump, like any other citizen called before a court of law, is innocent until proven guilty. This case will indeed demonstrate that fact, since no effort is being spared to guarantee the civil and legal rights of the former president. Beyond the courtroom—where nothing can be assumed or taken for granted—however, there is not just what the prosecution can prove or what the defense can challenge under the rule of law, but what we, as citizens, know to be facts and what we can see with our own two eyes and hear with our own two ears. And federal court action will be very different in securing justice than the two impeachment proceedings brought against Trump during his presidency, where actions were quashed in accordance with partisan considerations and rivalries rather than based on the overwhelming evidence. It is the job of the prosecution, the jury and the judge to try and decide the case based on hard facts, not on whether the decision will alienate one party or another, or whether one party has more votes than the other and can prevent the opposing force from prevailing.

Whether it can be proven in court or not, however, is not the concern of those of us who objectively know what we’ve seen and heard.  And what we have seen and heard is this:

·        A president who, for the first time in history, took seditious actions that put his own personal and political interests above American democracy and the rule of law.

·        An incumbent president who, after failing to prove his claims of election fraud in dozens of courts, decided to take the law into his own hands, refusing to accept the authentic results, to concede to his rival, or to voluntarily leave office.

·        A president who hired a group of unmitigatedly crooked and lunatic lawyers to spread a false narrative of a stolen election, of adulterated results and of tampered-with voting machines, none of which ever existed, as proven repeatedly in the courts and in numerous recounts.

·        An incumbent president who countenanced the creation of fraudulent lists of fake state electors in an attempt to overturn his clear and definitive loss in the Electoral College.

·        A president who seriously contemplated the unsound advice of a disgraced general and several other advisers that he could declare martial law and rule by force—with only the honor and stability of the armed forces chiefs preventing him from doing so.

·        A president and his attorney’s calls to election officials in at least two states seeking to get them to invent election results that would make Trump the winner, even when he legally and demonstrably wasn’t.

·        A former president who has yet to concede defeat, years after his loss, either because he is being feloniously disingenuous or because he has lost touch with reality and believes his own narcissistic fantasy in spite of abundant proof to the contrary.

·        An incumbent president who, as one of his final acts as chief executive, fueled a massive and violent demonstration of his own making and then refused for hours on end to defuse the situation, despite a virtual state of siege in Congress and serious threats to the lives of police, of members of Congress and of his own vice president.

·        A former president who continues to show no remorse, and who, in fact doubles and triples down, blaming everyone but himself for the serious legal jeopardy that he is facing, backed by palpable evidence of more than seventy felony counts, the validity of which will be tested in courts of law where he will have a chance to redeem himself, but is unlikely to do so.

Sidney Powell, General Flynn, Rudy Giuliani,
the lunatic fringe...

Allies of former President Donald Trump have rushed to his defense since he was charged Tuesday in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

They inaccurately attacked the judge assigned to oversee the trial, baselessly speculated that the timing of the accusations was intended to obscure misconduct by the Bidens and misleadingly compared Trump’s conduct to that of Democratic politicians in somewhat, but nor entirely, similar situations—I say “somewhat” because the case of Trump is unprecedented in US history.

The most egregious of these claims came, disgracefully, from the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, who disingenuously, sought to compare Trump’s conduct to that of other candidates who, in the past, have questioned the results of close elections. He mentioned, in particular, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton—biasedly overlooking Republican Richard Nixon’s complaints about John F. Kennedy’s narrow win. McCarthy indicated that Trump was being pilloried for something that was his right—to question election results—while nobody was mentioning the other three times where candidates did the same. The indication being that it was a Democrat versus Republican thing.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy

Clearly, that is not the case. For one thing, 2020 was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a close call. And it should be pointed out that in those other three cases, the results were questioned, the challenges ruled invalid, and all three candidates accepted the outcome, conceded defeat and fully supported the peaceful transfer of power. Trump is the first president in history who hasn’t.

No one, least of all Jack Smith or the federal court, is questioning Trump’s right to challenge the election results by all legal means—which, again, he has done and failed. Rather, what is being questioned and charged is, first of all, the potentially felonious behavior of a former president who sought to overturn an election by illegal means, and second, whether McCarthy and his party are really willing to subvert US institutions and the rule of law in order to defend the indefensible and render tribute to a cult of personality.

 

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA...

 

                            The devil went down to Georgia
                            He was lookin' for a soul to steal
                            He was in a bind
                            'Cause he was way behind
                            And he was willin' to make a deal...

                                                        —Charlie Daniels—

For the clear majority of Americans—even including many who were traditionally Republicans—the New Year has been postponed until January 20^th. Until then, it remains an extension of the most horrific year of Donald Trump’s four-year reign of terror. A year which may well go down in history as the one in which US democracy very nearly died.

If anyone had any doubt about that—there were those who said, back in November, “Let’s just give the president a few days to get used to the idea of losing.” (How’s that working out for you)?—Trump surely dispelled it over the New Year holiday weekend. That was when, just a little over a fortnight from when he is due to leave the White House for the last time in his term, he was on the phone to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger applying gangster-style pressure and threats to try and extort the Georgia Republican into fabricating fake results to overturn Joe Biden’s narrow win in the already thrice-counted and certified presidential election in that state.

Raffensperger wisely, and in self-defense, recorded that call and it was almost immediately leaked to the national press, sending shockwaves throughout both major political parties and the country at large. However, not even that—a clear attempt by the president to bitch-slap the Republican administration in Georgia into doing his (insane) will—could ruffle the feathers of the state’s incumbent senatorial candidate, David Perdue, who today is fighting for his political survival in a run-off vote. Trumper more than Republican and personality cultist rather than democrat to the end, Perdue was mostly just incensed and shocked that the contents of a private conversation between a Republican official and the president had been leaked to the public. But his stance was laughable and seemed to reflect his own very elastic ethical standards, because not outing Trump would have been tantamount to witnessing a crime and not reporting it.

That’s right. Once again the president has acted in a way that runs clearly and unequivocally counter to the rule of law. Under federal law, it is a felony to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for exercising any powers or duties” defined for election officials (such as the secretaries of state in the fifty states). And renowned Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has publicly named several other federal statutes that Trump’s call infringes. Says Tribe, “Awakened by the traumatic Trump experience to the more permanent frailties and limitations of our governing system, we should not waste this unique opportunity to simultaneously tackle a festering crisis of democracy itself.”

According to Georgia legal experts, meanwhile, the president’s call also violates state laws covering tampering with election results and coercing election officials, as well as the state’s legal norms on extortion. It’s highly improbable that anyone would take seriously any call to impeach a president who will be gone in two weeks, but were that not the case, intimidating a state attorney general to try to get him to throw national election results seems rather like slam-dunk grounds for impeachment and removal from office. And if the US were anything like normal right now—which, such are the deep divisions that currently reign—it clearly isn’t, Congress, the cabinet, and perhaps even the Supreme Court would very likely be looking at the president’s dodgy mental state and verging on implementing the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to force the president to step down before he does something irreparably insane in this final countdown to his leaving or being escorted out of the White House.  

The hour-long call between Trump and Raffensperger was hard to listen to. First, because of the sheer delusional quality of all of Trump’s accusations regarding the presidential election in Georgia in which he claimed to have won by “hundreds of thousands of votes” despite the fact that the results of that election in the state have been counted and recounted by machine and then recounted again by hand, in voting managed by a Republican and pro-Trump administration, which appears to have made certain pre-election day attempts at voter suppression to give Trump an edge, and even then, every time the count came back, Biden was the winner. Only outright, blatant cheating would have allowed Trump to win, and that was, indubitably, what he was seeking in this call.

It was also hard to hear because it was an abusive tirade in which, for an hour, Trump sought to brow-beat Raffensperger, attempting to wear him down and to get him to “find” (read: fabricate) nearly twelve thousand votes, which were what he would need to charge fraud and try to snatch the election out of Biden’s hands.

In the mind of someone as dishonest as Trump, it must seem unfathomable that he could lose in a “Republican state”, because in his world, if you have friends in high places, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed. But not everyone shares the president’s estrangement from truth, honesty, and the rule of law.

The dual run-off in Georgia today is obviously crucial to national governability over the next four years. President-elect Joe Biden will have a very distinct opportunity to make a significant difference if the Senate is majority Democrat than he will if it continues to be the suppress-and-bury catch-all that GOP Majority Leader Mitch “Stonewall” McConnell has made it over the past eight years in which hundreds of Democrat-sponsored bills have been unceremoniously killed before they ever reached the Senate floor. But it is also, no matter who wins the two races, a litmus test for democracy, in that the Georgia Republican administration has stood up to—and hopefully will continue to stand up to—a corrupt federal administration that has sought by every device imaginable to cheat the system and install an autocrat for a second term that he didn’t earn.

Tomorrow will be the ultimate test, when Congress meets to certify the final count of the Electoral College. This is normally ceremonial, a mere formality. But this time, undemocratic politicians, shamefully led by one-time Trump detractors now turned accomplices like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas or by diehard sycophants like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, plan to object and call for an audit. In the end, none of the dozen main would-be coup leaders can actually believe that they will succeed in overturning the November election, so clearly, the only reason they are buying into Trump’s delusional ploy is to curry favor with him in hopes of tapping his base or of having him be their king-maker ally in future elections. No matter what their reasons, they are complicit in an attempt to subvert the election process and to undermine American democracy.

According to Professor Tribe, if Biden manages to have a majority in the Senate, he needs to move immediately to do something about this for the future.  “A norm is being broken,” says Tribe, “in which Congress does not ‘monkey’ with a presidential election absent ample evidence, which means that if Democrats control the Senate, they must consider amending the Electoral Count Act to prevent future such abuses.”

And an abuse is precisely what this, all of this, is. Democracy is hanging in the balance and there is no room for flexibility in seeking a remedy, lest it die in the darkness of the Trump era.

 

 

AN ABSENCE OF DEMOCRATIC RIGOR

 

Earlier this month, on Veterans Day, while speaking at the opening of the new military museum at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, General Mark Milley, affirmed the following: "We are unique among armies, we are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or queen, or tyrant or dictator, we do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or a religion. We take an oath to the Constitution, and every soldier that is represented in this museum—every sailor, airman, marine, coastguard—each of us protects and defends that document, regardless of personal price."

General Mark Milley

General Milley, the country’s top general officer, was referring to the same oath that I and many other veterans of my era—and those before and since—have sworn to. It begins like this: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same...”

I still stand by that oath, and so too, apparently, do the Armed Forces...at least for now. But a lot of surprising things have been happening over the course of the past four years, and those who have chosen to understate or ignore them could be in for some very unpleasant surprises in the future, as might we all.

The fact that General Milley felt called upon to reaffirm this oath —especially on Veterans Day, a sacred day for military personnel and veterans alike—is telling within the current unprecedented context. Especially after Milley’s commander in chief saw fit a few days before to carry out a shake-up at the top of the chain of command, starting with the firing of the defense secretary and continuing with the sacking of some high-ranking Pentagon officials. The president made little secret of why he was doing this. He was seeking to entrench “Trump loyalists” in the military two months out from what, considering the November 3 election results, should be his final day in office. He also made it clear that he was rejecting those results and planned to stay put, which rendered the Pentagon shake-up pointed and ominous.

It’s not hard to surmise, then, that General Milley knew precisely whom he was referring to when he said that soldiers “do not take an oath to an individual.” Because ever since Donald Trump took office in January of 2017, he has been demanding loyalty, not to the Constitution or even to the United States, but to him personally, from everyone on the roster of State, and he has deemed anyone who refused to comply a “member of the deep state”—yet another fantasy of his own fevered imagination.

The concern is, however, that such is the power of the image of the presidency—a personal power comparable only to that of the Pope within the Roman Catholic Church in terms of mass belief in the superiority of the personage holding the office—that these paranoid fantasies that flourish in Donald Trump’s mind have a contagious effect on his following. Indeed, nearly every time Trump supporters chide Trump critics for pointing to this particular White House resident’s severely flawed personality, they do so by harping on “lack of respect for the institution of the presidency”, rather than acknowledging that this president’s estranged relationship with truth and reality is like none other in the history of the office he holds.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party leadership’s prioritizing of winning over American democratic ideals is such that the majority-Trumpian GOP is perfectly willing to not only indulge but also to fan the flames of this fever in hopes of being able to cling to power at the expense of the people’s faith in the most noteworthy experiment in democracy in the history of the world. And this is only serving to institutionalize the climate of distrust that Trump and Company are seeking to breed, thus pitting the somewhat less than half of the population that is convinced Trumpian propaganda is true against the more than half the population that realizes that it is a pernicious lie.

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I have engaged repeatedly with Trump-supporters on the social media. Some are too dismissive to develop any rapport with whatsoever. Suffice it to say that on presenting my views on democratic ideals I have no few times been referred to in these post-election days as “a communist”, “an activist”, “an ass”, “a simpleton”, and “an imbecile”—more specifically, “a full-of-shit imbecile”. But those who have maintained sufficient logic and manners to present salient arguments have, to a man and woman, clung to the sole and valid idea of what the president and his campaign apparatus can legally do to challenge the election results.

None of these people, unfortunately, seems to be listening when I repeatedly agree that any candidate has certain legal recourse available when he or she has reason to suspect fraud. They have again and again accused me of wanting to forego certification of the vote and the legal rights of the president and the GOP and simply allow the media to call the election. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth or more ludicrous to anyone at all familiar with my ardently democratic principles for which I have, in another time and place, literally put my life on the line. I fully agree that no vote is final until certified and that, if there is a shadow of a doubt about corruption, it should be investigated. As in any other lawsuit, however, not on the basis of party passion, disappointment over outcome, political ambitions, candidate preference or unmitigated hearsay, but only on the basis of hard evidence and indisputable facts.

The other argument of mine that Trump supporters consistently ignore—because, I suspect, they have absolutely no valid stance with which to rebut it—is that while any and all proper legal recourse in the courts is valid, intervention by the Department of Justice, and more specifically, by the attorney general is not. Period. The only time that the attorney general can legitimately intervene in an election process is when all other legal recourse has been exhausted and election results certified, despite there still existing apparent and compelling evidence of irregularities. Otherwise, there is a hard and fast rule that the attorney general—who represents every citizen of the United States, not the president or a party—cannot intervene to cast doubt on, or to seek to overturn election results, especially when this key public official is doing so in the name of the ruling party and administration to which he or she is beholden. Attorney General William Barr has very apparently run afoul of this rule by announcing that the DOJ would be opening a pre-certification investigation into claims of voter fraud to the detriment of the incumbent.

This is a clear violation of democratic principles. The aim of the rule against the DOJ’s getting involved prior to finalization and certification of the election is self-apparent: It is to ensure that no president can become a dictator by using the machinery of government to neutralize the chances of an opponent’s winning the race. Barr, and by association, Donald Trump, have violated that trust.

The thread-bareness of Trump followers’ affirmation of the legality of the incumbent’s attempts to stall the inevitable and to refuse to concede the other candidate’s election victory lies in a question of legitimacy. The fact is that, to date, after dozens of filings, none of the suits brought by the Trump campaign has managed to make one iota of difference in the overall election results. And the court decisions handed down have mostly been rebuffs so severe that if Trump or his campaign were capable of anything even approaching shame or honor these findings would be a source of profound embarrassment.

For instance:

In a suit in Michigan in which Republican poll-watchers tried to block certification in Detroit alleging fraud and misconduct, Circuit Court Judge Timothy Kenny ruled that, “it would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this court to stop the certification process of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers,” adding that “Plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” The same suit was taken to a federal court under a new title where Trump’s team ended up dropping legal action after a lawyer for the city of Detroit suggested that the president’s campaign was seeking “to try the same case in multiple courtrooms hoping that somebody will provide an endorsement of their baseless conspiracy theories.”

Also in Michigan, four voters sought exclusion of all votes cast in three counties on allegations of fraud and irregularities. They did this with no corroboration, claiming officials had counted the ballots of ineligible voters and citing unverified reports of software glitches and dead people voting that had appeared on Fox News. The suit was later dropped.

A suit regarding the Detroit vote that was only cosmetically different from the one thrown out of court by Judge Kenny and later dropped by a federal court was filed again in yet another court, but was dropped by the plaintiffs themselves only a few days after filing.

When Michigan swung hard toward Biden, a desperate Trump campaign team again tried to halt the count, this time presenting an affidavit from one poll-watcher who said that another poll-watcher (whom she refused to name) told her that she had been told by unnamed poll workers to change the date received on a ballot.

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani

Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens interpreted the so-called affidavit as “I heard someone else say something.” Addressing the plaintiff, she said, “Tell me how that is not hearsay. Come on now!”

In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign sought to block certification of voting due to minor errors in otherwise properly signed and cast absentee, mail-in and other ballots. Common Pleas Court Judge James Crumlish denied the viability of any of the claims.

Four Pennsylvania voters later sought to block all votes from four counties alleging violation of the right to equal protection due to different absentee balloting practices from one county to the next. Shortly afterward, seeing the hopelessness of the claim, the Trump team decided to request withdrawal of the suit. The court dropped it and three more similar cases from the docket.

In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the Trump team sought to block the counting of six hundred mail-in votes because the Election Board had notified the voters that they had forgotten to fill in missing information on their ballot envelopes. When the attorney for the plaintiff was asked by the judge if any of the errors involved fraud, he admitted that they didn’t. Judge Richard Haaz disallowed the petition to annul the ballots saying, “Voters should not be disenfranchised by reasonably relying upon voting instructions provided by election officials which are consistent with the Election Code.”

These are just a few examples of the similar fates of all of some thirty court filings on behalf of Trump since Election Day. Perhaps the most humiliating was when Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, a supposed legal eagle who hasn’t actually practiced law in decades but is reported to be pulling down twenty thousand dollars a day in Trump-campaign-paid legal fees was chided by a federal judge for the suit he filed last week in Pennsylvania.

District Court Judge Matthew W. Brann, who heard Giuliani’s argument, said that what Trump’s lawyer had presented to the court was “strained legal arguments without merit and (with) speculative accusations.” The judge indicated that what Giuliani filed wasn’t tied to the actual complaint or supported by any evidence.

“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth-most-populated state. Our people, laws and institutions demand more,” the judge concluded.

Suffice this sampling of the Trump campaign’s exercising of its legal right to date to conclude that while legal, what the president is doing is less than legitimate. The pathetic nature of the filings up to now appears to be nothing more than a smokescreen for the election loss and, worse still, a ruse to create “dozens of court cases” questioning the results, even if those cases are quickly and unceremoniously dropped by the Trump team, in order to create a superficial climate of doubt regarding the election results and the clear legitimacy of President-elect Biden’s win. At last count, although many results still require final certification, Biden had a 5.98 million popular vote lead over Trump and is expected to command a more than seventy-vote lead over Trump in the Electoral College. Given the anemic performance of the Trump campaign’s legal team to date—it’s hard to see how they might have some ace up their sleeve when they’ve failed so miserably to produce any compelling evidence in court up to the present—those results are unlikely to change significantly, if at all, in favor of the incumbent.

The only conclusion, then, is that Trump’s entire strategy—such as it is—in refusing to do what every other president in living memory has done for the good of the Union and concede, is to sow discord, to undermine faith in the system, to basically slash and burn democracy so that if it doesn’t conform to his ambitions it will no longer be viable for his successors and will leave them with an ungovernable population.

These are the tenets of fascism. To scratch, claw and bite one’s way like a rat to the top of a personality cult that rewards dictatorial charisma over democratic vigor and that prefers blind loyalty to individuality and the dictates of a populist mob to respect for civil rights.

Already in Georgia this week—where the Republican governor and secretary of state have done the right thing by placing party beneath country and by not only ensuring an absolutely transparent election but also by certifying the results after a machine count and a hand count—pro-Trump protesters took to the streets to object to the clearly fair outcome. They declared themselves “the new Republicans” and dubbed “traitors” the governor, the secretary of state and a handful of other Republicans who have suggested it’s time for the president to concede and open the way to transition.

As the final results are confirmed and certified, it is likely that this kind of unrest could become much wider spread and perhaps more violent, since Trump’s disregard for democracy and his efforts to cast doubt on what one of his own appointed—and subsequently fired—Homeland Security officials called “the most secure election in history”, have “succeeded” in creating the perception among an estimated seventy percent of Republicans that they have been cheated and that the election has been stolen from them. It seems, from my experience, to be futile to ask any of these election deniers why on earth, if the Democrats really did “throw” the election, they would have permitted the GOP to do so incredibly well in the House, where the party gained numerous seats, or in the Senate, where control has come down to the fate of two run-off elections in a single state. They simply glaze over and repeat the litany that Trump was cheated, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Having resisted and survived dictatorial rule elsewhere in the world, I am disheartened and gravely concerned about the trend that Donald Trump’s four years in office have wrought in my native US. Polarization of rival parties, the prioritizing of dogma over truth, the successful impact of institutionalized lies and propaganda on the thinking of an enormous proportion of the population and the elevation of a sociopathic and narcissistic personality to Pope-like levels of popularity based on such critically destructive ideologies as racism, xenophobia, ultra-nationalism and hatred of “the other”.

I return often to the question that I have heard Americans ask time and again: How could a country like Germany ever have fallen under the spell of a dictator like Hitler? All I can do is point to what is happening right now and say that history repeats itself.

The conservatives who helped bring Hitler to power by largely “democratic” means, never believed that he would be able to use the clout that they had bestowed on him as chancellor to later create a single-party dictatorship. But the echoes of the past are there when, going into this election, we heard Trump repeatedly say that the only way he could lose was if there was fraud. Just as German conservatives fancied that they could “control” Hitler and “tame” his Nazi followers, so too the GOP thought that they could control Trump and his followers. Instead, their party has been usurped and is now the party of Trump and they are being held hostage by Trump’s base, which they so fear losing that they are willing to try and help them subvert democracy by continuing to deny the indisputable facts of this month’s election.

German journalist Theodor Wolff wrote in the Frankfurter Zeitung shortly after the Nazis won power in the country’s parliament that there was nothing to fear from Hitler. Although Hitler would surely fight the left tooth and nail and although it was true that he was backed by a virulent and violent base, there was "a barrier, over which violence cannot proceed" in Germany. Germany, he claimed, was a nation that was too “proud of its freedom of speech and thought” to allow itself to live under tyranny.

The right was sure it could control Hitler

In January of 1933, Wolff wrote: “It is a hopeless misjudgment to think that one could force a dictatorial regime upon the German nation. [...] The diversity of the German people calls for democracy.”

It is truly hard to watch what is happening in the US right now and not be reminded of this. Although democracy has apparently willed out, make no mistake that if Trump and many of his followers could overturn this free and fair election by whatever means necessary and with total disregard for democracy, they almost undoubtedly would.

What happens over the next four years after the worrying events of the last four will be of capital importance in determining the survival of American democracy. To paraphrase Theodor Wolff, will “the diversity of the American people (continue to) call for democracy?”

We shall see.    

  

BUSH’S LESSON IN DEMOCRACY FOR A HIJACKED GOP

Conservative Republican former President George W. Bush just did what the current GOP doesn't have the guts, the grace, the ethics or the honesty to do: congratulated President-elect Joe Biden and VP-elect Kamala Harris on their election win.

He is apparently not only following normal democratic etiquette (in other words subordinating party interests to the voice of the people), but also attempting to serve as an example to the rest of the GOP. The thing is, it is no longer the GOP that he presided over in the era of 911 when Americans were much more united. It is the usurped GOP of Donald J. Trump—no longer the unifying party of Lincoln, but the divisive and dishonest party of Trump.

In that context, Mr. Bush can probably expect to be catalogued by congressional Trumpsters as a "dangerous socialist"—as former President Dwight Eisenhower would be if he were alive today.

That said, at least he'll be in good company, which is more than one can say for any Republican who still honors the name but is remaining acquiescently silent in the face of such shameless and tyrannical behavior.

 

REALITY

 

US President Donald Trump's own Department of Homeland Security has just rejected his claims of a rigged election. In a public statement, the DHS unequivocally described to what degree the 2020 presidential election was valid, fair and utterly transparent, stating: "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

Maybe it's time for the GOP leadership to get their heads out of their...valises, and admit the same for the sake of democracy and the country. With the president having gone underground, in a fog of self-pity and bile, the rest of the political establishment, at least, should put on their big-boy pants and join the real world, for the sake of the Nation.

Joe Biden is the president-elect. Get over it and get to work, because the president is missing in action and conspicuous by his absence in the midst of the worst pandemic health crisis in living memory.

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.