THE SECOND ACQUITTAL OF DONALD J. TRUMP

 

This past weekend, the Republican Party leadership and the vast majority of its politicians decided where they stood. Would they defend the party’s traditions of conservatism, American unity, law and order and liberal democracy, or would they underscore still further the party’s vertiginous downward spiral into the sordid depths of populism, personality cultism, vigilante violence and mob rule over the will of the majority and over the rule of law? In the end—and, unfortunately, surprising to no one—they chose the latter.

Earlier in the week, GOP senators (ad hoc jurors in the second impeachment trial of ex-President Donald J. Trump), like their Democratic colleagues, heard the cogent and well-researched presentation of congressional impeachment managers laying out the case against Trump on the charge of inciting insurrection against the United States of America. Their case was illustrated by all too familiar video footage of the former president’s rabble-rousing speech given on the Ellipse near the White House on January 6^th and of the frenzied mob then following Trump’s instructions to go to the Capitol, where its members proceeded to clash violently with police and to enter the building by force, vandalizing the hallowed halls of Congress and searching for narrowly evacuated members of the congressional opposition, as well as dissenting members of the GOP (including Vice-President Mike Pence) whom they were promising to lynch.

But the presentation also included a great deal of new, formerly undisclosed footage that proved graphically violent and from which a number of members of Congress turned their eyes away—some because it was too painful for them to watch, but others because they were seeking, cynically, to demonstrate that they had nothing to do with this process and considered it politics as usual in the era of Trump. It didn’t matter to them that part of what they were watching was the brutal mob-murder of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, or the desperate bravery of Officer Eugene Goodman who, armed only with a billy club, stood off dozens of insurrectionists, making himself their target, until his colleagues could seal the Senate chamber and until he could taunt the rioters up the stairs to where police backup was waiting. It didn’t matter that they were seeing the violation of the congressional inner sanctum, the Executive-inspired terrorist raiding of another co-equal branch of government, the subversion of democracy by the followers of a president sworn to defend it. It didn’t matter that they, as members of the so-called “party of law and order” were watching how seditious thugs clubbed, mauled, abused and injured more than one hundred forty guardians of the Capitol in order to try and stop the democratic process by force and to maintain a would-be tyrant in power.

Their minds were made up before the trial ever began, despite swearing an oath to be impartial jurors, to say nothing of their standing oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United
States of America. They saw what everybody else saw. A national tragedy, unique in the two and a half century-history of the United States. But they simply didn’t care. They put party over country and personality cult over party. They were willing to let democracy and the nation lose in the tenuous hope that they themselves wouldn’t when it came time for the most radical and extreme of the former president’s base to vote in a future election.

Ignoring the evidence, which most top Republicans admitted was compelling, when it came time to stand up and be counted in defense of democracy, the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States, the GOP leadership caved. It claimed there was a technicality that kept the GOP from doing anything but voting to acquit. That technicality consisted basically of the fact that Donald Trump was no longer president and the Senate was, then, supposedly no longer competent to try him. And the GOP leadership continued to maintain this fallacious argument despite repeated statements from experts in constitutional law that it simply wasn’t true, and that there was even at least one historical precedent to prove that it wasn’t. Nor was it upheld by the House of Representatives, which is, according to the Constitution, the sole authority for setting the rules for an impeachment process. 

And then the GOP punted. They couldn’t do anything, they claimed, but there were other competent authorities who could, and they would leave the matter in the capable hands of federal and state justice. In other words, no way we’re going to grab this hot potato. We’re passing the buck to the Biden administration’s Department of Justice and to the courts of Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and other aggrieved swing states. To the civil courts, as well, where Trump and his top surrogates are already being sued in multi-billion-dollar libel cases. And when the crap hits the fan, we can always tell Trump supporters we had nothing to do with it. It was the damned Democrats and a few unholy Republican outliers.

Many media observers were this weekend bending over backwards to pat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the back for giving what amounted to no more than a wink and a nod to justice. In a wriggling and convoluted speech that too many analysts found “important”, McConnell said, in so many words, that the ex-president was indeed guilty of inciting the insurrection that took place on January 6^th. Not merely because of the seditious speech that he made that day on the Ellipse, but also through his repeated and endless statements to the effect that the election had been stolen, that his voters had been robbed, that he was the legitimate president, and that if his followers didn’t “fight like hell” they “weren’t going to have a country left.” But that, as he interpreted the Constitution, he had no right to judge “a private citizen”.

McConnell even found a way to blame the House Democrats for the acquittal, saying that while they had indeed gotten a majority to vote to impeach while Trump was still president, they had failed to deliver the article of impeachment to the Senate until after he had left office. He admitted that constitutional scholars on both sides had provided cogent arguments regarding whether or not a former president could be tried by the Senate. While he praised and said he respected both, he clearly decided on the one that was most convenient for his never-ending political career. Namely, that while he laid the blame for the January 6^th attempt to overthrow the US government on one man, Donald J. Trump, his hands were tied.

McConnell’s speech was, in a week of GOP profiles in cowardice, the number one most cowardly act. Only seventeen GOP senators out of fifty would have had to do their patriotic duty and vote to convict in order to restore the integrity of American democracy. In the end, only seven did, and despite the fact that they were only doing their duty to the Constitution and democracy, those seven are being held in hero status by small-d democrats all over the country, because they will clearly be dubbed traitors by the followers of the man who has once more sidestepped Congressional authority, played the country, and bolstered the de facto power of what conservative writer George Will has so aptly described as “the Lout Caucus”.

Mitch McConnell could have changed all that. He could have voted to convict and convinced the necessary nine other Republicans to do the same. And by that single act of patriotism and honesty, he could have ensured that no other self-styled despot like Donald Trump ever took office again, and that January 6^th, 2021, was a single tragic stain on the fabric of democracy that would never happen again.

But he didn’t. He could have made all the difference in the world to American democracy and he failed to step up. And hopefully history will remember him for it.

 

TRUMP’S LEGACY...OR THE NEAR DESTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY

 

 In June of 2018, in an essay entitled The Family Separation Incident and What It Says about Trump https://yankeeatlarge.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-family-separation-incident-and-what.html, I wrote here: “Nazi Germany didn't see fascism coming either. They just saw a firebrand leader (also with a bad haircut) who attacked the status quo and talked down to traditional politicians whom he eventually banned, to cheers and raised fists of his racist, nativist base. And before they knew it, decent Germans who were tacitly against persecution of non-Aryans ended up no longer having a voice, because it became okay to jail or eliminate them if they spoke out. Eventually, it even became legal to jail or eliminate them. So when you hear those who, like Attorney General Sessions, quote “the law” in carrying out heinous, inhuman acts, warning, they are the voice of the “legal but illegitimate” and the harbingers of de facto rule.” 

I added that, “I feel sorry for Americans who laugh off these warnings and say ‘It could never happen in America.’ Democracy only survives if it is defended, if people stand up and demand it, if, like the teen survivors of the Parkland mass shooting, they ‘call bullshit’ when they see it. The truth is, that it is happening, right under our noses. The United States is courting the policies of authoritarianism and the personality cults of fascist designs.”

I am sad to say that my perception of what has taken place over the past four years has not changed, except to grow worse with each passing day of the Trump administration. And although I was labeled “an alarmist” back then (which seems like a hundred years ago), and even “anti-American”, and was accompanied by only a handful of observers in denouncing the Trump administration for what it was—a would-be authoritarian regime that had usurped one of the country’s two main parties and was willing to go to any lengths to perpetuate itself in power—today the majority of Americans are finally waking up to the fact that something really grave has happened here.

I’m not saying, ‘I told you so,” but...I told you so.

Optimists will say that, in the end, there is reason for celebration: Democracy willed out. And on a very limited basis, I agree. But there can be little doubt that it has done so by the skin of its teeth and despite scores of traitors in the midst of the very Congress that is charged with the protection and exercise of democracy, elected representatives, a minority to be sure, but a far too large one, who know the truth but are willing to perpetuate a criminal and treasonous lie for their own selfish political ends, because they are morally and democratically bankrupt.

Certainly not the least of these—in fact, a ringleader in the Trump conspiracy to remain in power—is a politician from my own state, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, who has been one of the most aggressive supporters of Trumpian authoritarianism. I can only hope that my fellow Ohioans will be wise enough to vote him out in the next possible by-election if he hasn’t been censured and expelled from Congress as a seditionist by then. There are already petitions being circulated to seek the removal of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri for their roles in perpetuating blatant lies about the 2020 election, which served as the main catalyst for this month’s insurrection at the Capitol Building in Washington DC. These petitions will include more than a dozen Trump-or-die members of the House as well. Hopefully, Jordan will be among them.  

I indeed have high hopes for the next four years, although I am sure they will be very difficult ones. How could they be otherwise, with Trump and his cronies having spent millions and millions of their supporters’ dollars on propaganda and apocryphal lawsuits in order to convince his followers that the election was stolen from them when everyone perpetrating and perpetuating that lie—except, perhaps, for Trump himself, who is, arguably, delusional—knew it to be untrue? The victims of that ruse weren’t Democrats, but Trump-Republicans, who fell for it hook, line and sinker, becoming the tool Trump sought to use to overthrow democracy and remain in power for another four years—at least.

So loyal is this core base to the Trump brand and to the Trump personality cult, that despite over sixty lawsuits thrown out of court for lack of merit or evidence and two Supreme Court presentations flatly rejected (by a High Court on which Trump himself had named three of the justices), and despite certification of the vote even—especially—by Republican state officials, the Electoral College and the United States Congress, they continue to take their authoritarian leader’s word above all. Perpetuation of that Big Lie (as the Nazis called lies told to the people in order to ensure their loyalty) is what earlier this month triggered an attempted coup in Congress and is still wreaking havoc across the fifty states.

This among all of the wrongs that Donald Trump has done to his nation, is the greatest wrong of all—having abused the loyalty of his base and imbued them with falsehoods that have prompted them to betray their country while feeling sure that they are doing just the opposite. They have been grifted, and they have been, and continue to be used.

Over the last several years, I have more than once written my observation that, under the Trump administration, the United States has been at its most divided since the Civil War. That too was seen by many, rather than as an honest warning from someone familiar with authoritarianism and how it works, as hyperbole and as intentionally incendiary. But since the tragic events of January 6^th, many people, sadly enough, have been forced to come to the same conclusion. As I write this essay, Washington DC is on lockdown. Nearly twenty-five thousand troops have been deployed in the nation’s capital to prevent further attempts at insurrection.

That’s about ten times the number of US troops currently stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan and five times as many as are deployed in those two war zones combined. It is a staggeringly bigger military operation than the one mounted in Washington following the Nine-Eleven foreign terrorist attack in 2001 that targeted the former Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in the capital that left over three thousand Americans dead. Back then it was only deemed necessary to activate six hundred troops to secure the city.

But this time the National Guard is not there to protect the country from foreign invaders. Its troops are there now, as Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulten told an interviewer, to protect the country “from the president and his mob.” Moulten was one of the people hunkered down in the Capitol on January 6^th, waiting hours for police and security agents to drive back the Trumpian invasion and make it safe for Congress to continue with the business of certifying the results of the November 3^rd election. From the office where he was barricaded in for the duration, Representative Moulten told a telephone interviewer, “We’re going to be okay. We’re going to pull through this. But I’m not sure that our country, at least since the Civil War, has ever been in a more precarious position. And never has it been under more assault from within.”

Moulten is a member of the House Armed Services Committee who served as a Marine Corps Infantry Officer from 2001 to 2008, after graduating from Harvard and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Asked to assess the current risk to democracy, he says that it is “a dangerous position for the country to be in” when members of Congress have been involved in a seditious plot to overturn an election by violent means. And it also worries him that, according to reports, about a dozen members of the Armed Forces appear to be involved in the anti-democratic movement backing Donald Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. While that may be few, he says, “the number should be zero.” Moulten described the scene this weekend in DC, ahead of the Inauguration next Wednesday, as looking “like the Green Zone in Baghdad”. He had expected it there in a war zone, but to see it in Washington was frightening and surreal.

This week images from Washington looked to me much like Buenos Aires did in March of 1976, when I was covering the military takeover there—a usually bustling downtown area locked down and deserted, with military trucks, armored personnel carriers and troops in fatigues on every corner, bridges into the city road-blocked, and with anyone going into or out of the area being subject to strict security measures. Seeing the same sort of military lockdown in the capital of my own country, once known as the seat of the greatest democracy on earth, is heart-wrenching, but a dose of reality about the age we are living in. At a time when much of the developing world has turned toward ever greater and more inclusive democracy, traditional Western democracies, and particularly the US, are struggling with the rise of a new strain of populist fascism.  

Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, whose studies for the past three decades have focused on extremism and populism in the US and Europe, recently wrote in The Guardian, that he had never seen such movements more emboldened than they are today. “To be clear,” he writes, “this is not just about Donald Trump or the US.” He explains that just last year anti-vaccine protesters tried to storm the Reichstag in Germany and also faced weak police resistance. And he goes on to say that, since 2019, the Dutch Farmers Defense Force has been destroying government offices and threatening politicians in The Netherlands.

But he adds that, while Trump may not be the initiator of neo-fascist populist movements like these, “(he) has been a major catalyst of this process.”

“Obviously,” Mudde adds, “racism and racist dog-whistling have been key to the party since they launched their infamous ‘southern strategy’ in the 1970s, which brought white southerners to the Republican Party, but this goes far beyond that. The radicalization is not just ideological, it is anti-systemic.”

As for how we have arrived at this point, Mudde’s conclusion is the same as my own: “First and foremost, through a long process of cowardice, failures, and shortsighted opportunism of the mainstream right. Already in 2012, in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, by a longtime prominent neo-Nazi, I wrote, ‘The extremist rhetoric that comes from so-called law-abiding patriots should be taken more seriously.’”

Mudde says that back then he had advised Republican leaders to “be more careful in choosing their company and insinuations”. What happened, however, was, he says, just the opposite: far-right ideas and people were mainstreamed rather than ostracized.

Experts like Mudde clearly see the phenomenon I mentioned earlier, and that I have been trying to hammer home since the 2016 election that brought Trump to power. Namely, the far right’s grifting of a disenfranchised segment of the white population by speaking to their worst fears—immigrants, greater empowerment of minorities, the disappearance of their traditional jobs as technology replaces people, the advancement of science over “beliefs” and ever greater adherence to freedom of conscience that has removed Christianity (and particularly evangelism) from its former pedestal—and telling them that right-wing populists “have their back”, that they are “the real people”, the formerly silent majority that have now been given a voice. The traveling partners for this neo-fascist movement to replace representative democracy with single-party authoritarianism have been the far-right “conservative” media, from right-wing talk radio to Fox News and from Breitbart to One America News and Newsmax, and a still highly influential religious right.     

Six months ago, I’m fairly sure that if, in the manner of Rod Serling introducing a new episode of The Twilight Zone, I would have written, “Imagine if you will,” that Donald Trump loses the election and, instead of leaving office quietly, decides to lead an insurrection as a means of remaining the president despite the will of the majority of the people of the United States, even many of my readers would have said that I was being argumentative and unrealistic, and that Trump might grumble and moan but that a smooth transition of power had always been guaranteed, throughout the history of the United States. Again, I apologize for being right and couldn’t be more saddened by the truth.

The original sin, however, is not just Donald Trump’s. It is the failure of politicians in general to create a democratic society that is ever more inclusive, that provides equal possibilities for an excellent education to everyone, that ensures that people don’t die because they can’t afford proper health care, that no one goes hungry or sleeps on the street in America, that the electoral system isn’t gerrymandered to repress the segments who most require representation in a patently unfair society, that Americans are safe to walk their streets and expect to be protected by law enforcement rather than victimized by it. 

A people that is proud of the democratic system that governs it and feels that it is a part of an all-inclusive project designed to improve its members’ standard of living to an ever-increasing degree isn’t a people that votes for a Donald Trump. If his shameful and undemocratic legacy is to be definitively buried as of next Wednesday, the rebuilding of democracy must start on Day One with reconstruction of a compassionate and socially all-inclusive democratic society.