THE TRUMP CULT – MORE OF THE SAME…ONLY WORSE

 Donald Trump’s new term in power is beginning just the way the other one ended, with utter disrespect for the law, for the justice system, for law enforcement, for every single person who isn’t a hundred percent behind the Führer or who doesn’t fall within the narrow characteristics of the MAGA ideal, and with open contempt for compromise and unity, and for the Constitution of the United States.  It has begun, literally, “with a vengeance” and with a burning desire to further divide Americans rather than bringing them together.

He wasn’t in office more than a few hours before he overrode investigators, the federal courts system and juries that had worked tirelessly to bring to justice insurrectionists who had raided the Capitol Building on January Sixth of 2021, doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, injuring one hundred forty police officers, some very seriously, and killing another, while threatening with bodily harm or murder, members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence. Fifteen hundred rioters in total, some still in the process of trial and conviction, and hundreds of others already serving or having served sentences. He also commuted the sentences of six dangerous urban terrorist leaders who conspired to mount the insurrection—among them were Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the so-called Oath Keepers and Enrique Tario, leader of the self-styled Proud Boys gang, perhaps the most militant of the shock-force groups supporting Trump.

The Proud Boys are a neo-fascist ad hoc organization that Tario describes as “Western chauvinists”.  It is an all-male, white-supremacist, domestic terrorist gang. They emerged on the national stage as an active terrorist counterforce during violent race riots following the public suffocation-torture and  murder of Minnesota African American George Floyd by veteran white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, in May of 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term.

When, during the 2020 presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would denounce white-supremacy, the then-president hedged. When his opponent, Joe Biden, mentioned the Proud Boys, Wallace asked what Trump had to say to that group. Chillingly, Trump answered that he would tell them to “Stand back, and stand by.”

After he lost the election later that year and, after failing to legitimize his false claim that the election had been “stolen”, the meaning of that ominous message to the Proud Boys became clear, as they, in the style of Mussolini’s Blackshirts of old, led other extremists in mounting the January Sixth Insurrection, which will go down in history as one of the darkest days in American democracy. Despite the fact that, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election Trump surrogates including Vice President J.D. Vance had assured the public that violent criminals involved in the J-6 riots would not be pardoned, Trump’s sweeping decree has fully pardoned or commuted the sentences of virtually every insurrectionist involved in those tragic events, and has stymied the trials of hundreds of others still under investigation.

Trump continues to tout the insurrectionists and terrorist gangs that took part in the extreme violence at the Capitol as “patriots”, and as “hostages” of the Biden administration. Underlying those patently false descriptions, however, is an effort by Trump to obfuscate his own responsibility for the insurrection. Clearly, there were well-documented federal criminal charges against him for inciting the January Sixth Insurrection, prior to his winning the 2024 election, which rendered his prosecution moot. By casting the insurrectionists as “patriots”, perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and pardoning every single person involved, as if the whole thing had merely been cooked up by the Biden administration, Trump may well be offering up a hail Mary that charges against him will simply go away completely once he is no longer president.

In his first hours in office, President Trump has also come with promises—more like blood oaths, actually—to “go after” all of those who did their jobs and served their country, the rule of law and democracy in seeking to prosecute him, to the full extent of the law, for the provable and proven misdeeds that he perpetrated during his first administration (which, in any country or party that cared one iota about democracy and the rule of law, should have been his last). And he makes no secret of the fact that he will weaponize the Justice Department to do it, while falsely claiming that it was weaponized against him and his cronies.

The newly installed president has been chomping at the bit for four years. Not to put forward a formula to make the US a better, kinder, more inclusive place for all Americans, but rather, to exact revenge for his own personal grievances, and to undo every good and humanitarian measure enacted by all administrations but his own going back a quarter of a century. All the way back, indeed, to the Bush junior era, in which that administration introduced plans for legal status and a path to citizenship for twelve million undocumented immigrants, as well as being at least half-heartedly empathic toward the LGBTQ community. As Tim Marshall of Seattle Pride puts it, “Thanks George W. Bush, for being the least regressive GOP politician of the ‘00s. We’ll remember you like a pair of ultra-low-rise jeans: a pain to live with but impossible to forget.”

Regarding this point, clearly, during his last administration, Trump targeted women’s reproductive rights by packing the Supreme Court with radical far-right justices who overturned Roe v Wade, a half-century-old landmark precedent that protected women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies. New restrictions on women’s rights are expected as the far-right’s Project 2025 starts meshing with executive action. But this time, Trump also seems bent of annulling all of the progress the LBGTQ community has made in attaining equal rights over the course of the last quarter-century. Trump pointedly announced during his whining, bullying, divisive and self-congratulatory inaugural address that “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”  Note, that he said “of the US government,” not of his administration, presuming, then, to speak for all three branches, regardless of opinions and/or legislation to the contrary. Spoken, in other words, like the despot he plans to be.

He hours later backed this up by signing a sweeping executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and directing federal agencies to cease promotion of the concept of gender transition. Trump is actively promoting discrimination against the LGBTQ community by vowing to his radically right-wing base that he will rid the US of what he calls “transgender insanity”. This is an only thinly veiled invitation to his radicalized followers to marginalize LGBTQ people across American society.  

Indeed, Trump’s immediate authoritarianism has extended beyond the two-gender rule to also do away with all measures currently promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, measures which, until now, have been a bastion of fairness and humanitarianism hard fought and earned over long years since the Civil Rights Era.  His orders regarding the civil rights of these minority sectors of society include giving departments and agencies of the Executive Branch an ultimatum to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs within sixty days, as of his first day in office.

This action includes firing all chief diversity officers and scrapping all equity action plans. He is also ordering a veritable witch-hunt requiring all departments and agencies to give the  White House Office of Management and Budget a full accounting of any and all previous diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, including the listing of names of DEI grant recipients and DEI government contractors. In short, in the mean and vindictive second autocracy of Donald Trump, diversity, equity and inclusion will have no place. Indeed, they will be areas targeted for persecution, with the Trump administration already encouraging government workers to report any attempt to keep some form of DEI alive in their bureaus.

Other rights violations are in the offing.

For instance, Trump plans—and has issued an executive order to prove it—to do away with birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship (fittingly in this immigrant nation, in which most of use descended, not from indigenous peoples, but from boats) is guaranteed  under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. In other words, anyone born on US soil is automatically an American.  Trump’s  order arbitrarily asserts that a child born in the US is not a citizen if  the mother doesn’t have legal immigration status or “is in the country legally but only temporarily,” and if the father is not a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order further forbids US agencies from issuing any document recognizing such a child as a citizen or from accepting any state document recognizing such citizenship.

In other words, Trump is rendering children across an entire segment of US society virtually stateless, and robbing native citizens of their birthright. This is already under challenge in the federal court system.

Oh, and, remember George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, which gave us the invasive Patriot Act, with all of its “state of siege”-style tweaking of the Bill of Rights, the introduction of torture under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation”, and the holding of certain types of prisoners, without charges and at the disposal of the Executive Branch—all things that administration had in common with every dictatorship I’ve ever covered as a journalist? Well, Trump is now going that one better by planning to use the military in domestic policing operations, with the excuse that illegal immigration is “a matter of national security" and "an invasion,” that entitles him,  as commander-in-chief, to call out “his” troops.

Buenos Aires, March 1976

Never mind that this is a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts use of military personnel in domestic law enforcement actions. As I pored over Trump’s barrage of royal decrees, I was recalling the night of the military coup in Argentina in 1976. The Junta issued a series of repressive decrees to let the country know that there was a new sheriff in town and that the constitutional rulebook had just been heaved into the dumpster.

Trump has made it clear that churches and schools will no longer be considered off-limits in plans for government persecution of the undocumented. This brought back memories of my leaving the newspaper where I worked late on that March night in ’76. There were Army trucks everywhere, and soldiers armed with carbines, sidearms, shotguns and light machine guns were checking papers and loading people onto the trucks for transport. Now too, I imagine churches and schools in the US surrounded by military convoys and people being dragged away to concentration camps.

Buenos Aires, March 1976

Oh yes, did I forget to mention that Trump has also enunciated plans to use military bases to create concentration camps for undocumented migrants? Yes, he’s calling them “migrant camps”, but make no mistake, the idea is to create concentration camps within military jurisdictions. And don’t kid yourself, once the genie is out of the bottle in terms of authoritarian designs, there’s no putting it back. Nor is there any reason to believe that, in a state of virtual lawlessness, other sectors of American society could not also find themselves in an autocrat’s sights. There is a reason, in a healthy democracy, that the role of the military is external, not domestic, and a reason too that soldiers and officers alike swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, not a king or dictator.

In short, I’ve seen (lived) this movie before, elsewhere in the world, and know how it ends. And it doesn’t end well. This is not the American representative democracy that we grew up with. This is a populist authoritarian regime, headed up by a megalomaniacal demagogue, whose only goal is to be the most powerful man on earth.

 

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 it 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. 

TRUMP, THE GOP, AND THE MORLOCK FACTOR

 

In 1895, when he was twenty-nine years old, the “father of science fiction”, H.G. Wells, celebrated a couple of major events. Having left his first wife—his cousin Isabel, whom he had married four years earlier—he was re-married to his former student, Amy Robbins, and then, he promptly published his first work of fiction. It was a novella that he titled The Time Machine. It was that book that made him decide to become a serious writer. Fifty more titles would follow before his death in 1946, a number of them in this genre known today as sci-fi.

While The Time Machine is seen by sci-fic buffs mostly as an early reference to time travel and to the dream-adventure of being a time traveler, it is also, on a deeper level, a darkly dystopian story about class struggle and culture wars. Wells pictures the far distant future—802,701 AD—as a place that, on the surface, appears idyllic, a land of peace, love and plenty. But it is also a world that belies a dark and dangerous secret. That world is, of course, visited by the protagonist of the story,  a Victorian-era English scientist known only as the “Time Traveller”.

The Time Traveller tells his academic colleagues that he has built a machine on which one can literally travel into the future. The machine moves through time rather than space and can take one to the same spot on which it stands at any point time. He carries out his experiments in time travel privately. He sits in the strange machine, throws its levers and, voilà, the images of future times pass by his sides in a blur, his home and laboratory collapsing and being replaced by a sometimes frightening, sometime inspiring  landscape.

When the Time Traveller sees the most attractive landscape  of all, a lush, green, Garden of Eden-type image in that far-distant future, he activates the machine’s levers again and stops. It is indeed a beautiful, almost heavenly place.

H.G. Wells

Long story short, the Time Traveller comes across a small civilization in the forest, a people Wells calls the Eloi. They live in a benign climate and seem not to have a care in the world. They are immune to stress and are unencumbered by intellectual curiosity or cultural development. They are just content to live in this beautiful place, this Eden, in small peaceful villages. It is a place of love and beauty, where the inhabitants apparently want for nothing, a place ostensibly untouched by violence, in which they live entirely on the plentiful fruits that grow everywhere.

The Time Traveller is introduced to this idyllic humanoid non-culture by a beautiful Eloi named Weena. He quickly becomes infatuated with her but knows he will eventually have to return to his world. He toys with the idea of taking Weena back with him to his own era. But when he hikes back to the place where he has hidden his time machine, it is gone. In searching for it, he enters one of a number of strategically located, deep dry wells, and it is there that he encounters the cave world of the Morlocks. The Morlocks are a simian-like race which, on the one hand, is in charge of maintaining all of the underworld machinery that creates the heavenly environment in which the Eloi blithely live, but, on the other, depends on the flesh of the Eloi for its own survival. 

Never has the gist of the social principle involved been better explained than by actor Gary Sinise in the 1996 film, Ransom.  Sinise plays the part of a rogue New York City police detective, Jimmy Shaker, who has formed an underground gang that kidnaps and holds for ransom the young son of multimillionaire airline owner Tom Mullen (Mel Gibson). Mullen decides to ignore FBI protocol and pay the ransom Shaker’s gang is demanding. He has gone to great lengths to lose his FBI tail and is  going alone to the meet. As then scene opens, he is receiving instructions by car phone from Shaker as he drives.

 The dialogue goes like this:

Shaker tells Mullen about Morlocks

Det. Jimmy Shaker:
[talking as they are both driving in separate cars and out of sight of one another]

You a movie fan, Tom? Ever seen that movie, The Time Machine?

Tom Mullen:
No.

Det. Shaker:

It’s the land of the future, right? There are only two kinds of people left in the world now, the Morlocks and the Eloi…

Mullen:
Okay.

Det. Shaker:
The Eloi, they live above ground... they wear togas, they're all blond.  They eat grapes and shit like that.  It’s like the Garden of Eden out there, I mean basically everybody just plays around.

Mullen:

How do I get my boy back?

Det. Shaker:
The Morlocks, they live underground, all right? Big hairy ugly suckers, like you wouldn't wish on an ape.  Down there with all this machinery, they're doing all the labor, they're making sure that the Eloi have enough food and togas...

Mullen:

Are you gonna answer me?

Det. Shaker:
Oh, great deal if you are an Eloi, right?  There’s only one thing—every once in a while, a Morlock comes up to the surface and snatches an Eloi, takes him down there...

Mullen:
All right, I’m done driving until you tell me what I want to know!

Det. Shaker:

The Morlocks, they don't eat grapes... They're cannibals. They eat Eloi.  So when I think of The Time Machine, it kind of reminds me of New York City, you know? See, you’re an Eloi. You and all your friends walking around like zombies with no fucking idea of the shit going on down below. So…does this make me a Morlock? I don’t like to think of myself like…(pauses) I guess it does.  And every once in a while, one of you gets snatched.

Chilling.

But, okay, so why am I telling you this story about H.G. Wells, and Mel Gibson, and Gary Sinise, and the Eloi and the Morlocks, and all that?

Well, because, in a sense, we’re living it. And we’re living the chilling plots of a lot of other dystopian novels as well. The story just struck me when I was trying to explain our current climate to myself. And I can’t promise it will be the last time I’ll make references to the clairvoyance of dystopian writers. Indeed, I can guarantee you that I will be referring to other such stories, because a number of them are coming true, all at once, right before our eyes.

But for today, let’s look at the evidence for this comparison.

Prior to January 6, 2021, the Republican Party—or at least the most traditional segments of it—still had the deluded notion that the party belonged to them. Indeed, many in the GOP leadership felt that they were using Trump. They, like many Americans, thought the checks and balances, so carefully crafted into the Constitution by the framers, would take care of any populist authoritarian tendencies Trump, or any other candidate, might have. They trusted a long and, until then, sacred history of democracy and tradition, of separation of powers. They trusted in the peaceful transfer of power that had always characterized the American way of life and of politics.

They were slow learners and believed their own nonsense about Trump having a peculiar way of talking, but that it was “just his style.” They still thought of him as, in the end, rational and, in spite of everything, innately American. They ignored the fact that he referred to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-American “militias” as “very fine people” or that he had told the Proud Boys to “stand down and stand by.” They didn’t find it the least bit insane that he talked about biker gangs as having his back. Or that he had repeatedly hinted that martial law was a presidential option.  

As members of Congress, they had, they presumed, the frying pan by the handle. They were willing to go to unusual lengths to win elections. Even to that of allowing a man known to be bereft of conscience, principles, honesty, sincerity, government experience, ethics, scruples or historical and political knowledge (a man known more for being crafty than for being intelligent) to represent them—as long as he brought his sizable following with him. Besides, if things did go awry, it would be the Democrats on the receiving end, and hey, who cared?

They thought of the MAGA folks as an amorphous if critical mass of unsophisticated votes. They had that in common with the Democrats. It was that attitude, by both parties, which permitted the rise of Trump and MAGA. Trump and his team got it. They were strategic. They simply played on the fact that there was a very large segment of the population that would follow this reality show host and grifter no matter where he led them—an ignored and disenfranchised segment who feared becoming even more invisible in the future, and who were willing to follow anybody who could come along and convince them that he was going to take vengeance for them, that he was a superhero, and that he was  going to blow it all up. They were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. The GOP leadership didn’t understand what made those people tick—Trump did—but they knew there were a hell of a lot of them and that Trump could bring their votes to “the party”.

But then, Trump lost. Just as he had lost the by-elections for the party in 2022.  In the face of that defeat, a large part of the Republican elite was thinking that they’d had four years, and the loss was bad for the party, but maybe now they could take the party back from this guy and send him home. There was just too much drama with him in government. Surely, in the end, he would accept the election result, come to heel, follow the long-held democratic tradition, shake hands with the victor and go home. For good.

Not Donald Trump. He kicked and screamed and fought and shouted fraud. He disputed the election results in the courts, and when his campaign’s cases were found to be without merit, when his own attorney general said there was no fraud, he sought to pressure state officials, anyway he could, to rig the results and snatch the victory out of his opponent’s hands. He falsely accused poll workers and voting machine makers. He stubbornly refused to concede, and tried to get his own vice president and MAGA members of Congress to back up his story of a rigged election and refuse to certify the election results. And when none of that looked as if it would be enough to return him to office, he scraped the bottom of the lowest reaches of his movement for the most violent elements he could find. 

In other words, Trump gave his very own Morlocks permission to rise up from the dark, disenfranchised, violent underworld. And this time they had permission from their leader—indeed, for many, from their god—to remain on the surface and to wreak havoc. Their mission was to devour the Eloi in Congress. And it was on that day that fat, complacent, millionaire Republicans, perennials in Congress, realized for the first time that when the crap hit the fan, they too were in the line of fire. Being an Eloi wasn’t exclusive to their political opponents. They too were Eloi, and the Morlocks were coming for them.

So that day we witnessed Trump’s own vice president running for his life, GOP members cowering in the chamber next to their Democrat counterparts. Even MAGA mouthpiece Josh Hawley who had given a raised-fist salute to the Morlocks outside was now filmed booking through the halls of Congress to escape the Morlock advance. The Morlocks, it was clear, knew no authority but their own, the leader whose bidding they were doing. Whoever got in their way was going down—as attested by the policeman they killed and the one hundred forty they injured. And their king, their god, watched it all on TV and never lifted a finger to stop it.

That was the day that the GOP officially ceased to exist and became the Party of Trump. Despite pseudo-patriotic speeches by the traditional old white guys in the former Republican leadership (clearly, they were no longer in charge no matter what their nameplates said) about how this was the last straw, and they were done backing Trump, in their frightened arrhythmic hearts, they realized that Sergeant Jimmy  Shaker was right: They were Eloi. Them and all of their fat, privileged, entitled friends, “walking around like zombies with no fucking idea of the shit going on down below.” And in a matter of hours, they had all changed their soiled trousers, and their tunes, and were kissing the ring of their new party leader.

It was a Morlock-eat-Eloi world, and, clearly, if you were in the Party of Trump, you were either with him all the way, or the Morlocks were dragging you down to the underworld for lunch. 

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.