A 14-MONTH-LONG CAT-5 HURRICANE

 

Donald J. Trump has done more during the first fourteen months of his second term as president to undermine, and indeed, destroy the reputation, standing and integrity of the United States than any other phenomenon in American history.

I make this statement advisedly, because the US Civil War was indeed the greatest tragedy in American history. But it was also one of the nation’s greatest triumphs, reuniting the country as one, ending the scourge of slavery, reestablishing the rule of law, and, despite decades of hardships and challenges that were to follow, moving the country gradually toward ever greater equality and social order. Donald Trump has, on the contrary, even backtracked on much of that progress, by systematically seeking to turn the clock back to a pre-Civil Rights Era racist mentality—floating the elements of “manifest destiny” and of replacement-theory politics—and to a time when women were considered second-class citizens.

America's domestic essence and international reputation have been founded, historically, not on “power”, but on strength, the international strength of representing Western democratic ideals and of standing against aggression, and the domestic values of upholding free and fair elections, the strict rule of law, and the stability of peaceful transfers of power from one administration to the next.

While Trump’s first term in office tested all of these healthy and honorable traditions and principles to the limit, the liberal democratic system managed to endure. And the system prevailed despite scant effort on the part of the Republican Party, corrupted and hijacked by the Trump phenomenon, which, even after the fact, purged the most honorable of its members, who had demonstrated their devotion to political rectitude, and to the values of nation over political affiliation.

Incomprehensibly re-elected, however, by a slim popular margin in 2024, Trump has taken his second term as a mandate to completely dismantle the constitutional system that he repeatedly assaulted without final success during his first four years from 2016 to 2020. I have often compared Trump to “a bull in a china shop” when it comes to the Constitution, civil rights, the rule of law, and plain common decency. But in his second term, this metaphor has fallen short. The past fourteen and a half months have indeed been more like a prolonged and unabated category five hurricane in terms of the devastation wrought by Trump in the areas of constitutionality, democratic health, ethical traditions, civil rights, American culture, and the international standing of the United States on the domestic and global stage.

Since Day One of his second term starting on January 20^th, 2025, Trump has, with the aid of his unqualified but sycophantic picks for key posts in the Department of Justice, intelligence and law enforcement, systematically weaponized federal power against any and all opposition to his absolute power, not merely blurring, but basically obliterating the once sharp line between democracy and political retribution. He has underscored this corruption of American justice by making public attacks on judges, juries and the courts—including the Supreme Court—thus diluting confidence in American judicial independence, once the cornerstone of America’s credibility both at home and abroad.

The impact of this is a fast-growing perception of the US as an increasingly authoritarian regime in which once democratic institutions now serve power rather than constraining it.

Along these lines, a hallmark of this second term to date has been the gross use of government agencies for political ends. Immigration enforcement—something nearly all sides agree must improve, but which the majority of Americans agree must be carried out within the confines of the rule of law—has been particularly affected, expanding in ways that are blatantly illegal, unconstitutional, patently violent, and in frank violation of civil rights granted to citizens and foreigners alike under the Constitution.

“Immigration concerns” have also been used by the second Trump administration as an excuse to literally invade major cities and states governed by his political opponents, creating a personal army of thousands of federally-immune government agents as a shock force to attempt to intimidate dissent based on states’ rights. Congressional criticism—even among a handful of members of Congress from Trump’s own party—point to widespread concern over the Trump regime’s lawlessness and complete indifference to civil rights.

Trump has also openly pressured or publicly discredited both intelligence and law enforcement agencies whenever their findings point to credible reports of wrongdoing on his part or on the part of his friends and cronies, or when such findings conflict with his political or personal goals. Hundreds of law enforcement and  intelligence agents—three hundred in the FBI alone—many of them highly experienced experts in investigation, counter-terrorism, espionage, etc., have been unceremoniously sacked because of previously having been involved in probes into the Epstein files, or in Jack Smith’s inquiry into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and into his attempts to manipulate and overturn the 2020 elections. And more than three thousand prosecutors, investigators and staffers have been forced out of the DOJ for similar reasons.

This last, the savaging of the DOJ and federal law enforcement, has significantly weakened America’s ability to defend itself against its enemies, both foreign and domestic. And Trump has doubled down on debilitating the US by replacing some key officials in this area with individuals who have no qualified experience whatsoever. The naming of Kash Patel to head the FBI is a blatant enough example of placing highly trained agents under the command of a clueless sycophant—as was the stint of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

But an even greater and almost ludicrous example of this sort of surreally sycophantic restaffing of the State is that of Thomas Fugate III, appointed to head the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3)—a division of the Department of Homeland Security charged with combating domestic terrorism and targeted violence.

The man Fugate replaced was Bill Braniff. Braniff was an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience. Prior to heading up CP3 during the second half of the Biden administration and the first three months of the Trump regime, Braniff had been director of the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism—in other words, a consummate professional and expert. On leaving DHS, Braniff joined the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at the American University.

Fugate, for his part, prior to his appointment as the head of CP3, was working in 2022 as a cashier in a supermarket, then later was a staffer in the far-right Heritage Foundation. His only other qualification for the DHS appointment was apparently his being a self-described “Trumplican”, and having volunteered as a GOP campaign organizer.

All of this undermines the United States’ reputation as a neutral rule-of-law state, and aligns it with the sort of governments—Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, for instance, as well as tinpot dictatorships in third world nations—that the US has historically criticized and condemned.

In line with all of this, both in his first term, and, to an even greater extent, in his second, Trump has normalized hate speech, while systematically dismantling through State action most of the  progress made since the Civil Rights Era in terms of diversity, equality and inclusion—positive values in modern civilized society but perceived by the Trump regime as negative terms that undermine MAGA’s most cherished white-supremacist principles (manifest destiny and the myth of “reverse racism”).  Trump’s rhetoric, on the whole, is reckless, disdainful and inflammatory. But it is particularly contemptuous when it comes to immigrants, political opponents, and international institutions.

Add to that his most recent attack on the Supreme Court for refusing to allow his regime to decide who, born on US soil, can be a citizen and who can’t. The Fourteenth Amendment clearly states that if you are born in the US, you are an American citizen, period. And that was the interpretation, even of the three far-right justices Trump named to the Court during his first term. Trump is now calling the three of them “stupid”, and has suggested that if they are on  the Court thanks to him, they should be grateful and always rule in his favor, no matter how outlandish the request might be. Someone should probably tell him, perhaps, that justices are bound to rule in accordance with the law,  not in harmony with the president. But then, who’s going to tell him? His lapdog sycophants in the DOJ?

Trump’s effect on political and social rhetoric has been so all-pervasive that he has managed to normalize language once considered a violation of democratic norms. He has persuaded his most loyal followers that it is now okay to employ the racial slurs they had been inhibited from using in good company by liberal democratic norms in the post-Civil Right Era. He has made it okay in certain circles to sneer at political correctness, to insult those one considers different, or as representative of “the others”, to reject, offend and ostracize people who failed to fit the framework of MAGA, and so on.

A recent example that pretty much says it all was Trump’s comment on the death last month of Robert Mueller. When learning of Mueller’s death at eighty-one, Trump could think of nothing more proper to say than, “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.”

It is worthwhile recalling who Robert Mueller was and why that makes Trump’s vile statement all the more egregious. Even as far back as the late sixties, before he had reached his mid-twenties, Robert Mueller was heroically serving his country. Born into privilege like Donald Trump, Mueller, much to the contrary of Trump—who comes from a long line of service-shirkers, and describes America’s dead heroes as “suckers and losers”—joined the Marines after receiving a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a post-graduate degree in international relations from New York University.

It is worthwhile remembering that there was still obligatory conscription during that war and that Donald Trump was eligible for it, but managed to acquire four temporary deferments from serving, and finally, a fifth permanent rejection which alleged he had bone spurs in his heels that rendered him physically inept.

After completing Officer Candidate School and being commissioned as a second lieutenant, Mueller went to the Army’s Ranger School. Marine officers frequently trained with the Rangers for experience leading long-range reconnaissance patrols—often search-and-destroy missions with a high casualty rate. He was placed with a Marine combat company in South Vietnam near enemy lines

It was on this first tour as a young second lieutenant that Mueller won a Bronze Star for valor. It was on December 11, 1968, while leading a Marine rifle platoon on patrol in Quang Tri Province that Mueller and his men fell victims to an ambush by Vietcong armed with grenade-launchers, machine guns, mortars and small arms. The citation issued with his Bronze Star said that he  “personally led a fire team across the fire-swept area terrain to recover a mortally wounded Marine,” while it commended his “courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk.” Four months later, he would win a Purple Heart for taking an AK-47 assault rifle slug through the thigh while leading his platoon on a mission to rescue US soldiers pinned down under  another lethal Vietcong attack.

After leaving Vietnam, Mueller attended the University of Virginia where he completed his law degree by 1973. Three years later, he was already a federal prosecutor in San Francisco. And in a meteoric rise of a few short years was chief prosecutor for the criminal division of the Northern District of California.

By 1982, at age thirty-seven, Mueller was in Boston prosecuting fraud, corruption, money-laundering and terrorism cases. Mueller joined the Justice Department in Washington in 1989, and within a year, would be chief of the criminal division, where he would grapple with managing a hundred US Attorney offices and some two thousand federal prosecutors, while serving as a nexus with the FBI.

Ironically enough, Mueller’s immediate superior at the Justice Department was William Barr, with whom he would cross paths again three decades later, when Barr was Trump’s attorney general and Mueller was a special prosecutor investigating Russian interference in Trump’s election.

Mueller would also oversee prosecution of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, whose power stemmed in large part from his long-term relationship with the CIA—one of those dictators immorally supported by the US in its so-called war on communism in Latin America. Mueller was investigating Noriega as a kingpin in cocaine trafficking to the US. He would also head up the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland that killed two hundred fifty-nine people on board and eleven people on the ground. The FBI had probed the case unsuccessfully for two years, when Mueller used his authority as head of the criminal division to break through the agency’s barriers to multi-agency investigations and brought in the CIA, Britain’s MI5 and the Scottish police and got them all to share their information. As a result, Mueller made use of a tip from Scottish authorities to put the FBI on the trail of a Libyan intelligence officer who had used his cover as security chief for the Libyan flag-carrier airline to plant the bomb on the Pan Am plane. The bomber,  Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was indicted in 1991, but it would take until 2001 to convict him.

That, 2001, was, paradoxically, the same year that George W. Bush, following the nine-eleven Twin Towers attack, would appoint Mueller to head the FBI. Mueller would serve in that post for the next twelve years. And over the course of that time, he would turn the agency into one of the most effective counter-terror organizations on earth. His tenure would make him the second-longest-serving FBI director in history, only outdistanced by FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover.

After his retirement from the FBI, Mueller would again volunteer to serve his country at a time when Washington was known as “the murder capital of the USA”. President Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, who had worked under Mueller at the DOJ, said Mueller called him “out of the blue” and asked if he needed a murder prosecutor. Holder asked Mueller if he wasn’t maybe “over-qualified” for a line prosecutor’s post, but then said, “When can you start?”

Over the next three years, Mueller successfully investigated and brought down dozens of killers, helping significantly reduce the murder rate in the nation’s capital. During that time, he always answered his own phone, with a simple,  “Mueller, homicide.”

This is the American hero about whom the current president could think of nothing better to say than, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” And adding, “He can no longer hurt innocent people!” In typical style, the “innocent people” Trump referred to was only one person: him. It was Trump’s own DOJ that appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller, as always, did his job thoroughly and effectively. The report that he handed to Attorney General Bill Barr at the end of his probe concluded that while Trump himself had committed no crime, there was indeed evidence that Russian intelligence had interfered in the elections.

Barr, at Trump’s behest, smoothed this over by suppressing the report and providing an interpretation in which he dispelled any reports of collusion between Russia and the Trump camp. But Trump never forgave Mueller for carrying out an honest and impartial investigation, instead of engaging in a pro-Trump cover-up. In this second term, Trump has gone to great pains to ensure that there is no one impartial and effective in key positions in the government, surrounding himself with sycophants who are willing to break the law and the Constitution to protect his interests.

In conclusion of this point, Trump’s vile rhetoric and disdain for diversity, equality and inclusion—and the language that goes with it—has  not merely emboldened his cultist followers to take his lead. It has also emboldened other authoritarian leaders worldwide, who cite the United States as no longer having moral authority to criticize repression or abuses against their own citizens. Therefore, the US has lost its ability to influence other nations through values rather than force.

Worse still, Trump has single-handedly trashed America’s reputation as a reliable ally. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this, since the full trust in us of our allies has been among America’s greatest strategic assets since World War II.

Starting already in his first term, Trump’s disparaging remarks regarding our closest Western allies, his cozy relations with perceived enemies of the West and dictators in general, his loose-lipped handling of shared intelligence and his transactional (extortive) brand of “diplomacy”  badly weakened long-standing partnerships including NATO. And in the first year and three months of his second term, the eighty-year-old Western NATO alliance has been stretched to the breaking point. America’s erstwhile allies are now reluctant to share intelligence with Washington and are studying contingencies for NATO without the US, and, perhaps even, NATO with the US as its enemy and as a clear and present threat.

Even if Americans manage to topple the Trump regime, the damage he has done to our world standing will surely take decades to heal. And that will only happen if a Trump-free Washington has the humility to act proactively to get the West back on board with us.

Trump’s illegal war in Iran has only underscored this disconnect, with Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatening to pull out of NATO because the alliance has refused to aid and abet the Trump regime in its war of aggression against Iran—a supreme crime against humanity under international law. Moreover, Trump’s lawless action has caused Iran to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, effectively blocking worldwide delivery of a fifth of the world’s oil.

And now Trump’s regime is telling our one-time allies that the oil  blockade is not his problem. That it will be up to them to re-open Hormuz, since he seems to have grown bored with his war and is planning to end it soon. This is tantamount to tossing a live grenade into the midst of a group of friendly acquaintances and then running away.

Trump’s abrupt unilateral military actions without allied consultation and in violation of international law and the UN Charter have, in short, underscored uncertainty about US decision-making. Escalatory actions like airstrikes or other military interventions are being perceived as authoritarian and impulsive rather than strategic, and, as such, an imminent threat to world peace and prosperity.

Allies are, then increasingly hedging their bets. They are building independent capabilities or turning to regional arrangements, because they understand that if the Trump phenomenon could happen twice in a decade in the US, with Congress doing nothing to rein in the chaos, then any prior commitments the US has ever agreed to are now untenable.

These fears among our allies are further underscored by the economic and institutional unpredictability that is rampant under the Trump regime. Especially worthy of worldwide concern is how Trump has abandoned every economic and trade norm ever upheld by the US. The perception is of a demented leadership that is completely unpredictable and that, at any time, can turn on its allies and trading partners like a mad dog or—more aptly, perhaps, like a psychopath. Suddenly, our long-standing trading partners are witnessing erratic policy shifts, onerous trade tariffs, economic coercion, and apparently intentional creation of instability.

Add to this the undermining of normally independent domestic agencies, such as the Federal Reserve and regulatory agencies, and the US is garnering worldwide concern about its capriciously politicized economic management. In the end, what this means is that global investors are beginning to treat the US like a marginal and volatile State, rather than as the once foundational system in the worldwide economy.

In global economics and diplomacy this is sometimes referred to as the “concentration effect”. What this means is that the Trump regime is not just seen as damaging because of its severity, but also because of the concentration of its effects. Multiple institutional norms are being challenged simultaneously, and the assault on them is not part of a structured national policy, but the whims of a single despotic leader who is going internally unchallenged. And the messaging in this sense is continuous and global, since Trump is, perhaps, the most globally mediatic world leader in history—with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler.  

The end-result is that each action by the Trump unipersonal regime has the global effect of reinforcing the perception that the United States is no longer internally stable or externally reliable.   

Many will argue that the US has faced crises before and has always prevailed “because we are the greatest nation on earth.” But I submit—as do many other political analysts—that this time it is different.

Never before has a crisis emerged so directly from the presidency. Never before have the co-equal branches of government simply sat on their hands and watched a president wreak havoc. (For instance, Watergate was a major leadership crisis, but in that case, Richard Nixon’s own party demanded his resignation en lieu of impeachment and removal). Never, more than Trump, has a president and his administration targeted so many democratic pillars simultaneously, nor have the other branches permitted the Executive to get away with it. Never has the abuse of authority been so blatant or as consistent over time, and never have the abuse and its consequences been so domestically and internationally blatant, unbridled and visible in real time.

Seen in this light, the first fourteen months of the second stage of the Trump regime have been uniquely, historically and, perhaps, permanently damaging to the reputation, standing and integrity of the United States—more so than any other phenomenon in the nation’s history.

The eight million Americans who turned out at more than three thousand No Kings demonstrations across the country and the world recently gives me hope for the future. Still, I can’t help but ask myself daily: When are we going to quit pretending that this is business as usual, and demand, by the tens of millions, that our representatives remove this criminal tyrant from office and take back our nation?

CUTTING OFF OUR NOSE TO SPITE OUR FACE

 The Durham probe that former Attorney General William Barr ordered in 2019 is an iconic symbol of a political war being waged in the United States. After 873 days (and counting) of investigating the investigators in the Mueller inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, John Durham’s search for dirt on those aiding Robert Mueller in his look into any link between Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russian hackers who sought to swing the 2016 results in the former president’s favor has finally led to the announcement of only its second indictment.

William Barr (left) and John Durham

Durham’s probe was billed by both Barr and Trump as a blockbuster investigation that would uncover a plot by top Democrats to undermine the election results that brought Trump to power. Indeed, Trump at one point said that the investigation would reveal “the greatest political crime in American history.”

But after spending 200 more days investigating investigators than Mueller did probing the Russia connection, Durham has been unable to indict any recognizable faces from the Democratic camp or the FBI for impropriety in the handling of the Russian interference inquiry. It was only this past week when his office was finally able to secure a grand jury indictment against attorney Michael Sussman, a specialist in cyber-security, who in 2016 raised his suspicions with the FBI about what he claimed were secretly channeled data allegedly linking the Trump business empire to the Alfa Bank of Russia. Ultimately, the FBI said that there was “insufficient evidence” to bring charges based on the data provided by Sussmann.

But that isn’t the basis for Durham’s indictment of the attorney. Instead, Sussman is accused of telling the FBI’s chief counsel, James Baker, that he was coming forth as a “good citizen” when, according to the Durham probe’s allegations, Sussman was actually working for a technology company executive and for Trump opponent Hillary Clinton’s campaign when he took his story to the FBI. Durham claims, therefore, that Sussman lied to the FBI, which is a felony. Last Friday, Sussman pleaded not guilty to the charge.

The only conviction Durham has been able to achieve to date was of a low-level FBI attorney named Kevin Clinesmith. Clinesmith was indicted for and later convicted of doctoring an internal FBI e-mail memo in order to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Agency (FISA) Court warrant to investigate Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy adviser.  In sentencing Clinesmith, Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg—who also was the federal judge presiding over the FISA Court, and whom you might recall as the Republican-appointed judge who in 2016 ordered the release by the FBI to the conservative legal group Judicial Watch of more than 14,000 State Department emails found on Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server—made it clear that while Clinesmith had committed a serious offense, considering other corroborative evidence presented, the FISA warrant application would likely have been approved anyway, without the attorney’s having presented adulterated evidence. He therefore declined to send Clinesmith to prison, handing him a year on probation and community service instead.

Robert Mueller

The Mueller investigation, for its part, did indeed produce both indictments (34) and solid convictions (including those of five Trump lieutenants), as well as eight guilty pleas with regard to Russian interference in US elections. Mueller made it clear that no indictment of Trump had been considered, for the simple reason that, in accordance with Justice Department guidelines, a sitting president cannot be indicted (not even under sealed indictment). The Mueller Report, which was the culmination of that 674-day probe, did not conclude that there had been no pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 elections. On the contrary, the Mueller investigative team indicted thirteen Russians—twelve who formed part of the Fancy Bear hacker team under orders from the Kremlin’s largest foreign espionage agency, the GRU, and who were charged with hacking the Democratic National Committee e-mail server and leaking their communications to the public.

The thirteenth Russian indicted by Mueller was businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was charged with financing the Russian hackers. All were charged in absentia and while it is unlikely they will ever be fully prosecuted in the US, the charges have hindered their travel abroad. A fourteenth Russian questioned by the Mueller investigation was Maria Butina, who posed as a Russian-born gun activist with ties to the NRA. Following her statements to the Mueller inquiry, she was arrested and prosecuted for acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government under the provisions of the National Security Law, pleaded guilty, and ended up serving six months of an 18-month prison sentence.

All of this came in addition to indictments, during the second Trump impeachment inquiry, of Lev Parnas and Igor Furman, both born in the former Soviet Union, and both associates of Trump’s personal attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The two were arrested by the FBI in connection with campaign funding violations—more specifically, setting up a shell company to launder a US$ 325,000 donation to the Trump campaign. Through a series of complicated investigations led by Republican campaign watchdog Trevor Potter and by energy sector businessman Dale Perry, it was discovered that both Parnas and Furman were intimately involved in Giuliani’s mission to dig up dirt on then candidate Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine, as well as in Giuliani’s successful attempt to have career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch removed as the US ambassador to that country.

Trump referred to Yovanovitch as being “bad news”. But in fact, Ambassador Yovanovitch had a long history of tackling corruption wherever she found it, and that was one of her priorities in Ukraine.

It is interesting to note that when charges were brought against Parnas and Furman, it was another former Trump lawyer, John Dowd, who became their defense counsel.

Pence, Furman, Parnas,Trump and Giuliani

In other words, while the majority of Republicans seek to bill the Mueller investigation into Russian interference as a political hit job cooked up by Democrats—Robert Mueller is, it should be noted, a lifelong Republican—the probe did indeed produce proof of Russian interference in US domestic affairs and established an at least prima facie association between Russia and Trump loyalists. The Durham Investigation, for its part, has so far not clearly demonstrated its reason for existing, since the two minor indictments produced to date could easily have been achieved without the creation of a special prosecutor’s investigation.

What is most interesting, and sad, about both investigations is that while the judicial bases behind them might be sound—i.e., to root out corruption in the highest spheres of government—the political climate behind them isn’t. As I said earlier, at their root, they are both political skirmishes in a so far cold (or perhaps tepid would be a better word) civil war that is ripping the fabric of America’s two-and-a-half-century-old democratic traditions down the middle.

This is not hyperbole on my part, but the conclusion of a growing number of noted political scientists. When I posited back in 2017 that the US had never been more divided since the actual Civil War, many acquaintances—both Republican and Democrat—on the social media showed skepticism, or openly scoffed at the idea. But since the January 6^th insurrection, many, among both traditional Republicans and Democrats, have come into line with my thinking and are gravely concerned about the fate of US democracy and domestic security in the foreseeable future.

One of those who subscribes to this view of history in the making is Academy and Peabody Award-winning documentary film director Ken Burns. Renowned for his research into such related topics as the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, Nazism in Europe, and the populist reign of Louisiana boss politician Huey “The Kingfish” Long, Burns literally views the current post-Trump presidency era as “the most divisive since the Civil War.”

According to Burns, US democracy is imminently endangered by an internal threat stemming from the inability of today’s Americans to agree on even the most basic of facts. There are already, he posits, casualties of war-like proportions as a result of these divisions if we consider that 676,000 Americans have died in the COVID epidemic (more than perished in the 1918 influenza plague, when there was no medical treatment for the disease), mainly because politicians, led by the former president, have so politicized the use of masks and highly effective and readily available vaccines that nearly half of the country’s population remains stubbornly opposed to public health policies enacted to save their lives.

But COVID deaths, 2,000 of them a day at present, are only one grim symptom of how politicians are pitting one broad sector of Americans against another and, in the process, mortally wounding American democratic traditions—as well as killing their fellow Americans. In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky posit that the breakdown of “mutual toleration” and respect for the political legitimacy of the opposition is a sure formula for murdering democracy. Above all, they point out, it is absolutely necessary for everyone involved in the political process to accept the results of free and fair elections. The basic cornerstone of US democracy is free and fair elections. If you respect even the most basic of democratic tenets, you don’t mess with that. And yet, over the course of the last five years, and especially in the last two, the country’s voting system has taken more hits than a subway turnstile. 

It is worthwhile recalling that they were writing this veritable textbook on how democracies are killed quite early on in the administration of Donald Trump. But their warning that contrary to these basic rules of democratic life were spurious complaints about election outcomes and, graver still, attempts to overthrow the established democratic order and replace it with an authoritarian regime now seems prescient. Their then largely academic proposal has since transformed into a cogent prediction, provided a full two years prior to the January 6^th Capitol insurrection and the perpetuation by Trump’s political cohorts of “the big lie” that has convinced a very large segment of the public that Democrats and President Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election from Trump. Nearly a full year after that election, Trump keeps calling for the election results to be overturned, thus continuing to feed his most loyal base with a divisive lie that is perpetuating hatred between the two main American political camps.

And just how large is that democracy-dubious base? Polls suggest that more than 50 percent (some pollsters say more than 70 percent) of all Republicans—or about one in four American voters—believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that Democrats in general and President Joe Biden in particular stole the presidency from their far-right populist icon, Donald Trump. As recently as this month, Trump has continued to call for the election to be overturned, thus revitalizing his own lie (or perhaps delusion) among his closest followers and leading them to believe that the system is corrupt, that democracy no longer works, and that perhaps the January 6^th insurrection was the way to go in seeking to “win back their rights and nation.”

Despite this narrative, seldom has representative democracy worked better than it did in the 2020 election. That’s not an opinion. It’s a proven fact. In spite of desperate efforts by Trump and his allies to sully election system credibility, that system and the results it yielded, numerous machine and hand recounts, some sixty court judgments and a Supreme Court rejection have all clearly demonstrated the accusations of Trump and his closest cohorts to be utterly and completely false. Worse still, all of this proof has shown the Trump camp’s machinations to be a ruse designed to fool the gullible within his base—who, it turns out, are incredibly numerous.

Even the long, tortuous, so-called “audit” carried out by the comic book-named Cyber-Ninjas in Arizona couldn’t make Trumpian accusations of voter fraud stick. That ghost-like firm that sprang up out of nowhere, financed with 5.7 million dollars in Trump-supporter donations, allegedly channeled to them mostly through prominent Trump camp figures like lawyer and confessed prevaricator Sidney Powell and disgraced retired Army general Michael Flynn, has had to confess in its final report, leaked to the press this week, that there was no evidence of fraud against Trump in that state’s election process. On the contrary, their meticulous and decidedly partisan look at Arizona’s crucial Maricopa County ended up demonstrating that Joe Biden had actually beaten Donald Trump there by an even wider margin than original tabulations revealed.

And yet, this past week, after unsuccessfully harassing the main states where he lost, Trump turned to places where he won, bullying Governor Greg Abbott of Texas into auditing election results in several cities where the former president is nursing the delusion that he should have done better. Clearly, to any reasonable person’s mind, the election has been over for eleven months now, the result is unquestionable and Joe Biden, everywhere but in Mar-a-Lago, is president of the Unites States.

What is happening right now in the US is tragic, not only for the Nation but also for Western democracy as a whole, particularly because it plays to the narrative of two of America’s staunchest rivals, the authoritarian regimes today governing China and Russia, both of which hold that democracy is a messy, recalcitrant and ineffective form of government that is highly overrated. The Trump era has provided them with ample reason to scoff and they are doing so with abandon. The current situation in America is made to order for their anti-American propaganda machine, because they no longer even have to lie. It really is as bad as they say it is.

It is hard to see how the two and a half-century-old experiment in American liberal democracy can survive when the leadership of one of the two main parties governing it has deformed its definition of “democracy” and molded its entire political platform to suit the whims and power-mad delusions of a single personality, much in the same way that the Nazi Party did in embracing the absolute power of Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, over the course of the last twelve years, the Republican political leadership has basically abandoned its duties—lawmaking and representation of the rights of its constituency—in favor of obstructionist practices designed specifically to keep much needed legislation from passing and, worse still, of political strategies developed to discredit and paralyze its political opponents.

Wyoming Rep.Liz Cheney

An obvious symptom of the GOP leadership’s giant leap into the abyss of authoritarianism is its ostracizing of all fellow Republicans who fail to fall in, rank and file, behind the autocratic figure of Donald Trump. Iconic examples of traditional Republican figures (and true liberal-democratic conservatives) who have fallen victim to this type of ostracism include, the late Senator John McCain, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, Utah Senator Mitt Romney, Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, Ohio Representative Anthony Gonzalez, and even, to a certain extent, former Vice President Mike Pence, to name just a few. Meanwhile, dangerous fascistoid radicals like Georgia Representative Majorie Taylor Green and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who would have once been political pariahs among Republicans, are now party rock stars. 

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green

Many expert political observers say that the only hope for the future of American democracy is for the Democratic Party to take advantage of the power that it wields right now—and perhaps not for more than a year to come—to try and shore up democracy, and make it less vulnerable to attack in the future. Especially considering plots in Red states in several areas of the country to ram through laws that will “keep what happened in 2020 from ever happening again.” Considering that the 2020 election has been repeatedly proven to be one of the fairest in history, the underlying meaning of this stated mission is, then, to ensure that elections are skewed to make certain that the GOP has brass knuckles in its glove the next time it steps into the ring with Democrats. 

And it matters not one iota to the current GOP chiefs that in order to win by hook or by crook they will be disenfranchising millions of American voters. On the contrary, their purpose is precisely that.

Missouri Sen.Josh Hawley

But I believe that the only way for democracy to survive in the current climate is for the purge of authoritarianism to come from within the conservative movement itself. And I’m not alone in this belief.

Back in May, some 150 former Republican officials sent an open-letter message to their party warning that if the GOP didn’t break with Donald Trump, they would back the creation of a third party. Miles Taylor, one of the organizers of this new conservative movement within the GOP, said at the time, “The Republican Party is broken. It's time for a resistance of the ‘rationals’ against the ‘radicals’.”

Taylor had already begun to resist Trump’s authoritarian designs while he was serving in the former president’s administration. A Trump appointee and former Bush administration staffer, he served from 2017 to 2019 as chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security. He eventually outed himself as the Trump administration official who had written a 2018 anonymous op-ed in The New York Times entitled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration. But the last straw for most of the rest of the signers of the ultimatum, which they entitled A Call for American Renewal, was the Trump-incited January 6^th insurrection at the Capitol.

The signers include four former governors and 27 former members of the House of Representatives, as well as Trump and Bush administration officials, diplomats and former high-ranking party officials. Among the most familiar names are former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, former National Security Agency chief General Michael Hayden, former homeland security director Michael Chertoff, Republican strategist William F.B. O’Reilly, former Representative Barbara Comstock, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, and former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld.

The most high-profile opponent to the Trumpian takeover of the GOP, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, has so far resisted joining the movement, since she fears splitting the party would hand greater power to the Democrats. But with her effective removal by Trump authoritarians from any position of power within the party, observers feel she could eventually rethink that position and perhaps even end up being an alternative conservative candidate for the presidency.    

This incipient rebellion within the GOP is, to my mind, the only real hope for the future of democracy in the United States. As noted historian John Meacham pointed out in the final days of the Trump administration, politics in America are no longer a matter of two parties debating issues from distinct viewpoints, but of two parties speaking two entirely different languages. And the language of the current GOP leadership is that of personality-cult authoritarianism, a language not so very different from that of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party.

True conservatives deserve to be represented by better minds and by genuinely patriotic hearts that put service above self-interest, Nation above party and democracy above personality. If the GOP has leaped permanently into the void of personality-cult autocracy and obstructionism aimed at destroying the opposition no matter what the cost to the Nation and to democracy, then the only hope for the future of democracy in the United States of America lies in the hands of conservatives who either rebel and take their party back from Trump and his cohorts, or in those with the courage to forge an entirely new conservative movement based on the original ethics of the party of Lincoln.

The current cold civil war between the two traditional parties is not a democratic option. The only thing it promises to ensure is that whoever “wins” will end up administrating the crumbling ruins of one of the greatest political systems ever devised.

 

WRECKING BARR

Donald Trump is the granite boulder against which reputations are smashed. William Barr’s is the latest in a long series.

Barr - proved unworthy of his reputation

Prior to his confirmation as attorney general, Barr was thought of by many on both sides of the congressional aisle—despite his obsequious spinning and justifying of criminal behavior witnessed in the Iran-Contra affair under both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations—as a sound constitutionalist and legal scholar, as well as a “straight-shooter” who could be counted on to carry out his duties as the nation’s  highest-ranking law enforcement officer with unyielding adherence to the necessary objectivity and independence of that post. But in light of his performance in handling the Mueller Report, Barr has proven himself to be unworthy of the high regard in which he was previously held.   

Generals Kelly and McMaster - too much, too long

Noteworthy among earlier alleged “adults in the room” who trashed their good names before, far too belatedly, abandoning the Trump camp are generals John Kelly and H.R. McMaster. In both cases, they were broadly seen as patriots and men of good faith who joined and remained in the Trump administration, more than anything else, as a means of guiding a clueless president along a legal and legitimate path in a complex world that he was loath to comprehend, while acting as “damage control” whenever it proved impossible to sway Trump from the designs of his most disastrous policies.

Be that as it may, both men overstayed their usefulness to the United States in this sense and ended up trying, against their better judgment, to justify the administration’s madness rather than frontally opposing it and, eventually, only after sullying what, in both cases, had been stellar records, decided they could no longer remain at odds with their own ethics and resigned. Too late, as it turns out, not to be splashed by the blowback from Trump’s lies and his hostile relationship with the Constitution and the rule of law.

Latest news updates regarding the two-year Mueller investigation and Barr’s presentation of it to the public suggest that the attorney general has forsaken the responsibilities of his office and scotched his good name in the legal and political community by acting, not as the representative of constitutional law and order, but as a partisan Trump surrogate.

A few corroborating facts:

 - On March 24, William Barr prefaced the release of a redacted version of the Mueller Report with a four-page letter, described at the time as “a summary” of the report’s contents, in which he issued the opinion (stated as fact) that the special counsel’s findings demonstrated no collusion by the president and his 2016 campaign team with the Russian government in its interference in the general elections, nor did they demonstrate any attempt by the president to obstruct justice by seeking to squelch an investigation into Russian interference and Trump-team collusion with it.

 - The government pushed this narrative with the president calling the report a “complete and total exoneration” and repeating the words “no collusion, no obstruction” ad nauseam following publication of the attorney general’s four-page tone-setting message.

 - On March 27, Special Counsel Mueller is reported to have written to Barr protesting the attorney general’s roll-out of the report. A long-time acquaintance of Barr’s, Mueller pulled no punches. The fact alone that the special counsel wrote a memo to Barr is a very big deal, since Robert Mueller’s sound reputation as one of the last true “boy scouts” in Washington would have precluded any interference with the attorney general’s handling of the report that, as per protocol, he turned over to the Department of Justice on conclusion, had Barr properly addressed the investigation’s findings. According to an article in The Washington Post, Mueller challenged Barr’s four-page public statement, complaining that it did not reflect the “context, nature or substance” of the report’s contents.

Mueller - not amused

 - The next day, Barr and Mueller are understood to have had a fifteen-minute telephone conversation. And the day after that, Barr wrote a memo to Congress saying that his four-page letter of March 24 shouldn’t be taken as “a summary” of the report. Clearly, this was because he had been unable to convince Mueller that the letter was anything but an attempt to spin the true findings of the report before it was released to the public. Barr knew full well that the vast majority of the US public would never peruse the details of the 440-page report except as chewed up and digested sound bites on their favorite news media—which would have vastly different interpretations across the spectrum between, say, Fox News and CNN.

 - Barr’s intention to continue to set a pro-Trump tone for release of the Mueller Report was apparent in his stalling of its release for over two weeks, while Trump and surrogates, including himself, used the time to hammer away at the no-collusion-no-obstruction narrative and to fabricate a conspiracy theory that the real idea behind the investigation had been to stage “a coup” to bring down the administration.  

 - On April 10, Barr gave Senate testimony regarding the Mueller Report. During that testimony, he lied when asked if Mueller supported his assessment of the report as per his four-page letter of introduction, saying that he didn’t know if Mueller supported it. Clearly, Mueller had already told him both by memo and probably by phone, that he vigorously disagreed with the attorney general’s interpretation, saying that Barr’s letter had created “critical confusion” among the public.

 - Barr finally delivered the Mueller Report to Congress and the public on April 18. But not without holding a pre-release press conference during which he renewed the no-collusion-no-obstruction narrative as if to further establish a pro-Trump tone among those who would never actually read the report, among whom Trump’s staunchest base could almost certainly be counted.

 - Once the report was released, and despite the attorney general’s redactions, it was obvious to any objective observer that Barr had purposely sought to mislead the public regarding the contents and conclusions. Among other things, it was clear that Mueller and his team had found multiple examples of what could be considered collusion—numerous instances of the Russian government offering its help to the Trump campaign and of Trump surrogates demonstrating enthusiastic interest in that help rather that reporting attempts by a hostile power to influence US elections to the FBI—and that the president did indeed seek to obstruct justice but was at least minimally saved from himself by aides who merely ignored and disobeyed his orders, as well as by current DOJ rules holding that a sitting president couldn’t be indicted. The report further and implicitly invited Congress to investigate and, if politically expedient, impeach the president, stating specifically that the investigation in no way exonerated Trump.

As a side note, it is interesting to recall that Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, faced an uphill battle in his confirmation as attorney general. Sessions was viewed by many as not only a Trump surrogate but also as a long-time political manipulator, a racist bigot and a good ol’ boy with an, at best, ambiguous relationship with the moral high ground. He was expected to be a loyal Trump servant and to do the president’s bidding with no regard for the required impartiality and legal tenets of his office.

Sessions - unlikely adult in the room

Against all odds, however, and no matter what one might think of Jeff Sessions’ civil rights record, he turned out to be a much more mindful and independent attorney general than Barr is proving to be. Sessions incurred Trump’s rage and disfavor by recusing himself with regard to the investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, because he admitted to having had contact with the Russians.

Sessions maintained the independence of the Department of Justice, even despite overwhelming pressure for him to demonstrate loyalty to the president over loyalty to the nation or to resign. Barr, on the contrary, was practically a shoo-in for the post, despite having written a paper shortly before his nomination the basic premise of which was that sitting presidents couldn’t be indicted and that obstruction wasn’t obstruction if the president committed it (a.k.a. the Nixon defense). Politicians on both sides of the aisle saw Barr as a brilliant lawyer and as a man of law. But since then, he has delighted Trump and his base by proving just the opposite, by basically showing himself to be, in contemporary street vernacular, “Trump’s bitch.”

There can be little doubt that Robert Mueller has held himself to a higher standard in his role as special counsel in charge of the investigation into obstruction of justice, Russian interference in the US election process, and possible collusion between American political agents and the Russian government. Barr, meanwhile, has shown himself to be disingenuous and politically prejudiced to the detriment of the very American justice that he is sworn to uphold.

THE MUELLER REPORT—AS I SEE IT

During the highly divisive debate over the past two years to which the Department of Justice investigation into presidential abuse of power, obstruction of justice and conspiracy with a hostile foreign power has given rise, moderates on both sides have cautioned their more radical peers to stop trying to second-guess Special Counsel Robert Mueller and wait for his report. Wait, we have, but the release of the report this week holds out no promise of an end to the discussion. On the contrary, it opens up new questions on which defenders of the two juxtaposed positions regarding the latest US administration are bound to bitterly clash.

When then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Donald Trump in May of 2017 that prosecutor Robert Mueller was being appointed by the DOJ to look into allegations of obstruction and collusion, the president is reported to have said, “This is terrible. This is the end my presidency. I’m fucked!” The best one could surmise about such statements is that the president might have been unwarrantedly paranoid about the legal process within the US justice system—considering his unfamiliarity with the Constitution, Federal law or the truth. But it would appear, rather, that Trump was genuinely worried about how exposed he was to such an investigation because there really was a “there there” under these headings.

The 400-page Mueller report indeed confirms a “there there”, despite Attorney General William Barr’s best efforts to downplay it, to the chagrin of Republicans and Democrats alike. The Republicans, because it implies that the Mueller Report is not an end to a controversy, but just the beginning. The Democrats, because Special Counsel Mueller has effectively punted to them, and how they receive the ball and run with it is likely, one way or another, to affect their performance in the 2020 elections.

I received the report through a friend in New York while it was still hot off the press and have galloped through it since then. I’m a slow and careful reader, so I’m sure that I’ll have more to say on this investigation in the future. But my first look has led me to certain concrete preliminary conclusions that, for what they’re worth, I am sharing below. But one of the main ones is that no matter how carefully the investigation was carried out or how many truths it has uncovered, the GOP is bound, by and large, to continue to contend that it isn’t what you know but what you can prove (or that it’s all about the privileges the office of the president provides), while Democrats will argue that the report reveals exactly what they expected it to reveal and that if the president isn’t indicted it’s only because, under the law, he can’t be.

Here are a few other first impressions I’ve formed in scanning the redacted Mueller Report:

 - The US media, which the president and his base have gone out of their way to insult and try to discredit, have done their job admirably with regard to the misdeeds of the Trump administration and of the president himself. My main reason for arriving at this conclusion is that little if any of the special counsel’s report comes as a surprise to anyone who has been closely following the mainstream news. Papers like the The New York Times and The Washington Post have done a particularly good job of reporting over the past couple of years, as have magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and news sites such as Politico and The Daily Beast, among others.

 - The Mueller Report is not the end of anything, but the beginning. In one passage of the report the special counsel practically extends an invitation to Congress to investigate further and possibly impeach the president. According to legal experts making statements to the media the day after the report’s release, there appear to be more than a dozen potential prosecutions arising from the report. And Mueller has alerted other departments and agencies to them.

 - Since receiving the Mueller Report, Attorney General William Barr has sought to mislead the country about its contents. In his four-page preliminary summary of the report and in the press conference that he held on its release, he carefully trimmed his conclusions to leave out “the bad stuff” and to concentrate on vindication for the president. He even went as far as to give his own opinion with regard to the “obstruction and collusion” issues, with an eye toward prejudicing the GOP base in full favor of Trump and toward undermining the morale of Democrats and some Republicans who were hoping for conclusive evidence of both things. Barr’s ministrations on behalf of Trump were inconsistent, we now know, with the contents of the report.

In this sense, and combined with his unfounded allegations of deep-state “spying” on the 2016 Trump campaign, Barr is showing himself to be precisely what skeptics thought him to be when he took over from former AG Jeff Sessions: a Trump “hired gun”, a legal eagle with clear partiality and at the personal service of Donald Trump, not a true attorney general serving the interests of the people of the United States as a whole. Those who thought Barr was “a straight-shooter” or an impartial purveyor of balanced justice will be disappointed. But those of us who were aware of his past actions in government know that his specialty is obfuscation.

Indeed, it was Barr (along with other colleagues), who was one of those called in as a “cleaner” during investigation of the Iran-Contra affair under the administration of George H.W. Bush. Those investigations were being handled by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. Walsh, like Mueller, was a Republican who had earned a well-deserved reputation for professionalism. The job for which Barr and his associates were brought in was the effective short-circuiting of that probe into “conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan administration officials,” which included by then President Bush. And they did their job well, conjuring up ways to suppress evidence, and thus shield top officials like Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger—co-defendant along with six others in the investigation— and, indeed, Presidents Reagan and Bush. Bush would eventually issue highly controversial pardons to the seven defendants, thus effectively halting Walsh’s probe and the legal jeopardy to which he and Reagan were exposed in its tracks.

- The Mueller report could not establish that the Trump electoral campaign directly colluded with the Russian government to subvert the 2016 presidential elections so as to swing them in favor of Trump. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. The report indicates that the Russians repeatedly reached out to the Trump campaign and that campaign officials including Trump’s son, Don Jr., did indeed show interest in the Russian overtures. This in itself is at least ethically questionable behavior, since a more politically savvy and democratically honest team would have immediately made the candidate aware of what was going on and urged him to go to the FBI to let the agency know that Russian intelligence was seeking to influence the outcome of the election. The report indicated that Don Jr. wasn’t charged for his role in seeking Russian contacts because his testimony demonstrated that he truly wasn’t aware that what he was seeking to do might be a felony. In other words, we can infer from this that Trump’s son was deemed too stupid and ignorant to be charged.

Furthermore, despite the president’s insistence that he was “joking” when, during a campaign rally, he said, referring to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private Internet server while she was secretary of state, “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find 30,000 emails that are missing,” the report indicates that it wasn’t more than five hours until Russian agents were at work seeking to hack their way into the computers of Hillary Clinton and, eventually, the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

 - There was indeed, according to the report, Russian intervention in the 2016 elections. It led to the Mueller team’s indictment of a dozen Russian military intelligence agents. Collusion or no, this is a topic of grave concern to the country’s security, and one that is getting way too little attention, mainly because if the president admits that Russian intervention in US domestic affairs is a major problem that requires immediate action, it will be a tacit admission that his performance in the popular vote, which he lost by nearly three million votes, may have been even worse than at first believed.

 - The Mueller Report does not say, as the president and AG Barr have sought to convince the public, that there was no obstruction and/or attempted obstruction of justice on the part of Trump. It merely says that Department of Justice guidelines dictate that no sitting president can be indicted. If not, independent legal experts indicate, there are at least eleven examples of attempted obstruction with which Trump could be charged. And former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told CNN that under federal law, attempted obstruction is the same as obstruction because it indicates a willingness to subvert and influence the outcome of legal proceedings.

 - Which brings me to a bottom-line conclusion of the report: namely, that, thanks to the adults in the room among Trump’s team and the GOP, the system worked to keep the president somewhat more in check than he otherwise would have been, particularly as regards obstruction of justice. What can be inferred from Mueller’s report is that collusion was avoided and obstruction contained because a number of Trump team members disobeyed Trump’s orders. In other words, they saved Trump from himself, and in the process, preserved the rule of law. The highest-profile case of this was seen in testimony by former White House Counsel Don McGahn whose lengthy presentation before investigators provided major insight into a paranoid and dysfunctional administration in which he consistently stood up to the president to keep him from breaking the law or getting others to do so.

The importance of McGahn’s testimony before the Mueller investigation team is clear from the fact that the president is now railing against the former White House counsel, saying that McGahn painted a distorted picture of the Trump administration. It is more likely, however, because McGahn was right on the money that he is now a target of the president’s rage.  As an unnamed White House source told The Washington Post, “If anything, Don (McGahn) saved this presidency from the president. If Don had actually gone through with what the president wanted, you would have had a constitutional crisis. The president’s ego is hurt, but he’s still here.”