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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

TIME TO FESS UP...

 

STRAINING DEMOCRACY TO THE LIMIT

 

 The United States judiciary has emerged as the only one of the three branches of government to stand as the last line of defense against tyranny. While many observers have dubbed “a clown show” the blatant attempts of the Trump-led GOP to steal this past November’s election from the American people—while falsely claiming that the Democrats were doing the same—in terms of the assault on democracy that it has represented, the entire process has been serious as a heart attack.

Clearly, the Executive Branch in cahoots with the vast majority of Republican members of the Legislature have been complicit in repeated attempts to thwart the democratic process and scavenge power from wherever they could find it in order to suppress and overturn the results of voting that a heroically honest Trump-appointed member of the Department of Homeland Security described as the most secure election in US history. Even Trump-surrogate Attorney General William Barr, following initial attempts to do his boss’s bidding in seeking dirt with which to invalidate the election process, has had to admit that, in all honesty, there is no there-there—no widespread, systematic voter fraud, no rigged voting software, no “voting dead” or multiple ballots cast by single voters, no anything of import.

Obviously, in Trumpland, where The Big Lie is the sole prevailing policy of state, telling the truth cost the DHS’s Christopher Krebs his job and put the attorney general in the hot seat. But Krebs is now a hero among small-d democrats, and perhaps Barr can go home after all this without having entirely bled-out every last shred of his reputation on the sacrificial altar of Trumpism.

Trumpland, where telling the truth is heroism

Just before the weekend this past week the Supreme Court again put a stop to a bogus claim of election irregularities entered by team Trump, this time through the State of Texas, whose attorney general, Ken Paxton, allowed the Lone Star State to be used as a Trumpian shill by filing a baseless claim of unconstitutionality against election processes in four swing states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It is, perhaps, worth noting that Attorney General Paxton is currently reported to be under FBI investigation for allegedly placing the power of his office at the service of a political donor. This report is what has been giving rise to speculation that he might have also placed himself at Trump’s disposal to whip up a last-ditch spurious case to bring before the Supreme Court so as to try and assure himself of a slot on the president’s good-bye pardon list. If so, it was a cheap vow he made to the president, since legal observers tended to agree from the outset that the Texas brief would never fly in the US Supreme Court, because Texas had no authority to question election laws in other states.

Barr...heading home

In its rejection of the Texas presentation, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case on the grounds that, “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.” That was the extent of the Court’s brief unsigned opinion, which spoke louder with what it didn’t say than what it did, since the dismissal was brief, dry and definitive—devastatingly so, because it didn’t even permit the case to be filed, let alone heard. Only two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, questioned, not the substance but the form of the Court’s refusal to hear the case. They indicated that it was their understanding that the Supreme Court could not refuse to permit the filing of a complaint by one state against another on its docket, but added that if it had indeed been filed, they too would have voted to refuse to hear it on the grounds stated by the Court as a whole.

This was not, as you may know, the first time that the Supreme Court basically told Trump and his zany surrogates to go pound salt. The other filing was sponsored by Trump-or-bust Congressman Mike Kelly against his home state, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for supposedly violating its own election laws. That time, earlier this month, the Court responded with a terse one-line refusal: “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”

Whatever the headings placed on these two attempts at filing with the Supreme Court as a ruse to shove a stick into the spokes of presidential transition, a proper choice to title them would have been “Trump v America” or “Trump v Democracy”. No matter how much we may make light of Team Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s dye-dripping meltdown, or the insane ravings of that legal team’s former member Sidney Powell about long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez’s having something to do with sabotaging the 2020 US elections, there is no way to stress enough how serious and tragic the administration’s multiple attempts to spuriously invalidate the final outcome—which could not have been clearer or more transparent—really are. Because, make no mistake, one state seeking to violate the states rights of four other states by attempting to dictate how they should run their elections, for the sole purpose of overturning free and fair voting results, in order to favor the defeated incumbent over the victorious challenger, couldn’t be more un-American. Nor could there be any more direct assault on democracy.

Rudy...meltdown

Texas (or at least its attorney general) was, quite obviously, acting as a surrogate for the forty-fifth president, whose wounded inner-child psyche can’t believe—privileged  enfant terrible that he has always fancied himself—that he could actually lose and is attempting to make the founding principles of American democracy pay the price for his self-righteous disappointment.

The only thing that could be worse than seeing the final deterioration of a mentally unstable (and I’m being kind here) US president is to see a significant number of other representatives of the American people indulging or, indeed, buying into a rogue leader’s madness. And that, sadly, tragically, devastatingly, is precisely what we are witnessing. As such, what we are also witnessing is, perhaps, the second worse threat to American democracy in the history of the United States.

Sidney...space cadet

This is not merely my own assessment, but that of journalist and historian Jon Meacham as well. Meacham, you may recall, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House. He is also the historian whom the Bush family chose to write the authorized and definitive biography of George H.W. Bush, entitled Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Some see Meacham as a conservative, others as a liberal. He himself has been quoted as saying, “I’m not really sure where the split is between liberal and conservative. I tend to write about people who you would think the right would be very interested in, but if I meet [readers] they’re probably on the left. Does that make sense? The Andrew Jackson book—you’d think that would be Republican, but if I walk into a bookstore somewhere, seventy percent of the crowd is going to be ‘NPR people’.”

Perhaps that’s because the definition of the right in America has suffered a quantum leap from the original meaning of “liberal democracy” toward the ever tighter embracing of authoritarian principles on the right. And old-time center-right conservatives like Meacham (indeed, like Dwight Eisenhower as well, I’m convinced) are now being seen more and more by the right as “dangerous leftists”.

Meacham...searching for "better angels"

Meacham’s most recent historical work is The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. He published the book in 2018, but even then, he saw the writing on the wall. Donald Trump was becoming ever more toxic for American unity and, indeed, for American democracy. But in his historical writings, Meacham tends to be an optimist, and, above all, to believe in the inviolability of American principles. Hence the title, which refers to a quote by Abraham Lincoln at the time of the Civil War.

To wit: “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

In that book, Meacham posited, mid-way through the Trump presidency, that the climate of partisan fury we were witnessing was not new. He sought to show that what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day, despite the horrors of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era and because of the struggles and sacrifice of the earliest Suffragettes, the stubborn will of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and John Lewis, and the humanity of someone like Eleanor Roosevelt. In The Soul of America, he looks at how American democracy has survived—thanks to the general quality of its leadership and the patriotic spirit of its people—such turning points as the Civil War, the so-called Lost Cause, the backlash against immigrants during World War I, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the demagoguery of the far-right America First movement in the run-up to World War II, the lawless reigns of political bosses like Huey Long, and the witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the nineteen-forties and fifties. In a quote from that book, he says that while things may look gloomy, “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before,” as a result of Lincoln’s “better angels” finding a way to prevail.

But in recent statements, even an American optimist like Meacham is hardly sounding bullish. In a brief interview with CNN late-night host Don Lemon, he recently referred to the GOP as “a party dissociated from reality” as it does the bidding of an off-kilter president who is using its members to try and overturn the results of a free and fair election. He confirmed that what’s happening is unprecedented in American politics and a clear and present danger to democracy. The only comparable phenomenon he could offer was when Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 and eleven states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy.

According to Meacham, what was happening right now—a president and his party seeking to disenfranchise well over half the country and impose a virtually authoritarian regime—was not about two parties debating two opposing sides of an argument. Rather, he said, it was two parties “speaking two entirely different languages.” And Jon Meacham is not wrong. The vast majority of the Republican Party—which should, perhaps, considering the current reality, change its name to the “Trumpian Party”—is speaking the language of authoritarianism, while both large-D and small-d democrats are speaking the language of freedom, equality and democracy.

To believe that the president and his party are, by any stretch of the imagination, posing legitimate questions about the outcome of an election that is now over and decided—except for the formality of the Electoral College vote—is ludicrous. Anyone who still believes that this is anything but a mentally disturbed leader’s attempt to steal the election with the shameful aid of hundreds of GOP politicians is simply in denial.

Days before the election, iconic American intellectual and political observer Noam Chomsky described Trump to an interviewer as “a president who has said if he doesn’t like the outcome of an election, he’ll simply not leave office.” Professor Chomsky went on to say that this imminent potential threat to democracy had been “taken seriously enough that, for example, two high-level, highly respected, retired military officers—one of them very well known, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—actually went to the extent of writing an open letter to General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reminding him of his constitutional duties to send in the American military to remove the President from office if he refuses to leave.”

And clearly, as we now know, both Chomsky and the military were right to consider this contingency, when, having lost more than fifty court actions brought by Team Trump since the election in attempts to overturn the results, only one has been even remotely considered by the various judges to present any validity whatsoever. And yet, Trump and the vast majority of GOP politicians in Congress continue to actively seek to erode confidence in the validity of this election—one might argue to their own detriment in the case of GOP senators and representatives who were on the down-ballot in November and won, since if the ballots were invalid in Trump’s case, they were invalid in theirs as well. But we are living in an era of ruling party lies and magical thinking in which logic plays no part.

Most people are by now convinced that Joe Biden is the president-elect and that he will be sworn in as such next month. The rejection of Texas’s bid to get a Supreme Court hearing and hold up certification of the 2020 election is being seen as the failed last attempt—among myriad others—of the Trump regime to snatch the election out of the hands of American voters. But what do we do with the undeniable fact that not only an administration beholden to Trump, but also dozens upon dozens of elected senators and representatives of the people of the United States have willingly and knowingly been part of a plot to overturn the results of one of the most transparent elections in history? How do we deal with the fact that these politicians, who, if they could have found a way, would have willfully and knowingly undermined democracy and the Constitution of the United States simply to maintain their grip on power, will be remaining in office for at least the coming term with their anti-democratic and, dare I say, un-American ideology accompanying them?

On Monday the Electoral College will vote and, if representative democracy has survived in America, the tragicomedy of errors known as the Trump administration should be officially over. All electors except those from Nebraska and Maine, are bound by state law to cast their votes in accordance with the outcome of the presidential voting results in their states. This should, then, be a mere formality, and, in accordance with certified election results, Joe Biden should receive three-hundred six electoral votes, and Donald Trump two hundred thirty-two, giving President-elect Biden a comfortable win of seventy-four EC votes.

But in the last four years, we’ve become more than accustomed to shocking and unpleasant surprises—violations of American traditions and principles that most of us never would have believed were possible. So while there now seems to be little doubt that the democratic process will survive (thanks almost entirely to American Justice), only time will tell what other outrages we might have to endure from here until January 20, 2021, and beyond. Hopefully, in the new year, all of these machinations will only be like the memory of a four-year nightmare.   

 

QUID PRO QUO...

 

OCD...

 

AN ABSENCE OF DEMOCRATIC RIGOR

 

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

General Mark Milley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance:

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

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

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

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

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The right was sure it could control Hitler

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

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

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

We shall see.    

  

BUSH’S LESSON IN DEMOCRACY FOR A HIJACKED GOP

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

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

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

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