AN ATTEMPTED COUP

 

This afternoon, I became aware that Donald Trump’s attempt to burn to the ground the democracy he couldn’t dominate had reached a new and ever more incendiary stage. Word was that there were nationwide protests around public buildings by irate die-hard Trump supporters. Even in my own small hometown in Ohio, folks were asking each other on-line what was going on, that “people carrying flags” were circling the county courthouse.

Inciting insurrection

Just after that, I became aware that there were “massive protests” at the Capitol Building in Washington DC. But as I speed-read numerous reports and watched live coverage, I quickly realized that the “protests” were much more than that. The Capitol was under siege. Rioters (not protesters) had clashed with undermanned federal police officers and had not only managed to enter the Capitol by had also made it to the doors of the two chambers and engaged in standoffs with law enforcement. The security of Congress, in other words, had been completely overrun and police had ended up with their backs to the doors of the Senate and House, trying desperately to keep Trumpsters from pushing through. At least one person, a woman, was shot and critically wounded during the standoff and at least six other people, including one police officer, had to be hospitalized.

Inside those chambers, voting to certify the Electoral College results had to be suspended as members of Congress and their staff were forced to shelter in place in the face of a major national security breach. Vice-President Mike Pence eventually ordered the Senate evacuated and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi requested National Guard assistance to clear the Capitol Complex. The entire complex had already been placed on lockdown.

Normally, the president of the United States would have taken national security measures under such grave circumstances and immediately reinforced security with more federal police, the Secret Service, the FBI and/or the National Guard. But in this case the presidency was conspicuous by its absence. Or better said, the occupant of the White House was no longer acting as the president of the United States, but as the leader of a domestic terror organization that had managed to breach national security in his name. That doesn’t mean, however, that he won’t eventually order full-scale security measures, and considering who and what he is—a public official in clear rebellion against the established order—this is further cause for concern about the security of the nation. Some constitutionalists fear that, after inciting insurrection and allowing it to get completely out of control, Trump could then invoke the Insurrection Act and, basically, take over Washington DC using active duty federal troops, and citing the national security breach that he himself has fostered.

Shots fired! Members of Congress shelter in place

Aghast at what he was watching, CNN’s star political anchor, Jake Tapper, correctly said that what we were witnessing was “unprecedented”, that nothing even close to this had happened since the Vietnam War protests, and that those had been peaceful. This was something else. This was, he said, “sedition.”

But he was wrong about that. This was quite clearly insurrection. That is, “a violent uprising against an authority or government.” Sedition had indeed taken place prior to this and was the catalyst that caused it, and the author of that sedition was Donald J. Trump. The insurrectionists had come directly to the Capitol from a Trump rally on the Ellipse, just south of the White House. There, the forty-fifth occupant of the White House addressed the raging hoards of his supporters calling on them to “fight for” him. He encouraged their rage by indicating that they were part of a popular crusade.   

“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical Democrats,” he harangued the crowd. “We will never give up. We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”

The so-called “Save America March” was organized entirely on the basis of Trump’s false claims that he won the election and on his lies regarding “mass voter fraud”, which have been definitively and repeatedly debunked and disproven in more than sixty court cases in favor of Biden. In his rabble-rousing speech, the president-in-rebellion told his hard-core base that elections in “Third World countries” were “more honest” than the one that he lost. “We will not let them silence your voices.” he said.

Seeking to bring populist pressure on the vice-president, whose ceremonial duty under the democratic system is to declare Joe Biden president-elect once congressional certification is completed, Trump told the crowd, “I hope Mike is gonna do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”

Secret Service members, guns drawn in Congress 

That is, of course, utter rubbish, as was his later assertion that “one of the top constitutional lawyers in our country” had informed him that the vice president has “the absolute right” to throw out the election results. Unless Trump considers Rudy “El Loco” Giuliani one of the country’s top constitutional lawyers, no attorney could seriously have told him that, since it is a bare-faced lie. As Mike Pence himself is reported to have told Trump, he has absolutely no legal authority to refuse congressional certification of the president-elect’s clear and proven win.

Trump also lashed out at Georgia Republicans after they lost both senatorial run-offs and, as a result, the Senate passed to Democratic control. The president-in-rebellion called that election process “a setup,” and slammed the current Republican administration in that state as “weak” and “pathetic”.

“We have to primary the hell out of the ones that don’t fight,” Trump raved. “If they do the wrong thing,”—i.e., throw the election—“we should never ever forget (what) they did.”

He also expressed his approval for how his backers had turned out at the airport in Washington to harass Senator Mitt Romney of Utah—sharp critic of the president’s anti-democratic machinations, and the   only member of the GOP who voted in favor of his impeachment conviction—when he flew in for the Electoral College certification vote. “I wonder if he enjoyed his flight in,” Trump scoffed to cheers from his fans.

As if all of his previous inflammatory rhetoric hadn’t been sufficient, it was the president himself who urged his by now enraged supporters—reportedly including elements of the Proud Boys and other violent ad hoc “militias”—to march from there to the Capitol, so as to “give our Republicans the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Long Trump’s “partner in crime” in defying democracy during his last four years as Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell delivered a belatedly impassioned speech against Trump’s effort to overturn the election results, while Trump rioters clashed with law enforcement officers outside the Capitol, before they managed to breach the building’s security and storm inside.

If history is honest, what happened—indeed, what is happening—today and what has happened over the course of the two and a half months since the November presidential election, will be recalled for what it is. Not the whims of an unstable president. Not the ravings of a lunatic who was never fit to serve. Not even one man’s delusional efforts to legally overturn voting results because, narcissist that he was, he simply couldn’t understand how he could possibly have lost.

If honesty and objectivity reign, these incidents will be recorded and remembered as the seditious attempt by a sitting president of the United States to incite insurrection and to stage a populist coup d’état. An attempt that, no matter how unsuccessful it may ultimately be, is treasonous, and has succeeded in disrupting the business of government and in breaching national security in one of the most security-sensitive venues in the entire country.

 

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA...

 

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

                                                        —Charlie Daniels—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

GO SELL CRAZY SOMEPLACE ELSE, THIS IS A DEMOCRACY

None but a handful of congressional Republicans has had the guts to speak up and tell the would-be emperor he’s through. And the ones who have timidly, almost apologetically, faced the fact publicly that Joe Biden will be president in less than a month from now have had to confront a maelstrom of Trumpian and Trump-surrogate attacks. It is a shocking affront to democracy that called for someone at the top of the GOP food-chain to speak out unequivocally.

And someone did: GOP propagandist and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who enthusiastically endorsed the forty-fifth president with every major medium in his holdings, including Fox News, has called out would-be autocrat Trump in no uncertain terms through one of his most high-profile tabloids, the New York Post.  From then to now, 2016-2020, Murdoch's almost obscenely Trumpian GOP-partisan paper is telling the president, enough with the bat-shit crazy antics.  

Quoth the NY Post:

Mr. President, it’s time to end this dark charade.

We’re one week away from an enormously important moment for the next four years of our country.

On Jan. 5, two runoff races in Georgia will determine which party will control the Senate — whether Joe Biden will have a rubber stamp or a much-needed check on his agenda.

Unfortunately, you’re obsessed with the next day, Jan. 6, when Congress will, in a pro forma action, certify the Electoral College vote. You have tweeted that, as long as Republicans have “courage”, they can overturn the results and give you four more years in office.

In other words, you’re cheering for an undemocratic coup.

You had every right to investigate the election. But let’s be clear: Those efforts have found nothing. To take just two examples: Your campaign paid $3 million for a recount in two Wisconsin counties, and you lost by 87 more votes. Georgia did two recounts of the state, each time affirming Biden’s win. These ballots were counted by hand, which alone debunks the claims of a Venezuelan vote-manipulating Kraken conspiracy.

Sidney Powell is a crazy person. Michael Flynn suggesting martial law is tantamount to treason. It is shameful...

Isn't it about time Trump and his foaming-at-the-mouth followers listened? And isn’t it about time the GOP grew a backbone and took back the party from Trumper conspiracy theorists and far-right mad dogs?

Time to choose: Embrace democracy or share Trump’s shameful “legacy” of attempting to deny the will of the people and instate an authoritarian regime. You are either with him in this final display of sociopathic narcissism and megalomania, or you are against him and support democracy and the Constitution of the United States.

You can’t have it both ways.

 

THE DEFINITION OF SEDITION

Question of the day: How much more flagrant do the actions of Donald Trump and his entourage have to become before there is a general admission on the part of Americans, and especially among all of the country’s remaining small-d democrats on either side of the aisle in Congress (not just Mitt Romney), that the forty-fifth president is, and always has been, a would-be autocrat? And that it is only thanks to the continued institutional integrity of the US Supreme Court, of the federal and state judicial systems, of state election boards, and of the Armed Forces of the United States that his presidency has not spelled the end of America’s two-hundred-fifty-year experiment in democracy.

We now know—his refusal to accept the legitimate outcome of national elections confirms it—that Donald Trump wasn’t kidding, as his apologists always tried to claim, when he expressed his admiration for dictators from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un, or when he heralded Chinese strongman Xi Jinping’s appointment as president-for-life by saying, “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot here someday,” or when he was campaigning for a chance at a second term and quipped that he was already thinking about a third. Donald Trump is a would-be autocrat who unrealistically (surrealistically) continues to refuse to believe that the people of the United States have refused him four more years after his disastrous first four..

And before I take up the subject of Team Trump’s latest anti-American machinations, I think it would be relevant to define the word SEDITION: Overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or rebellion against, established authority.

Please bear this definition in mind.

This past weekend there were credible reports from several major mainstream investigative news sources, who quoted executive staff members, regarding a meeting at the White House in which the outgoing (and trying desperately not to) forty-fifth president of the United States got together with at least two high-profile conspiracy theorists who are advocating “limited martial law” as a means of “overturning November’s election results”. One of these subversives—let’s be honest, there’s no other name for them—to whom Trump gave audience is convicted (and presidentially pardoned) felon General Michael Flynn, who, having gotten his get-out-of-jail-free card from the president, is now bent on launching a coup to show his gratitude.  The other is lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who basically just seems to be bat-shit crazy and thinks that former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez—who has been dead for seven years—somehow reached out from the grave to mess with American voting machines in the last election. Her delusions are so extreme that even the president’s zany attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani side-lined her from the legal team that has been leading Trump’s baseless and futile court efforts to overturn the election results. She too is espousing the martial law idea.

Flynn explained his theory further this weekend, saying that martial law was nothing new, that it had been declared dozens of times in US history. He’s right. But it has always, with the exception of the Civil War, been declared on a limited basis under highly unusual and dangerous circumstances, such as not only the Civil War, but also the Great Chicago Fire, earthquakes and other grave natural emergencies, rampant rioting and looting, uncontrollable racial violence, briefly during events surrounding Nine-Eleven, etc. It has never been declared because a sitting president and his party couldn’t deal emotionally with losing an election. In the federal legal code, martial law has been limited by several court decisions handed down between the Civil War and World War II, including the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits involvement of the military in domestic law, except when approved by Congress.

Michael Flynn’s suggestion, then, is tantamount to sedition, since it calls for inappropriate use of presidential powers to promote insurrection against the established order. And it should be considered a violation of his oath to defend the Constitution, as a retired general officer in the US Army—a rank which, somehow, despite his disgraceful performance to date and his conviction for felonious lying to the federal authorities—he has managed to retain.

Powell, for her part, continues to maintain her groundless accusations about rigged voting machines in swing states (apparently everything worked just fine in the states where Trump won)—despite assurances by election officials, governors and attorneys general from both parties that results have been checked and double-checked—and in the case of Georgia, a GOP-governed state, triple-checked—and that there are no widespread, systematic or systemic irregularities to report. This has been reconfirmed in at least sixty court cases, many brought in swing states by the legal team of which Powell formed part, and all brought by Trump-or-die supporters at the president’s behest, as well as two cases taken to and flat-out rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States. Still, for no other reason than her own gut-lunacy Powell is pushing for the president to take Flynn up on his martial law proposal so that she can get the voting machines confiscated and have a look at them—to see if the ghost of Chávez is haunting them, perhaps?

What both Flynn and Powell—and indeed the president—are saying is, “You people in the swing states that voted for Biden didn’t vote right. So we want to take over your states by military force and oblige you to vote again...and again...and again, until Trump wins. Why? Because we don’t like Biden and want Trump to keep on being president. Your choice and US democracy be damned! And the majority of the GOP’s members are either keeping their mouths shut in the face of this inexcusably seditious behavior or they are actively participating in it.

So Flynn and Powell are not the only two conspiracy theorists—if you don’t count the president—seeking to use the power of the presidency to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Not by a longshot. Another of the more prominent ones at a local level who has nevertheless gone viral nationally, is Amanda Chase. Chase is a member of the Virginia Senate who aspires to becoming governor of the state.

But that’s not what Chase is best known for—or perhaps “notorious” would be a more appropriate term. Two years ago, she walked into the Virginia Senate, open-packing a loaded .38 revolver. And she was wearing it on her hip while presenting draft legislation to a State Senate committee. Asked why she was carrying a loaded gun to the Legislature, she said it was to act as “a deterrent for over-exuberant folks.”

Chase has also repeatedly posed for photographs with political militant and gunman Antonio Lamotta, who is a promoter of the conspiracy-theory crazies of QAnon. It should be noted that Lamotta, who Amanda Chase seems to admire and want to emulate, was arrested in Philadelphia and charged with a third-degree felony last month, shortly after the general election, for being caught carrying several pistols, an AR-15 assault rifle, and over 150 rounds of ammunition without a valid Pennsylvania firearms permit.

Recently, Chase herself was seen toting an AR-15 at port arms while at a far-right, white supremacist, political rally where she was surrounded by Boogaloo Boys. The Boogaloo Boys, as you may remember, emerged last year from the murky undergrowth of extremist fringe sociopaths that the Trump era has spawned, or at least encouraged. They are sometimes referred to as a militia (the National Guard is a militia, this is just another tribe of would-be felons), but are actually a loosely organized far-right, anti-government, and extremist political group, better described as domestic terrorists.

Bearing her past behavior in mind, it should come as no surprise that Chase last week also called on Trump to impose martial law in her state, making the patently false claim that there was “extensive fraud here in Virginia” and that Democrats had “cheated to win.” Her statement drew immediate condemnation from Republican lawmakers and former lawmakers including Denver Riggleman, Barbara Comstock and David Ramadan. Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Kirk Cox called her statements “absurd and dangerous”, and Virginia Democratic Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton said Chase was “unhinged”.

Sidney Powell has been spreading her ridiculous fantasies to anyone who wants to hear them in Trumpland, apparently having taken a real shine to grabbing a mic and standing up in front of a (maskless, non-socially-distanced) crowd and, in doing so, actually manages to make Rudy Giuliani look marginally sane. Flynn, for his part, has been seen protesting outside of the Supreme Court with QAnon members and other extremist lunatics, as if their un-righteous outrage could change the views of the highest court in the land, whose decisions are founded on the rule of law and, hence, final, since there is no higher court to appeal to.

Meanwhile, in Congress there’s a covey of coup-mongers who say they may try and throw a monkey wrench into the transition when the
Legislature convenes on January 6^th, by seeking a vote on whether to accept or reject the Electoral College’s final count. What do they hope to accomplish when Biden hammered Trump by a margin of seventy-four electors? Well, a good “what’s-in-it-for-me” indicator came from former jock and college football coach, now-Senator Tommy Tuberville, who must be missing his former days of gladiator glory in the stadium and is looking for a new Caesar to impress, since, according to Trump, Tommy Tuberville credited the president with making him “the most popular politician in the United States.” (Careful there, Tommy, The Don doesn’t like being outshined). Which is why Tuberville now appears willing to call for a vote on the EC count, and, in doing so, go against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who has way-belatedly accepted President-elect Biden’s legitimate win and has asked his colleagues to help move the country smoothly to the inauguration.

Everybody wants something from Trump in return for their futile attempts to overturn the elections. But mostly they want to avoid being pilloried by him on Twitter, or having him give them a thumbs-down so that his base feeds them to the lions at the polls—this last being the case of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the run-offs that they must still face in Georgia.

In the lower house, it’s Republican Representative Mo Brooks who is leading a plot to reject Biden's Electoral College victory. The congressman has said he wants to reject the electoral votes certified by states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania that had what he calls “flawed election systems” a notion already quashed by the Supreme Court and dozens of lower courts.

Republican Representative Riggleman, whom I mentioned earlier, had pretty much the same appraisal of all of this as I did in describing Sidney Powell, saying that “the technical term for it is bat-shit crazy.” Trump’s own former National Security Advisor John Bolton—who is historically and famously known as a right-wing hawk but who, in the era of Trump sounds moderate (or at least sane) by comparison—termed the call for martial law by Flynn and those including the president who have actually listened to him instead of laughing him out of the room, “appalling” and “unprecedented”, as was the president’s continued refusal to accept the reality of his loss.

The most outspoken GOP member by far has been Republican Senator Mitt Romney who called these latest flirtations with authoritarianism “really sad” and “embarrassing”. Romney said that just when the president could have been taking one last big victory lap for the speed with which the country had come up with two vaccines with which to fight the COVID-19 epidemic, he is instead hunkered down denying the results of a free and fair election. Said Romney, “He could be championing this story (about the vaccines) but instead he’s leaving Washington with conspiracy theories and things so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their heads, wondering what in the world has gotten into this man. I think that is unfortunate because he has more accomplishments than this last chapter suggests he is going to be known for.”

And Romney is right. Rather than being known for the success of Warp Speed, Trump will go down in history as the president who encouraged the people to deny the science, a denial which has been the direct cause for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. And given the course so far of his last seventy days in office, he will also be known as the first leader in US history to abuse presidential power and actively seek to overthrow democracy and disenfranchise the American voter. 

Try as I might to keep my sense of humor and make light of the insanity in the grip of which the United States continues to find itself, despite the fact that the election is over, certified state by state and re-certified by the overwhelming results of the Electoral College vote, the continued denial in which the president and his cohorts are submersed is worthy of genuine concern. Particularly since, having run out of legitimate legal options through which to try and build a case for which he has absolutely no corroborating evidence, he has now surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists, coup-mongers, violent fringe groups and political opportunists who are seeking to ride on his coattails and, no matter what the cost to the country, to grab some of the dissipating populist power than he once clearly commanded.

What we should pay attention to here is the euphemistic language being used to describe what we are witnessing. What Trump and his now unadulterated far-right fringe entourage are trying to do can no longer be called “seeking to overturn the election results.” After a legitimate, free, fair and duly certified elections and with Inauguration Day less than a month off, the current machinations in the Trump camp are a blatant attempt to overthrow the established order in the United States of America. If the same thing were happening in any African or Latin American nation, no one would think twice about calling it what it is: an attempted overthrow, in short, an attempted coup d’état.

Many people are thinking that it doesn’t really matter. That it will soon be over. That Trump is history. That a new dawn is coming in which everyone will come to his or her senses and say, we have to start mending our fences and healing the divisions. We have to make amends, realize that what has happened here is grave and that it must be avoided in the future. We have to start working together across the aisle and throughout the community for the good of America.

But a great deal has been broken over the course of the past four years—and of the four years before that. And once the ideals and principles of a democracy have been shattered, it is a monumental task to put them back together again, a task that requires selfless and eager cooperation. In a United States in which people no longer see each other as Americans first and foremost but where they tend to divide sharply between right and left, it’s hard to see that happening any time soon. But hopefully it eventually will.

In the end, this will either be seen merely as one of the darkest chapters in the political history of the United States that is now, thankfully, coming to an end, or it will be seen as when “the new normal” began and political hatred and in-fighting destroyed a two and a half-century-old democracy, the greatest the world had ever known.          

 

TIME TO FESS UP...

 

QUID PRO QUO...

 

REALITY

 

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

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

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

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

US democracy is under imminent domestic threat. The once unthinkable is happening under our noses. There is election interference and the threat is coming, not from Russia, China or Iran, but from the most imponderable of sources—the forty-fifth president of the United States and the highest offices of his administration. They are, in essence, seeking to orchestrate a virtual coup and to spark civil insurrection by creating a false scenario that they are maintaining with lies, innuendo and false testimony.

The threat is very real, although so far the country’s judicial system—not its Department of “Justice”—is staunchly resisting the attempt. It is only a matter of time until we see which of the two forces will win out, since “all the president’s men” in Congress are complicit in this fabrication. But in the meantime, every true small-d democrat needs to stand up and be counted, or, failing that, admit—whether internally or overtly—that he or she is on the side of autocratic rule.

This is not a drill.

Up until the recent intervention of Attorney General William Barr in the president’s delusional attempt to deny reality and pretend that he has even a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the current election, the futile actions being taken by the Trump administration’s campaign team were legal, if questionable in their legitimacy. If, on a county by county level, the Trump campaign team had reasonable doubts—the key word here being “reasonable”—about this or that ballot count, then, under the law, they could legally take those doubts to the appropriate court. They have done this multiple times already, and have overwhelmingly had their cases judicially dismissed for lack of any legal merit whatsoever. They have a right to persist as long as Judges accept hearing their filings. But the courts, despite uncommon pressure from the administration and the GOP, are doing their job and their patriotic duty to democracy by demanding facts, not hearsay. As in the case of a Trump filing that quoted a postal worker as claiming he had been pressured to hold up delivery of probable GOP-voted ballots, only to have the “witness” recant once he was standing tall before the court.

While legal, such attorney interventions have been a clear slap in the face to Democratic and Republican election officials alike, who have done a phenomenal job in their role as the last line of defense for democracy, by ensuring absolute transparency and meticulous ballot-counting in one of the most contentious elections of all time. Nor have they been concerned about the questions that the Trump campaign legal team has posed, standing by the clarity of both the polling procedures and the count, and assuring the public that results can be questioned as often as the candidates like, but will be what they are, because they are authentic and Trump has lost the race by a very decisive margin.

That margin is currently predicted by reliable poll-watchers to be no less than five million popular votes and, perhaps, as many as seventy or more electoral votes. In other words, the 2020 election is all over but the gnashing of teeth and bawling for Team Trump. And Donald Trump’s refusal to concede (as every other candidate in recent memory has done by this point) and the GOP’s continued tolerance of this puerile, narcissistic presidential whim, promise to go down in election history as a profound embarrassment for the Republican Party and as a potential source of very real shame for American democracy. Especially since the US is not some remote, inconsequential nation whose political comings and goings can pass totally unnoticed, but a powerful country once looked up to as the leader of the free world, but increasingly viewed under the influence of the Trump phenomenon as a tin-pot banana republic hiding behind First World cosmetics.

That perception was vastly augmented this week when the administration’s all-out effort to circle its wagons and refuse to surrender to the overwhelming tide of democratic outpouring meandered out of the territory of illegitimacy and into the realm of questionable legality. This happened when Attorney General William Barr cavalierly overlooked his appointed role as overseer of the rule of law in America and—as he has already done on no few occasions since taking office—used the sobering power of his post and taxpayer dollars to launch a partisan defense of the Trump campaign in detriment to the will of more than seventy-five million American voters. Never before in the history of the United States, has an attorney general abused his power in this way, by preemptively announcing the launching of probes into alleged election irregularities prior to final and official certification of the election results. Particularly on the basis of such factually thin accusations and hearsay.

And while the attorney general was busy aiding and abetting Trump in his ruse to call the validity of the election into question, the president himself was making moves unmistakably similar to those that I’ve witnessed as a foreign correspondent in no few coup attempts in other parts of the world. A lame duck with only two months to go before the democratically inevitable transfer of power—for the first time in American history we have doubts about how peaceful it will be—the president, in his role as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, is shaking up the hierarchy at the Pentagon. Some news sources inside the military have referred to “the beheadings” that have taken place this week, in which the president has replaced career higher-ups with Trump loyalists.

And Trump has further doubled down by making sure that, so far, the Biden transition team has received no sign that it will be given access to data, intelligence and procedures to which it must be made privy before taking office in January. The idea being, why should they when neither the president nor his nefarious enablers will admit that Biden has won. Fortunately, Biden’s forty-seven years in public service and eight years as the nation’s vice-president—one of the most engaged vice-presidents in history—make him less vulnerable to these stumbling blocks than a less experienced president-elect would be. But it is still an astonishing attack on American ideals and traditions, as well as on the spirit of the Transition Act of 1963.

And yet, there can be no sincere denying that Biden has won. Indeed, specialized voting statistics experts estimate that, in an election that garnered massive turnout, when the last vote is counted, President-elect Biden will have won by the largest margin of any challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Again, if this sort of thing were happening in any country but the United States of America, US intelligence would be observing it as an impending coup d’état.

But let’s return to Attorney General Barr, who has edged out even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the ad hoc post of Enabler in Chief. Shortly prior to the election, there were those who sought to defend the AG’s restraint. Not only had he incurred Trump’s fury by telling the press that he didn’t figure the Durham Investigation would turn up any prosecutable wrongdoing against former President Obama or former Vice-President Biden in the 2016 election, or with regard to a probe into the activities of Biden’s son Hunter, but he also refused to open a separate Justice Department probe into the Bidens when the president promised his base that there would be one.

Earlier this week, however, Barr’s Trumpian restraint ended when he issued a memorandum providing authorization for a federal probe into President Trump’s clearly and provably false claims of “widespread nationwide voter fraud”. Trump’s fevered ego, which has never been able to accept defeat, thus got a booster shot of steroid-like vigor from none other than the country’s chief law enforcement officer, who, through his memo, gave credence to the president’s absurd claims that, for instance, anti-GOP voter fraud had been perpetrated with the acquiescence of the Republican secretary of state in Georgia and with that of the Republican city commissioner of Philadelphia, based entirely on the fact that the incumbent was losing in both places. In Trump’s specious “logic”, how on earth could a Democrat win where a Republican was in charge of the vote? 

All Barr had to do was tell his boss that it happened because the US is a democracy and election results are a fact, not a whim. But instead, he decided to use taxpayer dollars to indulge the president’s hissy fit, not even bothering to wait for final certification of the election outcome or for lower court decisions regarding any and all claims of possible fraud. As such, the AG used his powerful office, which is supposed to serve and protect the interests of every American, as a key piece in a conspiracy theory created and perpetuated by the president and his corrupt enablers at the highest levels of the GOP.

As a result, Richard Pilger, the Justice Department official charged with overseeing all investigations into election crimes, resigned his post on the spot. “Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote in an internal office message, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” His resignation was accompanied by a letter of protest signed by some one thousand six hundred DOJ attorneys. Pilger’s  reasons for resigning and for the attorneys’ protest were clearly based on the fact that Barr’s memo ran counter to longstanding Justice Department best practices that include never investigating election fraud until local officials have completed all counting and certified the vote. The whole idea behind this practice is to prevent any federal administration’s bringing pressure to bear on local officials as a means of changing the outcome of an election. The fact that Barr is doing precisely that appears to make his motives crystal clear. 

Barr’s move comes against a murky background in which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—with whom the AG met the same day that he issued his memo—defended incumbent Trump’s supposed right to challenge the election totals even as they are still being counted. McConnell is clearly, like the president, subordinating what is best for the United States to his own political ambitions. He thinks he needs the unbroken support of the Trump base in order to maintain a Republican majority in the Senate during run-offs set for January 5, and that, to him, is worth burning the institution of American democracy to the ground. The theory being applied by both Trump and his surrogates is the same one that drove the Nazis rise to power in Germany in the nineteen-thirties: namely, that if you tell a big lie often enough, long enough and loud enough, it will eventually gain acceptance as “truth” among the masses.

Prior to McConnell’s tribute to his Caesar, in this fateful week for American democracy, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper with whom he has been on the outs ever since Esper rightly refused to obey a call from the president to deploy US troops against citizens protesting the George Floyd murder on the streets of American cities. There are rumors that “the beheadings” might continue, with CIA Director Gina Haspel’s and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s potentially being the next ones in line to roll.

Since Election Day, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the president of the United States has gone full-blown, bat-shit crazy, raising the imminent-danger level of his previous conspiracy theories and unmitigated prevarication to that of a national security risk. Especially since it is playing on the paranoia of the most violent fringes of his base supporters, to the point that a scenario of armed civil insurrection is not at all unimaginable. The president is, in effect, seeking, no matter how insane it may seem, to ignore the clear outcome of a valid democratic election and to install an autocratic regime in the United States of America. And while this sci-fi-like phenomenon of a rogue president trying to overthrow American democracy should have always at least been a contingency we needed to contemplate, what never should have been in the cards was the adherence of any of the country’s other institutions to one man’s insane ambitions. But here we are...  

As for my own reaction to all of this, I’ve been a journalist, political observer, researcher and commentator most of my adult life and, at age seventy, have never before witnessed the astonishing phenomenon currently unfolding in the US in any major democracy on earth. That it is taking place in my own country which, like many other people worldwide, I have always seen as one of the greatest democracies on earth, and indeed as the founder of modern democracy as the world knows it, is a source of unfathomable pain and sadness to me.

I continue to respect the ideas and ideals of conservatives, liberals, libertarians, democratic socialists and many other shades of political philosophy in between. And as always, I am ever open to the lively exchange of ideas and to the democratic idea of finding a middle ground on which we can all work together for the common good. But I no longer consider Trumpism to fall within these boundaries.

The fact that anyone who fervently believes in democracy might have voted for Trump in 2016, and even again in 2020, might challenge my own sense of suspension of disbelief, but I will, to paraphrase Voltaire, “defend to the death” their right to vote for the legal candidate of their choice. But what I can no longer abide is anyone’s attempted defense of President Trump’s move to discredit a properly conducted election, his refusal to accept the proven results and concede the victory of his rival in the best American spirit of a peaceful and democratic transfer of power, or his clear and continuing attempts to breed false doubts about the election and to incite sedition and potential violence as a means of rejecting the voice of democracy and illegally and illegitimately maintaining his grip on power.

Nor can I any longer tolerate anyone’s claim that this is an election like any other or that Donald Trump was ever “just another president”. His consistent rejection and/or subversion of every notion of American tradition and ideals, of everything that has ever been right or decent or fair about the American constitutional system renders him, to my mind, incomparable not only to his Democratic predecessor, but also to former Republican presidents including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and even Richard M. Nixon, all of whom served, in their own way, in the name of the American people and respecting the authority and sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Donald Trump is not an outlier. He is a wrecker and destroyer whose actions only serve his own ambitious purposes. Be forewarned that I, for one, will no longer tolerate the perpetuation of his lies as “alternative truth” or his autocratic designs as “politics as usual”. This election is “the hill I will die on” for American democracy.