JANUARY SIXTH – A CRITICAL CHAPTER IN US HISTORY

 

January 6, 2025 - election certification

Today is an important day.

No, I don’t mean the day that Congress certifies yet another in our long history of democratic elections. That, though fundamental to America’s democratic process,  is a mere formality. Always has been…Except for once.

No, no, I’m not talking about what was once the mere formality of a peaceful transfer of power. I’m talking about the time that it wasn’t.

Today, then, is the fourth anniversary of the January Sixth Insurrection. That’s how it needs to go down in the history books. Although, it could also very fairly be dubbed The January Sixth Trump Sedition. I mean, when some historian with excellent research skills writes about it many years from now, and recalls it as the point when American democracy began to unravel.

The entrance to the Capitol, January 6, 2025

The president—I’m talking about President Biden; he is still the president even though he seems to be allowing the president-elect to suck up all the oxygen in the room—has mentioned how we should never forget the day that Trump and his crew tried to overturn a free and fair election “and democracy prevailed.” The thing is, it didn’t. Nor did the criminal justice system. Nor, then, did the rule of law.

Granted, today Democrats followed the rules, upheld America’s constitutional  tradition, adhered to democracy. They didn’t stir up trouble, call up swing-state colleagues and pressure them to  “find votes” that didn’t exist. They didn’t  attack Congress, doing millions of dollars in damage and hounding legislators in those sacred halls, threatening to harm or kill them. They didn’t call for their own vice president to be hanged or gang up in a violent mob on overwhelmed Capitol Police with bear spray, fists and clubs, killing one of them and sending one hundred forty others to the hospital, some with very serious injuries. Nor did they bitch and rant that the umpire was blind or that the game was fixed.

Democrats play the game with every ounce of energy they’ve got, and if they lose, they quietly go home, figuring they’ve been licked fair and square. That’s because modern-day Democrats are what their name implies: democrats. They live, advocate and uphold democracy and the rights of the people. They don’t simply use democracy as a meaningless buzzword.

Capitol entrance, January 6, 2021

Meanwhile, Trump-Republicans are becoming ever greater proponents, not of the American Republic imagined by our forefathers, but of what is known as a “banana republic”. Not the dictionary definition for the term banana republic, which is, “a small nation dependent on one crop or the influx of foreign capital.” No, I use the term in its political sense. That is, a badly ruled and corrupt country led by an autocratic or dictatorial government, which pretends to be democratic and to represent the people, while only representing itself.  

So how do I explain the dissonance between that depiction of the soon-to-be-ruling party and the unquestionably democratic process that took place today?  Attempting, as I always do, to be,  in every way, an independent and objective voice, objectivity dictates my bias in favor of anything but MAGA when it comes to democracy, fair play, and the rule of law. And today, democracy, in a certain sense, became its own victimizer, since it was Vice President Kamala Harris’s sad democratic and constitutional duty to certify an election whose winner will, indubitably, undermine the very democracy that, incredibly, returned him to power for a second time.  

The scene inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

When it comes to who is committed to democracy and who isn’t, the proof is in the pudding: On the day of the January Sixth Insurrection, Trump Republicans sought to twist history, to pretend they hadn’t lost when they had, in fact, been trounced. They had taken their case to more than sixty courts, to the Supreme Court (which, despite its Trump bias, refused, on the basis of merit, to hear it), and even to then-President Trump’s own Justice Department, and their false claims of fraud were rejected at every turn.

So MAGA did what banana republicans do—denied they’d lost—denied the truth, in other words—even though they knew they had, and backed their authoritarian leader in mounting a protest that turned into a riot, that turned into a full-blown insurrection, for the purpose of preventing that election from being certified, as if halting certification made it any less true that their candidate lost by an unquestionably large margin. In the process, they violated one of the most sacred and fundamental traditions of American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power.

That is huge. That is historic. And it should be marked every single year as the historical enormity that it is.

But compare, if you will, what happened today, on this particular January sixth, a quiet, snowy winter’s day, when the certification process, headed up by Vice President Harris, and thanks to the ungrudgingly democratic spirit of her party, came off without a hitch and Donald Trump’s second term as president was formally certified, unquestioned by any member of Trump’s opposition. Democrats simply did what was right, what constitutional law and American tradition expected of them.

But it is unlikely that this will be appreciated by any supporter of a man who considers even America’s heroes to be “suckers and losers” for keeping their oath to support and defend the Constitution and the country with their very lives, if necessary. Donald Trump’s reaction to that sort of display of patriotic loyalty, while standing on the consecrated ground of Arlington National Cemetery?   "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" 

That brings me to why I say that, historically speaking, the January Sixth Insurrection should be recalled as the day when American democracy began to unravel, not when it prevailed. Because it was, and democracy is indeed unravelling.

There is simply no way that the US should be on the verge of inaugurating yet another Trump presidency. I’m not questioning the election figures. I don’t doubt that the election process was as free and fair as it was in 2020. (Let the delusional MAGA crowd still claiming that Biden didn’t win in 2020 take that as they will). I may be utterly baffled by, but do not question the choice made by American voters between the two candidates.

I do, however, question the democratic logic behind the Republican Party’s having chosen Trump as their 2024 presidential candidate. Thanks to the GOP’s leaders, we are about to re-inaugurate a felon, an insurrectionist, a man with as much respect for the rule of law and for the Constitution as for a roll of toilet paper.

But that’s not the only reason I believe that American democracy is unraveling. It is also unraveling because justice, in the case of Donald Trump, has not been served. Trump has been inadvertently enthroned as the prime example of what has until now been a general perception, and that, thanks to Trump, is now an indisputable fact: that “equality before the law” is a mere myth. The rule of law, the Republican Party and their Trump-laden Supreme Court have demonstrated, by endorsing the immunity of such a flawed and openly corrupt man—for a second time—is only for the powerless. If you are powerful enough, you are above it, and are entitled to a get-out-of-jail-free card. And if you are a friend of the most powerful people, you get a pardon, no matter what you’ve done. The probable consequences of that now open fact have even seeped into the current presidency, prompting Joe Biden to go against everything he has ever stood for, and to provide a blanket pardon to his own son for fear of unjust reprisals under a new and ever more lawless Trump administration.

But the GOP, no matter how MAGA-hijacked and democratically bereft it has become, is not solely to blame for the stunning materialization of yet another Trump regime. Blame also rests on the shoulders of current Attorney General Merrick Garland, who dragged his feet for a year before ever even entertaining the idea of an investigation of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, and then slow-walked the process afterward so that the possibility of prosecution was perceived as “election interference”, and was rendered, in the end, academic.

As a result, the Justice Department has suffered a humiliating defeat. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and the federal courts have been forced to back down in the face of Trump’s return to the presidency, which hasn’t erased the serious crimes with which the president-elect has been charged, but which has rendered his prosecution moot.

Attorney General Garland has suggested that he might release Prosecutor Smith’s full investigative report to the public. Personally, I can only shrug and ask, so what? Is that supposed to be a consolation prize? Will we get to read the report—I mean, unless Trump’s lawyers are successful in suppressing it—to know “what might have been,” if only Garland had done a better job at defending democracy and the Constitution? Because the truth is that if the attorney general had, from the outset, made keeping a would-be autocrat from ever getting near the Oval Office again, Donald Trump’s candidacy, rather than the rule of law, would have been the moot point. Trump would already have been tried, convicted and sentenced before the election cycle began. He would have been in prison, or, at the very least, banned from ever holding public office again.

Instead, here we are once more…

The next four years are a puzzle, both predictable and an enigma. Trump clearly won’t change. A narcissistic megalomanic can’t change his stripes, so expect more insanely undemocratic and ally-alienating behavior. Indeed, we’re already hearing the most outrageous of rants emanating from Mar-a-Lago about “buying Greenland” and about “making Canada the fifty-first state.” But more serious considerations are inevitable: Questions like, will Donald Trump seek a way around the two-term rule and go for a third, perhaps citing FDR’s mandate as a precedent? And if he can’t swing that, will he again attempt to refuse to leave office at the end of his term and spark an insurrection to back the perpetuation of his reign? And as his autocratic bent becomes more problematic, what will the GOP do? Keep embracing MAGA and kissing Emperor Trump’s ring, or come to its senses and find ways to limit Trump’s quest for authoritarian power?

At this critical point in American history, we have little choice but to watch and see. 

THE INQUIRER LISTS REASONS LINKED TO DEMOCRACY AND RULE OF LAW FOR BACKING HARRIS

 

The Philadelphia Inquirer today officially announced its endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.

This is huge, in terms of media endorsement in a crucial swing state. The Inquirer was founded in 1847 and is one of Pennsylvania's oldest and most influential periodicals. It is also ranked among the most influential papers in the country. This fact is supported by its having won TWENTY Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence since 1975.

In announcing its endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket, the paper's editorial board pulled no punches in listing its reasons.

These are the same reason that I have voted for Kamala Harris and why I don't think this election is simply a matter of political choice or "differences of opinion".

This election is quite simply about the choice between democracy or tyranny, and my objective reasons for saying that are precisely the same as The Inquirer's reasons for throwing their paper's support behind Kamala.

Here are the reasons they gave for their endorsement:

"Voters face an easy but tectonic choice in the race for the White House.

“Will they choose the first woman or the oldest man to be the next president?

“Will they choose the prosecutor or the convict?

“Will they choose the candidate who supports restoring Roe v. Wade, or the man who bragged about overturning it?

“Will they choose the candidate with a tax plan to help the middle class or the one who wants to help the superrich?

“Will they choose the candidate who backs a tough bipartisan immigration law or the guy who killed the measure?

“Will they choose the candidate who wants to combat climate change or the one who thinks it is a hoax?

“Will they choose the candidate who upholds the peaceful transfer of power or the one who summoned a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol?

“Will they choose the candidate who stands up to Vladimir Putin or the one who said Russia could do ‘whatever the hell they want?’

“Will they choose the candidate who champions education, health care for all, and sensible gun safety laws, or the person who wants to close the U.S. Department of Education, repeal Obamacare, and told supporters after a school shooting to ‘get over it?’

“Will they choose the candidate who supports the working class or the one who is anti-union and opposed raising the minimum wage?

“Will they choose a woman of color who wants to unite the country, or a man with a history of misogynistic, racist, and divisive comments and actions?

“Will they choose the candidate who supports LGBTQ rights or the one who wants to roll back protections for the gay community?

“Will they choose the candidate who will uphold the presidential oath, or the one who was impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, profited from the White House, dangled pardons to cronies, and was indicted four times?

“This baker’s dozen list could go on, but the choice is clear and obvious.

“Vice President Kamala Harris wants to help all Americans.

“Donald Trump wants to help himself.

“That is why The Inquirer endorses Kamala Devi Harris to be the 47th president of the United States.”

Amen!

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/a/endorsement-president-kamala-harris-democracy-20241025.html

CAPITULATION

 

With what he may have thought was a harmless and indifferent gesture, US President Joe Biden this past week issued a powerful message not only to Saudi Arabia but also to human rights advocates everywhere: When it comes to the choice between defense of human rights, free speech and democracy or cheap fuel for America’s gas-guzzling SUVs, we’ll take cheap gas.

Murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi

There can be little doubt that when Biden had to confront the inevitable photo op with the ruthless Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, it was an embarrassing moment. It looked way too much like what it was—humiliation, desperation, the flailing of a drowning man. 

After all, this was the guy whom Biden had promised in fiery campaign speeches a couple of years ago that he was going to hold to account and shun as “the pariah that he is.”  But with Putin’s war in Ukraine turning the oil market head over heels, and soaring gasoline prices at home fueling nearly double-digit inflation and inversely scuttling the president’s popularity ratings on all fronts, the question Biden probably asked himself was, as the BBC’s veteran worldwide correspondent John Simpson quipped, “Who has a lot of oil? Exactly!”  

While the president would share a warm handshake with Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, he made sure that it was clear that MBS only merited a quick fist-bump. One wonders if this was supposed to allay the concerns of the liberals who had voted for him or to have prompted the international community and human rights activists to say, “Ha, see there, fist-bump. I guess Biden showed him!” Because if that was supposed to be the message, it didn’t take. The word that more likely seems to have been the first to come to mind was “capitulation” rather than scorn.

The politically costly fist-bump

In the lead-up to this unfortunate meeting, Biden’s West Wing had indicated he might not meet at all with MBS and would instead only officially meet with the king. But too many foreign affairs experts made it clear that if that was the plan, he might as well stay home, because the cock who currently rules the roost in Saudi Arabia is the crown prince. The king, they pointed out, is a mere figurehead for life, with no real power to decide anything. If you want to talk to the Saudis, you can’t avoid talking to MBS, because Saudi Arabia is a one-man show.

Which is precisely the point about the murder of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi. Nothing of consequence happens in the Saudi regime without the knowledge and complicity of MBS. To believe the official story of the Saudi government that the murder was committed by rogue outliers without the crown prince’s knowledge is to believe in fairytales—especially since the grisly assassination took place within the premises of a Saudi diplomatic mission.

For anyone who might need to refresh their memory regarding this major international incident, here’s a brief summary of the facts. Jamal Khashoggi was a high-profile Saudi dissident, journalist and author, who had long campaigned against the bloody regime, not as a radical, but as a moderate who was willing to advocate gradual democratic improvement without pushing for the overthrow of the Saudi government. Prior to his work as a columnist for the Washington Post’s Middle East Eye section, Khashoggi had served briefly as the editor of Al Watan, a Saudi newspaper that he sought to mold into a platform for progressives seeking respect for human rights and a more democratic opening. He was a particularly strong advocate of equal rights for women in his country. But his trenchant opposition to the regime’s domestic policies caused him to be sacked.

No fist-bump for the Saudi king.

After the Saudi regime banned him from Twitter in 2017 for his criticism of the brutal policies supported by the king and crown prince, Khashoggi had reason to believe that his life was in danger and in September of that year, he left Saudi Arabia for self-imposed exile in the US. While in exile, besides working for the Washington Post, he also became general manager and editor-in-chief at the Al-Arab News Channel, and continued to be a powerful voice for democratic change in his native country.

He was, additionally, a staunch critic of the war on Yemen waged by Saudi Arabia with US backing, which had fostered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Of that war, he once wrote: “The longer this cruel war lasts in Yemen, the more permanent the damage will be. The people of Yemen will be busy fighting poverty, cholera and water scarcity and rebuilding their country. The crown prince must bring an end to the violence…Saudi Arabia's crown prince must restore dignity to his country by ending Yemen's cruel war.”

On October 2, 2018, the fifty-nine-year-old journalist was happily planning his upcoming marriage to then thirty-six-year-old Hatice Cengiz of Turkey. On that date, Khashoggi went to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul to request some documentation he would need for his marriage. CCTV footage recorded him entering the embassy, but he was never recorded coming out. Later investigation revealed that the journalist had been brutally murdered inside the premises of the diplomatic mission and his body dismembered and removed to another location.

After releasing a series of thin and conflicting stories to try to cover up the heinous crime, the Saudi government eventually admitted that the murder had occurred but has maintained ever since that it was carried out without the crown prince’s involvement or knowledge. This, despite the fact that in 2017, MBS had told another Saudi journalist that Khashoggi's work was tarnishing his image, and that he would go after Khashoggi “with a bullet.”

Less than two months before his murder, Khashoggi wrote, “Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince…is signaling that any open opposition to Saudi domestic policies...is intolerable." As an example of this repressive policy, he pointed to government measures “…as egregious as the punitive arrests of reform-seeking Saudi women.” He wrote that “while MBS is right to free Saudi Arabia from ultra-conservative religious forces, he is wrong to advance a new radicalism that, while seemingly more liberal and appealing to the West, is just as intolerant of dissent.” Khashoggi went on to write: “MBS's rash actions are deepening tensions and undermining the security of the Gulf States and the region as a whole.”

Following careful investigation, the CIA has concluded that there is no doubt that Khashoggi’s assassination was on orders from MBS and that the crown prince had reached across international borders to carry it out, sending a hit squad of more than a dozen agents to murder the journalist in Turkey and make his body disappear. This is consistent with the fact that no few of the regime’s other opponents have simply disappeared without a trace.

Despite President Biden’s initial promises to hold MBS and Saudi Arabia to account for the murder and for the generally ruthless policies of the regime, and in spite of repeated calls from human rights advocates and liberal politicians for the severing of diplomatic ties with the Saudi regime, this past week’s meeting with the crown prince rendered his good intentions moot. Furthermore, that single meeting overshadowed Biden’s entire Middle East tour, eclipsing everything else, which, even without the MBS factor, didn’t go well.

To wit, besides fist-bumping his way into one of the still most burning human rights controversies of today, sparking the outrage of every human rights group at home and abroad that was looking to this administration to restore the basic decency unceremoniously trashed during the Trump presidency, he failed to get anything significant in return. There is no real evidence to suggest that Saudi Arabia has the installed capacity to significantly increase its production, or that, like the rest of the international oil cartel, it would be willing to do anything that might spark a drastic decrease in the price of oil. And the trip rendered no immediate solution to high fuel prices in the rest of the region either.

While Biden managed to give the appearance of inching bitter enemies Saudi Arabia and Israel somewhat closer together, there’s no reason to believe that MBS will risk major conservative opposition at home to appease Washington and Tel Aviv, nor is there any guarantee that the right-wing Netanyahu camp won’t return to power in Israel and undo any progress made. Furthermore, while he did his best to appear tough on Iran, he simultaneously said that his administration still believed that diplomacy was the answer and made clear his commitment to piecing the Iran nuclear accord achieved under the Obama administration back together. While that was sure to please those of us who believe that the way to deal with Iran is by bringing it back into the concert of nations, it is a policy that is unlikely to garner any support whatsoever after the mid-term elections when Democrats may very well lose their tenuous hold on Congress.

To add insult to injury, while he was touring the Middle East, Biden was once again blindsided by West Virginia senator and Democratic outlier Joe Manchin, who again threw the president’s domestic policy plans into utter chaos.

So what could the US president possibly have to gain from capitulating to MBS? The answer is “nothing,” and his advisers should have made him aware of that fact. Because by fist-bumping with a ruthless murderer, the only thing the president has earned is the contempt of the international human rights community and the further erosion of his support among liberal Democrats.

CUTTING OFF OUR NOSE TO SPITE OUR FACE

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

William Barr (left) and John Durham

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

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

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

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

Robert Mueller

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

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

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

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

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

Pence, Furman, Parnas,Trump and Giuliani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wyoming Rep.Liz Cheney

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

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green

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

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

Missouri Sen.Josh Hawley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

GQP: THE PARTY OF Q

 

I’ve been thinking lately that GOP (Grand Old Party) has become a misnomer for the Republicans. I’m tempted to argue that there’s nothing “grand” about it anymore. Its leadership (such as it is) has relinquished any legitimate pride it once could have claimed regarding American traditions and ideals, conservatism, law and order, defense of democracy, the rule of law, and, of course, all that now obsolete nonsense about being “the Party of Lincoln”. It has embraced extremism, conspiracy theories, mob rule, oligarchic autocracy, born-again racism and personality cultism. But okay, I’ll spot them the word “grand”, because they did come in second for The Most Votes in History in the last presidential election, so....grand, like “big”. Fine.

That said, however, there’s nothing “old” about the party that exists today, either. Starting just twelve years ago, the Republican Party quit working for the country and democracy, and went into business for itself and its politicians. After Barack Obama, with a democratic congressional majority in his first four years, worked incessantly to overcome the, until then, worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—a crisis that resulted from a lack of former Republican-led government control over questionable banking, stock market and insurance industry practices—as well as creating an ongoing and developing universal health care program, reforming the financial system, securing America’s commitment to dealing with global climate change, establishing Net neutrality, rescuing the American automotive industry, kick-starting the clean energy industry, cutting veteran homelessness in half, improving worldwide nuclear security and reviving the Justice Department’s civil rights division (among other things)—he found himself faced in his second term with a Republican-led Senate, whose obstructionist-in-chief, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, did his damnedest to block every single bill that the Executive sent to Congress, not on the basis of merit (or lack of same) but simply because it came from Obama.

And for the next four years, under the presidency of Donald Trump, McConnell has continued to obstruct nearly everything coming from the Democrat-led House. Over four hundred bills that piled up on his desk throughout the Trump era and never got a hearing in the upper house, just because they were signed by Democrats and despite the fact that many of them clearly would have improved the lives of average Americans. And he has aided and abetted the ex-president in his obsession with destroying Obama’s entire legacy of good government practices, exceptional international diplomacy and improved social justice.

So, hey, perhaps the Republicans could keep the initials GOP, after all, but just change what the “O” stands for to Grand Obstructionist Party, since the party has become so identifiably obstructionist that it has even backed—whether by commission or omission—former President Trump’s insane attempt to block and overturn by force the outcome of last November’s free and fair elections. To say nothing of also obstructing, as they did the other time he was impeached, any attempt to hold Trump responsible for his misdeeds—in this case, for trying to overthrow the United States government.

That said, there’s a case to be made for calling it the GTP—Grand Trump Party—because from 2016 on, after all politically viable candidates had been culled on the strength of The Donald’s  massive and largely inexplicable popularity (much like that of wildly popular pro-wrestling stars whose fans are fanatically loyal even though it’s obvious to everyone but them that their super-heroes are skillful but unmitigated fakes), a desperate Republican Party, whose only interest had become winning at any cost, allowed itself, at first hesitantly and later enthusiastically, to be usurped by a candidate with the ethics of a snake-oil hawker and the patriotism of a carpetbagger.

And even now, when Trump has lost his chance at a second term and made such a mess of the electoral process that the Republican leadership could have very easily taken the opportunity to cut him loose and take back their party, they have chosen to continue to vie for what’s left of his most rabidly extreme base and forsake all other considerations except offending these populist fanatics. In other words, the GOP continues to be paralyzed by their fear of Donald Trump—or better said, by their fear of further election losses in the future, over and above any patriotic consideration of the nation and its democratic traditions—which would appear ludicrous considering that the Republican Party fared far better in the November elections than Donald Trump did.

But here we are, following an insurrection in which a Capitol policeman was brutally mob-murdered and several other people died as well, when hundreds of rioters incited by the former president took Congress by storm and forced the nation’s elected representatives to huddle and hide in fear for their lives. An incident of singularly historical importance, in which Trump cultists, hundreds of them, sought to interrupt the democratic process and the official certification of the November elections, and attempted to keep Trump in power by means of a populist coup. And still, only five Republican senators out of a hundred would vote to impeach the former president, while scores of Republicans in the House continue to stubbornly support Trump’s conspiracy theories—debunked in over sixty failed court actions filed by the Trump team and in the rejection, twice, by the Supreme Court of charges regarding alleged election irregularities, as well as by virtue of certification by fifty state attorneys general and the Electoral College—regarding a “stolen election”.

So, my question is, if Trump fanatics are now identifying themselves as “Trump Republicans”, and if the Republican leadership is willing to throw everything the GOP has ever stood for out the window solely in order to hang onto that core of undemocratic personality-cultists who would be perfectly happy to overthrow American democracy in order to keep Trump in power, why not take off the fig-leaf and call the party what it has become—the Party of Trump, or GTP?

There is another choice, however, that seems to be glaring at Republican leaders from the darkest, densest depths of the violent far-right insurrectionist jungle. Here’s the thing: This past week the GOP started waffling about what to do regarding their Marjorie Taylor Greene problem. And so far, the answer has been, “nothing.” By comparison, the Republican leadership has had no problem whatsoever discussing what punishment should be meted out to Representative Liz Chaney, a highly respected traditional Republican leader and daughter of former Vice President Dick Chaney, for the “heinous crime” of following her ethics, her patriotic duty and her conscience in voting to impeach Donald Trump for inciting insurrection.

You may recall that Georgia Republican Congresswoman Greene, who was swept to office on a wave of QAnon conspiracy theories that she readily endorsed—to the glee of foaming-at-the-mouth, gun-toting, rightwing militants—was praised by Donald Trump as the future face of the Republican Party. You might also remember that she once claimed that California wildfires were being set by Jewish bankers using space lasers, and that she, a couple of years ago, reposted a white nationalist video claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by “Zionist supremacists” who perpetuated it to “promote immigration and miscegenation.”

More recently, Greene has done things like embracing British ultra-rightist commentator Katie Hopkins who famously described migrants as “cockroaches”, whom she wouldn’t mind seeing die. Greene’s response? “I would love to trade you for some of our white people here that have no appreciation for our country.” She further termed the results of the 2018 mid-terms as the “Islamic invasion of our government”—in reference to the election of congresswomen Rashida Talaib and Ilan Omar, the first two Muslim women ever voted into Congress.

Not content with that, she has, since the November elections and their violent aftermath, endorsed calls on Facebook for the execution of top Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. And, among her most atrocious endorsements is the one for a conspiracy theory that claims the tragic Parkland and Sandy Hook mass shootings were “hoaxes”. She even has gone as far as to harass one of the Parkland victims, David Hogg, on the street, badgering and abusing him verbally and telling him that she had a gun in her purse.  

So with Trump’s future being a lot less certain than that of an apparently ever stronger extremist wing of the conspiracy-daft far right, maybe even continuing to embrace Trump is too risky for an ever more acquiescent GOP leadership. Some of the most extreme fringe elements of the far right now believe that they were also duped by Trump. That they gave him their all, obeyed his express wishes and took over the Capitol, standing point and awaiting the declaration of martial law and the military takeover that would restore their leader to power. This, they felt they had been promised by Trump surrogates like disgraced General Mike Flynn and space-cadet attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. In the end, they were left holding the bag.

So perhaps then, they will be seeking new heroes, someone more like them, someone like, say, Marjorie Taylor Green, who represents more than the Trump brand. She who was elected to office as the voice of Q.

Maybe, if the GOP is dubious even about giving Greene a slap on the wrist and removing her from committee duty (do we really need a conspiracy theorist who supports old anti-Semitic Nazi fabrications about the evils of Jewish businessmen, or who claims the victims of the Parkland and Sandy Hook school massacres faked it, on the Education Committee?), let alone impeaching her under Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 of the Constitution—for, among other things, inciting rebellion, disseminating false information regarding the fairness of national elections, promoting conspiracy theories designed to incite insurrection, calling for the assassination of national officials, including other members of Congress, and carrying a loaded weapon onto the floor of the House—then why not just add a curlicue to the “O” and rename the GOP the Party of Q or GQP?

That way, the ubiquitous “Q”, a symbol that’s beginning to get some of the kind of traction the swastika did with the Nazis, can be incorporated directly into the party name. And there will no longer be any doubt about where the Republican leadership’s sympathies lie.