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.       

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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.