Question of the day: How much more
flagrant do the actions of Donald Trump and his entourage have to become before
there is a general admission on the part of Americans, and especially among all
of the country’s remaining small-d democrats on either side of the aisle in
Congress (not just Mitt Romney), that the forty-fifth president is, and always
has been, a would-be autocrat? And that it is only thanks to the continued
institutional integrity of the US Supreme Court, of the federal and state
judicial systems, of state election boards, and of the Armed Forces of the
United States that his presidency has not spelled the end of America’s
two-hundred-fifty-year experiment in democracy.
.
And before I take up the subject of Team
Trump’s latest anti-American machinations, I think it would be relevant to
define the word SEDITION: Overt conduct,
such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against
the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a
constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or rebellion
against, established authority.
Please bear
this definition in mind.
This past weekend there were
credible reports from several major mainstream investigative news sources, who quoted
executive staff members, regarding a meeting at the White House in which the
outgoing (and trying desperately not to) forty-fifth president of the United
States got together with at least two high-profile conspiracy theorists who are
advocating “limited martial law” as a means of “overturning November’s election
results”. One of these subversives—let’s be honest, there’s no other name for
them—to whom Trump gave audience is convicted (and presidentially pardoned)
felon General Michael Flynn, who, having gotten his get-out-of-jail-free card
from the president, is now bent on launching a coup to show his gratitude. The other is lawyer and conspiracy theorist
Sidney Powell, who basically just seems to be bat-shit crazy and thinks that
former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez—who has been dead for seven
years—somehow reached out from the grave to mess with American voting machines
in the last election. Her delusions are so extreme that even the president’s
zany attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani side-lined her from the
legal team that has been leading Trump’s baseless and futile court efforts to
overturn the election results. She too is espousing the martial law idea.
Michael Flynn’s suggestion, then, is
tantamount to sedition, since it calls for inappropriate use of presidential powers
to promote insurrection against the established order. And it should be
considered a violation of his oath to defend the Constitution, as a retired
general officer in the US Army—a rank which, somehow, despite his disgraceful
performance to date and his conviction for felonious lying to the federal
authorities—he has managed to retain.
Powell, for her part, continues to
maintain her groundless accusations about rigged voting machines in swing
states (apparently everything worked just fine in the states where Trump
won)—despite assurances by election officials, governors and attorneys general
from both parties that results have been checked and double-checked—and in the
case of Georgia, a GOP-governed state, triple-checked—and that there are no
widespread, systematic or systemic irregularities to report. This has been
reconfirmed in at least sixty court cases, many brought in swing states by the
legal team of which Powell formed part, and all brought by Trump-or-die
supporters at the president’s behest, as well as two cases taken to and
flat-out rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States. Still, for no
other reason than her own gut-lunacy Powell is pushing for the president to
take Flynn up on his martial law proposal so that she can get the voting
machines confiscated and have a look at them—to see if the ghost of Chávez is
haunting them, perhaps?
So Flynn and Powell are not the only
two conspiracy theorists—if you don’t count the president—seeking to use the
power of the presidency to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Not
by a longshot. Another of the more prominent ones at a local level who has
nevertheless gone viral nationally, is Amanda Chase. Chase is a member of the
Virginia Senate who aspires to becoming governor of the state.
But that’s not what Chase is best
known for—or perhaps “notorious” would be a more appropriate term. Two years
ago, she walked into the Virginia Senate, open-packing a loaded .38 revolver.
And she was wearing it on her hip while presenting draft legislation to a State
Senate committee. Asked why she was carrying a loaded gun to the Legislature,
she said it was to act as “a deterrent for over-exuberant folks.”
Chase has also repeatedly posed for
photographs with political militant and gunman Antonio Lamotta, who is a
promoter of the conspiracy-theory crazies of QAnon. It should be noted that
Lamotta, who Amanda Chase seems to admire and want to emulate, was arrested in Philadelphia
and charged with a third-degree felony last month, shortly after the general
election, for being caught carrying several pistols, an AR-15 assault rifle,
and over 150 rounds of ammunition without a valid Pennsylvania firearms permit.
Recently, Chase herself was seen toting
an AR-15 at port arms while at a far-right, white supremacist, political rally
where she was surrounded by Boogaloo Boys. The Boogaloo Boys, as you may
remember, emerged last year from the murky undergrowth of extremist fringe
sociopaths that the Trump era has spawned, or at least encouraged. They are
sometimes referred to as a militia (the National Guard is a militia, this is
just another tribe of would-be felons), but are actually a loosely organized
far-right, anti-government, and extremist political group, better described as
domestic terrorists.
Bearing her past behavior in mind,
it should come as no surprise that Chase last week also called on Trump to
impose martial law in her state, making the patently false claim that there was
“extensive fraud here in Virginia” and that Democrats had “cheated to win.” Her
statement drew immediate condemnation from Republican lawmakers and former
lawmakers including Denver Riggleman, Barbara Comstock and David Ramadan.
Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Kirk Cox called her statements “absurd
and dangerous”, and Virginia Democratic Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton said
Chase was “unhinged”.
Sidney Powell has been spreading her
ridiculous fantasies to anyone who wants to hear them in Trumpland, apparently
having taken a real shine to grabbing a mic and standing up in front of a
(maskless, non-socially-distanced) crowd and, in doing so, actually manages to
make Rudy Giuliani look marginally sane. Flynn, for his part, has been seen
protesting outside of the Supreme Court with QAnon members and other extremist
lunatics, as if their un-righteous outrage could change the views of the
highest court in the land, whose decisions are founded on the rule of law and,
hence, final, since there is no higher court to appeal to.
Meanwhile, in Congress there’s a
covey of coup-mongers who say they may try and throw a monkey wrench into the
transition when the
Legislature convenes on January 6th, by seeking a vote on whether to
accept or reject the Electoral College’s final count. What do they hope to
accomplish when Biden hammered Trump by a margin of seventy-four electors?
Well, a good “what’s-in-it-for-me” indicator came from former jock and college
football coach, now-Senator Tommy Tuberville, who must be missing his former
days of gladiator glory in the stadium and is looking for a new Caesar to
impress, since, according to Trump, Tommy Tuberville credited the president
with making him “the most popular politician in the United States.” (Careful
there, Tommy, The Don doesn’t like being outshined). Which is why Tuberville
now appears willing to call for a vote on the EC count, and, in doing so, go
against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who has way-belatedly accepted
President-elect Biden’s legitimate win and has asked his colleagues to help
move the country smoothly to the inauguration.
Everybody wants something from Trump
in return for their futile attempts to overturn the elections. But mostly they
want to avoid being pilloried by him on Twitter, or having him give them a
thumbs-down so that his base feeds them to the lions at the polls—this last
being the case of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the run-offs that they
must still face in Georgia.
In the lower house, it’s Republican
Representative Mo Brooks who is leading a plot to reject Biden's Electoral
College victory. The congressman has said he wants to reject the electoral
votes certified by states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania that had what he
calls “flawed election systems” a notion already quashed by the Supreme Court
and dozens of lower courts.
Republican Representative Riggleman,
whom I mentioned earlier, had pretty much the same appraisal of all of this as
I did in describing Sidney Powell, saying that “the technical term for it is bat-shit
crazy.” Trump’s own former National Security Advisor John Bolton—who is
historically and famously known as a right-wing hawk but who, in the era of
Trump sounds moderate (or at least sane) by comparison—termed the call for
martial law by Flynn and those including the president who have actually
listened to him instead of laughing him out of the room, “appalling” and
“unprecedented”, as was the president’s continued refusal to accept the reality
of his loss.
The most outspoken GOP member by far
has been Republican Senator Mitt Romney who called these latest flirtations
with authoritarianism “really sad” and “embarrassing”. Romney said that just
when the president could have been taking one last big victory lap for the
speed with which the country had come up with two vaccines with which to fight
the COVID-19 epidemic, he is instead hunkered down denying the results of a
free and fair election. Said Romney, “He could be championing this story (about
the vaccines) but instead he’s leaving Washington with conspiracy theories and
things so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their heads, wondering what
in the world has gotten into this man. I think that is unfortunate because he
has more accomplishments than this last chapter suggests he is going to be known
for.”
And Romney is right. Rather than
being known for the success of Warp Speed, Trump will go down in history as the
president who encouraged the people to deny the science, a denial which has
been the direct cause for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. And
given the course so far of his last seventy days in office, he will also be
known as the first leader in US history to abuse presidential power and actively
seek to overthrow democracy and disenfranchise the American voter.
Try as I might to keep my sense of
humor and make light of the insanity in the grip of which the United States
continues to find itself, despite the fact that the election is over, certified
state by state and re-certified by the overwhelming results of the Electoral
College vote, the continued denial in which the president and his cohorts are
submersed is worthy of genuine concern. Particularly since, having run out of
legitimate legal options through which to try and build a case for which he has
absolutely no corroborating evidence, he has now surrounded himself with
conspiracy theorists, coup-mongers, violent fringe groups and political
opportunists who are seeking to ride on his coattails and, no matter what the
cost to the country, to grab some of the dissipating populist power than he
once clearly commanded.
What we should pay attention to here
is the euphemistic language being used to describe what we are witnessing. What
Trump and his now unadulterated far-right fringe entourage are trying to do can
no longer be called “seeking to overturn the election results.” After a
legitimate, free, fair and duly certified elections and with Inauguration Day
less than a month off, the current machinations in the Trump camp are a blatant
attempt to overthrow the established order in the United States of America. If
the same thing were happening in any African or Latin American nation, no one
would think twice about calling it what it is: an attempted overthrow, in
short, an attempted coup d’état.
Many people are thinking that it
doesn’t really matter. That it will soon be over. That Trump is history. That a
new dawn is coming in which everyone will come to his or her senses and say, we
have to start mending our fences and healing the divisions. We have to make
amends, realize that what has happened here is grave and that it must be
avoided in the future. We have to start working together across the aisle and
throughout the community for the good of America.
But a great deal has been broken
over the course of the past four years—and of the four years before that. And
once the ideals and principles of a democracy have been shattered, it is a
monumental task to put them back together again, a task that requires selfless
and eager cooperation. In a United States in which people no longer see each
other as Americans first and foremost but where they tend to divide sharply
between right and left, it’s hard to see that happening any time soon. But
hopefully it eventually will.
In the end, this will either be seen
merely as one of the darkest chapters in the political history of the United
States that is now, thankfully, coming to an end, or it will be seen as when “the
new normal” began and political hatred and in-fighting destroyed a two and a
half-century-old democracy, the greatest the world had ever known.
