THE ‘KING’S’ SPEECH

 

Three nights ago, I once again watched The King’s Speech, with brilliant and moving performances by Geoffrey Rush, as an Australian speech therapist with an uncanny talent (but no credentials) for gifting speech to the speechless, and Colin Firth, as the reticent, stammering Prince Albert of Britain, who was to become King George VI, upon the abdication of his older brother, David, who gave up his crown in exchange for the love of a twice-divorced American commoner with a racy reputation—a love story that would resonate throughout the English-speaking world as a popular fairytale for years to come.

Firth and Rush in "The King's Speech"

The following night, I watched, in its entirety, President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address, and I couldn’t help but strike a parallel in my mind between the award-winning film and the president’s stunning performance. Granted, Biden has a half-century history in American politics and has learned to tackle public speaking with vigor and aplomb. But like King George VI, Biden has struggled all his life with a speech impediment, a stammer that has always taken great concentration for him to overcome. Journalists and commentators who should have done their research and, as such, should have known better, have far too often, on hearing Biden’s sometimes halting and disjointed speech, echoed the president’s bitterest opponents in misconstruing it as diminished mental faculties, due entirely to the fact that he is, without a doubt, an old—but not, for that, automatically elderly—man.

I suppose the reason I naturally struck the comparison between The King’s Speech and President Biden’s speech was that, at least in my mind, there were unavoidable parallels. In order to be a constitutional monarch at the service of his people, George VI (father of Queen Elizabeth and grandfather of King Charles) had to overcome his crippling stammer and attendant terror of public speaking to become an effective head of state of the British Empire through some of the darkest years in its history. As if that weren’t enough, he also had to clear the hurdle of his unpopularity as the also-ran replacement for the former, if short-lived, heir to the throne, his flamboyant and popular brother David (a.k.a. King Edward VIII).

Biden’s situation is similar. Not only does he follow four years of Donald Trump, which, for better or for worse (worse), reshaped American politics and rendered the Republican Party unrecognizable as the respectable Grand Old Party of yesteryear, but he is also, as a former two-term vice president, “heir to the throne” of Barrack Obama, the most rock-star-popular and dynamic president in living memory, and one of the nation’s youngest and most consequential leaders. And, like George VI, Biden continues to struggle with his life-long speech impediment and with the prejudices of the ignorant and mal-intentioned, who seek to equate that struggle, applying flawed Medieval logic, with unsoundness of mind.

Like George VI, but with the comparative disadvantage of cable TV and a twenty-four-hour news cycle, Biden is under constant observation, with supporters holding their breath that he “doesn’t screw up”, and opponents gleefully awaiting the moment he does. Meanwhile, his political rival, former President Donald Trump, who is only a little more than three years Biden’s junior, screws up consistently. For instance, confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, confusing the current administration with the Obama administration—once even talking about running against Obama when he meant (or perhaps didn’t) Biden—and failing to pick his own second wife, Marla Maples, out of a photo line-up. Indeed, he even confused Maples with his sexual assault victim, newspaper columnist E. Jean Carroll. And those only form a small portion of his gaffs.

But as Trump himself once said, he could “shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue” and wouldn’t lose any votes. Over the years, if we’ve learned anything about MAGA Republicans, it is that this is shockingly and sadly true.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, vulgar and rude as ever.

That said, anyone listening to, and indeed watching, Biden’s State of the Union Address to Congress on Thursday night heard and saw a rejuvenated and articulate Joe Biden. The octogenarian president was vigorous, energized and upbeat, yet critical and combative, as well as extending an invitation to politicians of all colors to eschew hatred and division, and to negotiate and compromise on major issues for the good of the country, and the world. He was ready for hecklers in the MAGA camp, clearly knew in advance what each of his own statements would elicit, and responded intelligently, often wittily, and with admirable grace to what were clearly rude and vulgar interruptions—led, of course, by the ever crass and inappropriate Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose behavior was so unacceptably boisterous that she was threatened with removal by the Sergeant-At-Arms.

Biden was, in short, how every critic on both sides of the aisle posit he should be—strong, sharp, edgy, in command, but still willing to compromise, within ethical limits, to get what the nation’s people need from a reluctant and, in part, completely renegade Legislature. If anyone attended that historic event either fearing or hoping, depending on their political bent, to hear a confused and bumbling “Sleepy Joe”, they were either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.

Michigan Representative (D) Debbie Dingle, who was on the floor of the chamber for the speech, said it was “very clear” that her Republicans colleagues were “uncomfortable”, both with Biden’s strong showing, and with loud displays of impropriety from the MAGA sector in their own ranks. That behavior only seemed to underscore Biden’s pointed references to the undemocratic disorder and chaos sown by Trump and his most ardent supporters. Clearly, Republicans had set a miserably low bar for this State of the Union speech, believing their own electioneering hype in thinking that the perception would be that of a confused, doddering old man, who was obviously unfit to serve.

They were about to be disappointed. The president came out swinging from the very beginning, landing a stunning blow to the jaw of the MAGA wing, by opening with a quote from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, in 1941, told Congress: “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.” 
Biden then embraced that idea as his own, saying that, back then: “Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world. 
“Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. And yes, my purpose tonight is to both wake up this Congress, and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today. What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.” 

From that moment on, in strong and vibrant terms, he enumerated the things that, against all odds, his administration had been able to accomplish, and passed back to the GOP the bundle of failures that they have sought to lay at his door. At the top of the list was the continued chaos on the US-Mexico border, and in the immigration system as a whole. The president pointed out that while he had managed to prompt a bipartisan solution to the crisis with some of the most conservative members of Congress, the GOP leadership had bent to Donald’s Trump’s personal will in not passing the immigration bill so as to keep from giving Biden a major policy win before the elections. To which far-right Oklahoma Senate Republican James Lankford, mouthed the words “that’s true.” Biden made it clear that, if there was no improvement on the immigration front, the fault was entirely that of Trump-led Republicans, and that their reasons for rejecting the bipartisan solution were strictly a matter of political electioneering.

Lankford - "That's true"

In point of fact, Biden never mentioned Trump’s name in the nearly ninety-minute address, referring to him only as “my predecessor”. But those references were to number a baker’s dozen, always remaining within the initial context of the speech, positing that Donald Trump is a clear and present threat to American democracy.

Nowhere was that clearer than when he said: “Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. 

“But Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not asking for American soldiers. In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine. And I am determined to keep it that way. But now assistance for Ukraine is being blocked by those who want us to walk away from our leadership in the world. 

“It wasn’t that long ago when a Republican President, Ronald Reagan, thundered, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ Now, my predecessor, a former Republican President, tells Putin, ‘Do whatever the hell you want.’ A former American President actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. It’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. It’s unacceptable.”

Biden went on to underscore the obvious link between Trumpism and authoritarianism, saying: “History is watching… My message to President Putin is simple. We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down.  History is watching, just like history watched three years ago on January Sixth, (when) insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.” 

Biden continued to drive this point home, saying that the insurrectionists, “had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people.” 

Recalling the anti-democratic infamy of the chaotic end to the Trump presidency, Biden qualified the historic significance of that incident, saying: “January Sixth and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War. But they failed. America stood strong and democracy prevailed. 

“But we must be honest, the threat remains and democracy must be defended. My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January Sixth. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. And here’s the simplest truth. You can’t love your country only when you win. As I’ve done ever since being elected to office, I ask you all, without regard to party, to join together and defend our democracy!”

The president went after Trump and the MAGA Republicans on another burning domestic issue, saying that “history is watching another assault on freedom.” He went on to say that American women’s reproductive rights were under continuing attack following the overturning of Rowe v Wade during the Trump presidency. To make that point, he introduced two women in the audience, one who had had to escape the law in her own state to terminate a pregnancy in which the fetus had a fatal condition and carrying it to term would put her at medical risk and would threaten her ability to have children in the future, and another woman who had also had to leave her state after local laws declared embryos to be people, and the IVF facility where she and her husband were seeking relief from infertility shut down.

Biden described both cases—like thousands of others—as being the direct outcome of the overturning of Roe v Wade, opining, in juxtaposition to the Supreme Court ruling, that Rowe v Wade “got it right.” Taking more precise aim, he said: “Many of you in this Chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. My God, what freedoms will you take away next?”

In assigning blame for the diminishing of women’s rights, he laid primary responsibility at Trump’s door, saying: “… My predecessor came to office determined to see Roe v Wade overturned. He’s the reason it was overturned. In fact, he brags about it. Look at the chaos that has resulted.”

To the Supreme Court Justices sitting in the front of the chamber, he quoted their Rowe v Wade decision back to them, saying: “In its decision to overturn Roe v Wade the Supreme Court majority wrote, ‘Women are not without electoral or political power.’ No kidding! Clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v Wade have no clue about the power of women in America. They found out, though, when reproductive freedom was on the ballot and won in 2022…and they will find out again, in 2024.”

Meticulously throughout the evening, the president laid out issues affecting the United States both at home and abroad and underscored how MAGA Republicans are conspiring to stymie any and all solutions, despite Democratic efforts to reach across the aisle and achieve suitable compromises to enact improvements in the state of the union.

But the president also listed his administration’s achievements—all too often given short shrift by detractors and the media in general—despite this overwhelming opposition from the far-right. He touted, among other things, a record fifteen million new jobs in three years, unemployment at fifty-year lows, a record sixteen million Americans starting small business ventures, historic job growth and small business growth for Black, Hispanic, and Asian-Americans, eight hundred thousand new domestic manufacturing jobs, more people having affordable health insurance than ever before, the greatest reduction of the racial wage gap in twenty years, and a drop in inflation from a soaring nine percent to just three percent annually, and six hundred fifty billion dollars in private sector investment in clean-energy production that promised to add thousands of good-paying jobs to the workforce. He praised the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed into law on his watch and promised “buy American” policies would apply to both manufacturing and labor that formed part of the resulting construction projects. And he proudly discussed his administration’s part in taking on Big Pharma to bring down exorbitant drug prices for Americans, specifically talking about the reduction of insulin prices that had already been slashed for seniors from four hundred to just thirty-five dollars a month, with future plans to do the same for the rest of the country’s insulin users.

In short, it was, perhaps, the most political State of the Union Address in history. It was bitterly criticized as such by the MAGA opposition. But that factor also drew certain expressions of disapproval among some of the generally friendly mainstream media.

I disagree. If there was ever a time for a powerfully political State of the Union Address, instead of the usual meaningless waffling that goes with trying to please everyone, it is now. Biden is not wrong. US democracy is facing an existential crisis, the visible authoritarian head of which is Donald Trump, who has hijacked the former GOP and turned it into a cult of personality at his complete service.

Biden spent the first part of his term staying aloof of the fray, while Justice independently took charge of enumerating Trump’s transgressions and turning them into criminal indictments. But as the wheels of justice turn with agonizing lethargy, and it is clear now that insurrectionist and populist autocrat Donald Trump will once again be on the November election ticket, there is no longer any room for Marquis of Queensbury rules.

Democrats must strictly maintain the constitutional rules of democracy at a governmental and legal level, and see to it that they are obeyed by others, especially in the MAGA movement, who would burn it all down and plunge the country into anarchy. But at an electoral level, Biden and his party need to be ready to gird for battle and, when necessary, to get down and punch it out, to paraphrase the late Johnny Cash, in the blood and the snot and the beer.

The most indubitable point that President Biden made in his address last Thursday was the first one: US democracy is under mortal attack by authoritarians both at home and abroad (and all too often in cahoots with each other). The stakes are intolerably high. What is in play, is democracy’s very survival. And like it or not—in the absence of a strong third party conservative candidate willing to torpedo the GOP’s chances for the sake of the nation—re-electing Joe Biden is the only safeguard against democracy’s otherwise certain demise.

 

 

THE BANNON FACTOR

I was recently going over notes from a ghostwriting project that I worked at for nearly a decade. I was chief researcher and editor and thus responsible for formulating a lot of the political ideas that the client prompted me to consider in his writing. I was struck by how on point we had been as far back as 2013-2014 regarding the wave of authoritarian thought that was taking shape all over the West, but nowhere as much as in the United States, where a man who had never been taken seriously before, an almost ridiculous jet set playboy with a lousy comb-over and a series of insane business projects, many of which were crashing failures became suddenly relevant. He was a guy who was taken in the best of cases as a joke and in the worst as a swindler whom former partners sought to avoid in the future. But suddenly, he was becoming, against all odds, the face of the American ultra-right and, incredibly, a serious contender for US president.

What’s stunning to me now—although I called it on a hunch back then—isn’t so much the nefarious influence that this man, Donald Trump, has had on the entire spectrum of American politics in the last seven or so years. It was easy enough to see that coming if he managed to gain access to the White House. What was chilling, in retrospect, was just how influential his former chief adviser, Steve Bannon, had been in ushering Trump from the play-by-ear politics of his early campaign for the presidency into a truly pernicious political philosophy similar to the classic ideologies of some of the most prominent dictators in history. I couldn’t help thinking that, without Bannon—and to a somewhat lesser extent, Stephen Miller—while Trump surely would have been a capricious, directionless, reactionary and recalcitrant executive, as he always had been in his role as CEO of the Trump Organization where his main “product” was the Trump Brand, he probably wouldn’t have been nearly as focused as he has been on destroying the US representative democratic system as we, born right after World War II, had known it up to the present. He would, I reasoned, simply have bumbled through a four-year term like a bull in a china shop, alienating everyone, probably even including his own base and the GOP, with his aimless brand of populism and duplicity until he was voted out of office and faded from the scene.

But Bannon, a well-studied ideologue with a warrior mentality at the service of anti-establishment chaos, got Trump’s ear early on and convinced him that he was the man called by destiny to burn it all down. It was no coincidence that I referred back then to Bannon as “the American Rasputin”, because he was no less nefariously influential on Trump than Grigori Rasputin had been on Czar Nicholas of Russia. This was obvious from the outset, when what had passed for “policy” in the Trump campaign and early presidency, and that had all of the orientation of a weathervane in a hurricane, suddenly became laser focused on issues that were sure to appeal to the most extreme elements of the Republican far right. And, indeed, even beyond the traditional far right to other political currents too extreme to be embraced even under “the big tent” of Republicanism.

The arrival of Bannon and his “war room” in the West Wing of the White House was, then, clear as day, in its extremist influence that had Trump at war with the world, but a political war imbued with almost military strategy, designed to isolate enemies, incorporate erstwhile rivals where convenient, and destroy those who refused to climb on board. This was all pure Bannon, not because Trump wasn’t interested in conquering absolute power, but because he’d had no idea how to go about it in American politics until Bannon provided him with the tools.

Out of those project notes of mine, the information that jumped out at me regarded Steve Bannon’s stated philosophy in the years prior to the Trump era when the alt-right strategist was still searching for a protégé—courting potential candidates like Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz unsuccessfully before finding a perfect fit in Trump, someone aggressive yet malleable because he had never had a salient intellectual notion of his own. Trump’s brain was, Bannon reasoned, fertile soil for his revolutionary politics, a blank slate on which he could write his manifesto.

The notes in question had to do with an article that writer Ronald Radosh had researched for The Daily Beast in 2013. It was that year when he was invited to a book-signing event and cocktail that Bannon, then CEO of the Breitbart far-right ideological site, was holding at his posh digs in Washington DC. Radosh struck up a conversation with Bannon about a picture in which his daughter, Maureen, a West Point-graduate Army officer, was sitting in Saddam Hussein’s former throne with an assault rifle across her lap. Bannon, the doting father, couldn’t contain his pride for her.

One thing led to another and the chat became an interview. In the course of it, Bannon suddenly said, apropos of nothing, “I’m a Leninist.”

Radosh wasn’t sure he’d heard Bannon right. He knew the political strategist to be a far-right-wing, Christian white supremacist, “populist” and “nationalist”. Or at least, that was the pitch that he was currently hawking.

So Radosh said something like, “A Leninist?” And when Bannon confirmed it, he asked him to explain what he meant by the term. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state,” Radosh quoted Bannon as saying. “And that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Asked to expand on that thought Bannon, according to Radosh, told the writer that he was applying Lenin’s strategy to Tea Party populist goals. Radosh said that Bannon wasn’t shy about telling him that the institutions that he was focusing on were the Republican and Democratic Parties and the traditional conservative press.

Several years later, when Bannon was picked to be Trump’s chief strategist, Radosh contacted him again and told him that he planned to reused parts of that 2013 interview in a new profile he was creating for The Daily Beast and asked if the strategist would like to add anything new. Bannon, knowing that those comments weren’t going to fly in Republican far-right circles, claimed he didn’t recall that conversation and said if Radosh used it, he would deny it ever took place.

In the wake of the Trump era, in which the GOP has been usurped by the extreme right, and its moderates as well as true conservatives have been marginalized, in which the two main parties are faced off in a war in which Congress is shackled and stalled in a climate of non-negotiation, and in which the unthinkable happened for the first time in history when the extreme right tried to overthrow the established order and install an autocratic regime after losing an election, and indeed in a current climate in which an enormous cross-section of American politics no longer believes in the integrity of the democratic election process, it’s not hard to see that Bannon’s nihilist goals found an able enforcer in Donald Trump.

While it may seem positive for democracy that, in this week’s general election process, observers have pointed to Trump and his camp as the big losers in the race, Trump still has a large and fanatical following. And the fact that big-money campaign donors are reportedly ready to write Trump off, fades in importance in view of the fact that he is still capable, among his most loyal supporters, of raising millions of campaign dollars through donations of five to twenty dollars each. It is worthwhile recalling that neither Trump nor his most implacable base—often evangelicals who view him as a messiah sent by God—are simply not bound by long-standing American ideals and traditions. And it is also important to remember that if there is one thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump, it is that he often resurges even when the most sacred of pundits pronounce him finished.

Anyone who has ever had an ounce of true patriotism, anyone who cares at all about the future of American representative democracy, should be bearing that in mind for 2024, when the presidential election process is once again center stage.   

THE JANUARY SIXTH INSURRECTION AND THE CONTINUING THREAT TO DEMOCRACY

 

 It is hard to believe—for me at least— that an entire year has passed since the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The threat to our democracy didn't end with the shameful January Sixth attack on the Capitol and the attempted coup d’état staged by an insane, authoritarian-narcissist president and nearly one hundred fifty seditious lawmakers. On the contrary, democracy has never been under greater threat than it is right now.

A shocking number of GOP leaders—at a national, state and local level— are actively moving to support state to state legislation specifically designed to restrict and suppress voting rights, while continuing to foster insurrection by perpetuating the Big Lie. They are also avidly going after long-constitutionally-supported reproductive rights, religious freedom and, indeed, hard-fought women’s rights. But above all, they are overtly attacking minority rights that civil rights leaders have fought and sacrificed for since Reconstruction in the post-Civil War days, and which they had apparently won in the turbulent but democratically victorious nineteen-fifties and sixties Civil Rights era. While back then no one would have imagined that, less than sixty years hence the situation for civil rights would do anything but ever-improve, here we are, in a new era of Jim Crow politics—the worst since the post-Reconstruction era of the early twentieth century.

While their rhetoric might be crass, and often openly racist, sexist, xenophobic and unabashedly authoritarian, the methods all but a handful of GOP leaders are employing to sidestep the democratic process are somewhat more subtle. After losing the 2020 election, when the still rational, democratic majority of American voters and electors shouted a resounding “no!”  to a second four-year term for a president who had proven—not surprisingly to anyone familiar with his history—morally, constitutionally and mentally unfit to lead the United States of America, and who pushed the Republic over the brink to the point of near dissolution on one of the blackest days in the country’s history, these agents of authoritarianism are attempting to enact legislation that will make discrimination and voter suppression “legal”, despite its moral and constitutional illegitimacy. The idea is to blatantly gerrymander voting districts and limit voting tools in such a way that minorities of color and pockets of liberal Democrats will be robbed of any means by which to counter the far-right, or to win in the future when they will no longer be a minority, and when whites will become the new secondary ethnicity in America.

Not satisfied with pushing passage of state laws that, in the past as now, hide behind states’ rights as a means of defying historic Supreme Court decisions and, indeed, the Constitution, through legislation that flies in the face of civil freedoms and democracy, the GOP is also actively seeking to change the players in red states where Republican officials did their sworn duty in upholding the true results of the 2020 election. For having done what was right, ethical and legal, those elected and appointed Republican officials are being unceremoniously handed their walking papers. They are being replaced with officials that the GOP leadership at both the state and federal level hope—given a similar situation in the 2022 and 2024 elections, and indeed in all future elections—will put party over country and authoritarianism over democracy and fudge election outcomes, or simply rig the elections from the get-go.

To think that everything we are witnessing here is merely a democratically healthy difference of opinions is naïve and dangerous. Make no mistake about it: These GOP autocrats have been so reiterative and intentional in their bid to undermine democracy and promote single-party autocracy that, according to multiple opinion polls, something like four out of every ten Republican voters actually believe that the 2020 election—one of the most transparent and scrutinized in the country’s history—was rigged and that Donald Trump should be the current president.

The members of the GOP leadership who continue to promote this Big Lie—the same way that Nazi leaders did in their successful bid to dissolve German democracy and install themselves and Hitler as the only political power in that nation—for their part, cannot honestly believe for a minute that the 2020 election was “stolen” from their party. They have all of the data necessary to know that this is a bald-faced lie. Their repeated statements supporting that myth are, then, the height of cynicism, born of a quest for perpetual political power. Their actions and inactions make it absolutely clear that they are perfectly willing to end the two-and-a-half-century experiment in democracy that is the United States of America—once the greatest democratic power on earth, but now a faltering, chaotic shadow of its former self—if it means clinging to power indefinitely.

On the road to their now clear goal, there will, hopefully, be staunch resistance. Unfortunately, this promises to pit democrats and autocrats against one another to an ever-increasing degree. That is why, for the first time since the eighteen-fifties, political analysts are weighing the very real possibility of a second American civil war. And what happened a year ago, during the January Sixth Insurrection, when an American president and nearly one-hundred-fifty of his lackeys in Congress, in cahoots with high-rating Fox News commentators, fostered the nearly successful overthrow of the prevailing democratic order.

But those conspirators’ continued machinations prove that there was no victory over violence and sedition on January Sixth, 2021. That was only the drawing of battlelines for a future showdown. Whether that showdown happens on the floor of Congress and in the Justice system or on the streets of the nation in renewed civil strife that pits one group of citizens against another will depend entirely on whether the Republican Party returns to its historically democratic path and Lincolnian principles or continues to present itself as a lawless cult of personality that has declared war on America’s traditional principles of freedom, equality, democracy, and the rule of law.     

THANK YOU MR. PRESIDENT

You don’t hear it much anymore, but there is a saying that every cloud has a silver lining. I’ve been thinking that perhaps that’s true even of the shameful events that we have just witnessed in the United States, where, for the first time in history, a sitting president sought to use violence, sedition and insurrection as a means of rejecting a peaceful transfer of power after he lost an election.

After giving it a lot of thought and, as the Spanish expression goes, consulting the matter with my pillow, I have decided that small-d democrats owe Donald J. Trump a debt of gratitude, so let me just say thank you for a few things that he has done.

Thank you, Mr. President:

 - For demonstrating clearly from Day One that your sole “policy” was to destroy every achievement accomplished by the previous administration, while taking credit for the economic recovery that it had fostered after the worst crash since the Great Depression. And, once that was underway, for also showing a complete and utter lack of respect for every basic American tradition and institution.

- For making it clear from the outset that you bought into everything that diminishes an erstwhile democratic country’s leadership and greatness: xenophobia, isolationism, radical nationalism, racism, religious discrimination, inequality, disrespect for science and education, and scorn for the rule of law.

 - For showing a crystal clear lack of any and all empathy by means of demonstrative actions such as separating migrant and refuge-seeking parents from their children for the “crime” of daring to seek a better life in a nation once known as the melting pot of the world and as a country that once took pride in being a nation of immigrants. And, furthermore, by locking those children in cages, often deporting their parents without them, then losing track entirely of the family ties between one and the other so that many, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of those minors had to be placed in foster care, with a full five hundred forty-five of them being lost—yes, lost!—without a trace, as only had previously happened in some of the world’s worst dictatorships.

 - For never even pretending to be honest. Telling lies one on top of the other, by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, lies so blatant and so provably false that they have actually been collected for posterity by fact-check nerds.

- For never making any attempt at disguising the fact that you didn’t believe in democracy or the rule of law. For praising some of the world’s worst dictators and considering them “strong” compared to democratic leaders whom you always sought to cast as “weak”.

 - For further underscoring your love of bad actors on the world stage, by not only praising and treating them with deference, but also by insulting and alienating practically all of our traditional allies, including the very closest ones, who have stood by us in the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance since World War II.

 - For providing proof positive of your contempt for urgent international efforts to keep the global environment from becoming uninhabitable in our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s lifetimes by pulling us out of the greatest climate accord ever developed and in the creation of which, the United States was instrumental. (See item one).

 -  For clearly expressing your disdain for world peace in general and in peacemaking in the Middle East in particular, by acting as if a nuclear treaty with Iran that was impeccably engineered, carefully negotiated, painstakingly debated and internationally orchestrated among numerous countries was just so much toilet paper stuck on your shoe, and scraping it off, leaving the rest of the world community to deal with the results. For empowering your friends in Saudi Arabia’s murderous dictatorial regime to foster the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen. For handing Syria over to Russia and its bloody puppet regime, whose leader, Bashar al-Assad, has slaughtered, jailed and tortured hundreds of thousands of his own people and created the world’s worst refugee crisis. Also for showing your true colors by first using courageous Kurdish fighters to help defeat the ISIS Islamic terror organization along the Syrian border and then abandoning them to their fate when your Turkish dictator friend  Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacked them ruthlessly in the void you left.

 - For blithely ignoring the COVID-19 crisis, seeking only to find “a silver bullet” vaccine before election campaign season began, but suppressing vital information, failing to provide timely distribution of medical equipment, ignoring the need for a national strategy to deal with the worst pandemic in a century, treating it only as an inconvenience for the success of your presidency and convincing your base that it was “fake news”, in the process rendering the US the worst-hit nation on earth, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided, and then downplaying the incredible achievement of two viable vaccines in just nine months—a world record—because they didn’t arrive in time to be useful to you in your run for a second term.

 - For warning us time and again that you would refuse to leave if you didn’t win a second term. That you would, in effect, cling to the power that you believed to be yours rather than that of the office entrusted to you. That you were willing to do whatever it took to remain—lie, cheat, steal, organize your own army of white supremacist fanatics. That even after a second term you might go for a third or even—like the Russian, Chinese and North Korean authoritarians you so admire—go for president for life.  (Bless our naïve hearts, we thought you were kidding)!

 - For trying to incite a populist coup by calling in your fanatics from all over the country and sicking them on the two houses of Congress that were in session to certify the election that you clearly and unequivocally lost by seven million popular votes and seventy-four electoral votes, thinking that you could halt the democratic process by force and that that would be enough for you to remain in power—that and a little help from a handful of autocrats in the Senate and a few dozen undemocratic interlopers in the House. For sparking, thus, the first invasion of the hallowed halls of Congress since the early eighteen hundreds when the British thought they could take back their lost colonies by terrorizing the American Legislature and adding a new Day of Infamy to the history of the United States of America.

 - For making clear your deep feelings for domestic terrorists springing from their mindless loyalty to you over their country—a senseless mob, who faced off with overwhelmed law-enforcement and held US representatives and senators hostage while ransacking the halls and offices of the Capitol Building, the most sacred and living symbol of American democracy—by telling them that you “loved them” and that they were “very special” to you. Just as you did during the Charlottesville riots, where you referred to them as “very fine people”.

 - In short, within your complete general lack of honesty, for never having been dishonest about who and what you were: a sociopath, a narcissist, a man who never has had an unselfish thought, a person with a twisted and broken inner child, an unprincipled, self-serving, undemocratic, un-American, autocratic, misogynistic, racist misanthrope who has given new and sad meaning to the idea that anyone can become the president of the United States.

Thank you for all of this, Mr. President, because perhaps the people of the United States, or at least the majority of us, have learned some valuable lessons springing from the Era of Trump:

 - That democracy cannot be taken for granted.   

- That while our institutions may be highly resilient, they are also vulnerable, and only as good as the people who exercise them.

 - That character matters in political candidates and the facts weigh more than “beliefs”.

 - That democracy and populist personality cults are opposites.

 - That no matter how the players and names may change the system must remain strong and inviolate.

 - That the office of the presidency can only be respected if the person exercising it respects it and is respectable.

 - That if the people we elect to office do not believe in America’s founding principles then we have misplaced our vote and our trust and they must be voted out of office or impeached for violating those sacred principles.

 - That appeasement breeds tyranny.

 - That checks and balances work as long as the people exercising them believe in them and enforce them.

 - That a military that is loyal to the Constitution and a Supreme Court that is firmly grounded in the rule of law are the last line of defense for democracy.

And, finally, that no matter how far-fetched a notion it may have seemed four years ago, the establishment of an authoritarian regime in the United States of America is only impossible if those whom we choose to lead us are unequivocally determined to protect us against it and to defend the Constitution in both letter and spirit.

 

AN ATTEMPTED COUP

 

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

Inciting insurrection

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

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

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

Shots fired! Members of Congress shelter in place

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

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

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

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

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

Secret Service members, guns drawn in Congress 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

LOEFFLER—HOW THE GOP’S GREAT WHITE HOPE MAY DO DEMOCRACY AN INADVERTENT FAVOR

As the Georgia run-off looms, there are a couple of things Georgians might want to remember about Kelly Loeffler. First, her racist dog whistles have gotten to the place where they are no longer such. They are now blatant, and coming through as loud and clear as the president's. After Rep. Ilhan Omar publicly expressed her backing for Loeffler's opponent, Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Georgia senator falsely claimed Omar had been seen “smiling and laughing while talking about al-Qaeda and 9/11”, and suggested that Congresswoman Omar should be removed from office because of her status as a Muslim and as a naturalized American born in Somalia.

The fact is that, whether Senator Loeffler likes it or not, Ilhan Omar is what the United States looks like—or at least, what it should look like, since conservatives are lately loath to talk about the great American “melting pot” of nations, races and religions that is the United States of America, and that was so often referred to, by politicians and journalists alike, when I was a boy growing up in the fifties and sixties. Ilhan is a former war refugee, who found security and freedom in America and is literally living the American Dream by running for and winning national office to represent her district in Minnesota. Omar is the first Somali-American, the first naturalized citizen from the African continent, and the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in Congress. She is also one of only two Muslim women the Legislature, a woman of non-Christian descent in a Christian-majority country that, nevertheless, champions—at least on paper—freedom of religion and separation of Church and State. She is, then, a textbook example of what the United States is supposed to be all about.

Rep. Ilhan Omar

Loeffler, meanwhile is the richest member of the Senate, bar none. The fifty-year-old senator has an estimated personal net worth of eight hundred million dollars, and commutes between her Atlanta home and Washington in a private jet that she reportedly bought for that specific purpose. Just before she was recently accused of insider trading for the sale of millions of dollars worth of stocks that stood to be hurt by the coronavirus pandemic, her net worth was reported to be “only” about half a billion.  

Questions of insider trading were raised because Loeffler sold off the vulnerable stock—some of which she owned jointly with her husband, billionaire Jeffrey Sprecher—the sixty-five-year-old founder and CEO of the Inter-Continental Exchange (ICE), a sixty-billion-dollar financial, and energy and commodities trading firm, and chairman of the New York Stock Exchange—the same day that she joined other senators at a classified briefing on the coronavirus outbreak. Th
e meeting took place before the seriousness of the pandemic was known to the public at large.

Kelly Loeffler

Although the Senate Ethics Committee looked into the matter and despite calls for an FBI probe, in a political world where Mitch McConnell reigns supreme, and with Trump hand-puppet William Barr then at the head of the Justice Department, officials found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to take disciplinary measures or to bring federal charges against Loffler. This, despite the fact that the public release in March of federal disclosure documentation showed that Sprecher and Loeffler had also purchased stock in a company that stood to gain from shelter-in-place orders that governors and mayors eventually issued as a result of the pandemic of which Loeffler had prior and privileged knowledge.  Meanwhile, her husband’s company has seen a twenty-two percent rally over the course of the pandemic.

The other thing that’s interesting to recall is that Loeffler has only been a senator since just before the start of the pandemic, since she was not elected to office. Indeed, she was appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in December of 2019 to complete the term of Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, who resigned his office early because of failing health. She would later bite the hand of Kemp by joining Trump in accusing the governor and his Republican secretary of state of rigging the election against the incumbent president in Georgia. She continues to refuse publicly to accept the fact that Joe Biden in president-elect of the United States.

Jeffrey Sprecher

Since taking office a year ago, Loeffler has apparently spent no time whatsoever considering a stance on any issue under Senate consideration, merely mimicking whatever Trump’s current tweets have indicated his policy was. This is true to such an obvious extent that the president has praised her for having a “one hundred percent Trump” voting record throughout her single year in Congress.

In recent days, however, this loyalty to the mad king Trump caught her on her back foot, since she had followed the lead of Mitch McConnell and other leading GOP senators in voting to cut benefits to a COVID-strapped nation in half, compared with the first stimulus bill which had provided six hundred dollars a week in unemployment benefits plus a one-time twelve-hundred-dollar check to the worst-hit segments of the population. While Democrats wanted to extend the jobless benefits at six hundred a week and provide a stimulus check of at least twelve hundred, if not expanding it to two thousand, McConnell Republicans posited that many unemployed people would make more staying at home than working at that rate—the point here being that six hundred dollars for a forty hour work week implies a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage and, let’s be honest, the business-beholden GOP didn’t want to give lower class non-union workers any big ideas. And, since they apparently live in a country-club bubble and have no idea (nor do they care) what’s happening even a block from the Capitol, let alone in lower-class America as a whole, they felt another twelve-hundred-dollar stimulus check was “excessive”. All of which Trump seemed to be on board with, as long as he could stick it to the Democrats.

But at the last minute, as a hollow bone thrown to his working-class base and as a means of kidney-punching Republicans, including McConnell, who had dared to admit (in the face of overwhelming evidence) that the president had lost the election, Trump suddenly, if only briefly, joined with Democrats in demanding a two-thousand-dollar stimulus check, vetoing the new stimulus bill that Loeffler had voted for in lockstep with the GOP leadership, thinking that in doing so, she was doing Trump’s bidding. Now, a couple of days away from the run-off that will define her political future, Trump has left her, with her feet dangling in the air, scurrying to explain why she voted to hack COVID crisis benefits to Georgians in half and is now seeking to disavow that vote, claiming, like Trump, to think the stimulus check should have been two thousand, when it’s too late to do anything about it, because the Senate leadership has spoken and Trump’s veto has been overturned.

If all of this means that both Loeffler and her fellow Georgia Republican David Perdue—who is spending the last days of his campaign in COVID quarantine—lose the run-off in Georgia, which it appears they well might, perhaps both Trump, with his mindless trash-talking about the Republican administration in that state, and Loeffler, by kowtowing to the president’s insane conspiracy theories instead of defending her own constituency, will have done an inadvertent service to democracy, by handing the Senate to the Democrats and forcing Mitch “Stonewall” McConnell to step down, after the most disgraceful administration in history.