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Category Archives: Donald Trump
Donald Trump with his American carnage agenda is finally on his way out
From insurrection based on a Big Lie to death on a scale never before seen in our country, Donald Trump is finally on his way out.
One year after the first case of COVID-19 diagnosed in the United States 24,246,230 Americans have been infected and 401,553 have perished.
Joe Biden has a steep hill to climb.
(Image: Seth Abramson on Twitter.)
Police and service members in Capitol mob raise security questions for Biden inauguration
The U.S. Army said that Jacob Fracker – one of the two off-duty Virginia police officers who have been arrested on federal charges related to the Capitol riot – is a corporal in the Virginia National Guard.
The disclosure of Fracker’s status as a guardsman comes as thousands of National Guard service members, some of them armed, provide security in and around the Capitol in the wake of the deadly riot Jan. 6.
Yes, police “have First Amendment rights.” And in a well-disciplined police force, as in a well-disciplined military unit, organizational solidarity may matter more than a member’s attraction to groups and ideologies on the extreme fringes of society. The center holds.
McVeigh, a decorated Gulf War vet, didn’t blow up the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people, until after leaving the military. That explosion was 25 years ago: before the nation’s first Black president served two terms, before Donald Trump’s election and (nearly complete) one term, before white terrorist groups became emboldened and increased their numbers, before QAnon was even a thing, and — yes — before a Republican president embraced, energized, and enabled white nationalists.
The violence at the Capitol on January 6 (with all that came in the months before) raises the live possibility that the police and the national guard may harbor potential security threats to the president-elect and other officials, as well as guests, at the inauguration.
Mark this as one more consequence of the campaigns, election, and tenure of Donald Trump. The once unthinkable has become a ghastly possibility.
[Update:] “Twelve National Guard troops deployed to Washington ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration were flagged during background checks and have been sent home, Defense Department officials confirmed Tuesday, offering scant details as to what raised suspicions about them.”
(Image of Jacob Fracker and Thomas “T.J.” Robertson from CNBC.)
Most Republicans refuse to hold Donald Trump accountable, even after assault on the Capitol
Since the 2016 inauguration, most Republicans — if they didn’t step up to defend and support him — have dodged and weaved, made excuses, changed the subject, ducked reporters and declined to comment, when confronted with norm-busting outrages by Donald Trump. Throughout four years of aberrant presidential behavior, there have been a handful of GOP critics who objected forthrightly to one discrete thing or another, but then retreated into silence (and acquiescence); other Republicans have (at most) tut-tutted about tweets, overlooking every other crash through the guardrails of democracy. Virtually all Republicans serving in the Senate and the House — whether voicing occasional murmurs of disapproval or not — hardly ever strayed from the Trump-GOP party line. They were willfully blind to Trump’s off-the-rails conduct.
The Republican Party has never been willing to hold the President accountable for his actions. Not even when national security was as stake — from choosing Putin over the Intelligence Community in Helsinki, to betraying American allies in Syria, to extorting the Ukrainian president, to refusing to utter a word of criticism regarding Russian bounties on American soldiers or cyberattacks on government agencies and corporations — the pattern has been to let it slide. Trump made implementing tax cuts and packing the courts possible. Republicans kept their heads down, celebrated their partisan victories, and endeavored to preserve their careers.
At this stage — four days after Trump instigated the crowd that assaulted the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election — the pattern hasn’t changed one whit. There are a handful of GOP critics who have taken their leader to task, while the vast majority of Republicans have stayed silent, sought to deflect Trump’s sedition by changing the subject, and absolutely refused to hold him accountable.
(The pattern looks different but only because of a handful of names, including four Senators: Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, Lisa Murkowski, and Ben Sasse. Yes, their voices have our attention, but this is still a small number of Republicans. Turning to the House, few Republicans — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger stand out — have objected to Trump’s anti-democratic rampaging.)
Look no further than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. On Friday, he issued a statement that condemned “the violence, destruction, and chaos that unfolded at the Capitol on Wednesday” as “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American.” He said he had spoken with Trump (after the rioting had unfolded) to advise him that “he had a great responsibility to intervene to quell the mob and start the healing process.”
There is no further reference to Donald Trump in McCarthy’s statement, no suggestion that Trump paused to consider McCarthy’s advice, and not a hint that the President bears any responsibility for the violence he encouraged. McCarthy (with most Republicans) has let Donald Trump off the hook.
The Minority Leader hasn’t acknowledged that the rioters were Trump supporters of all stripes, from (what passes for) mainstream Republicans to fringe groups and true believers who revere the President.
Donald Trump has waged a months-long campaign to challenge the integrity of the election; to hurl baseless charges of fraud; to press, through established legal channels as well as through rogue, illegal, and corrupt efforts without precedent in American history, to overturn a democratic election. After Georgia officials refused to bend to Trump’s will, he turned to the ceremonial certification of the Electoral College vote in Congress. While Vice President Pence declined to play along with the Trump script, and a violent mob could only delay the count, Senate and House Republicans got on board to challenge the results in several battleground states that Trump lost.
McCarthy’s January 8 statement acknowledges none of this, though I submit that Trump’s campaign has been “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American,” the tactics of a wannabe strongman, not the elected leader of a free country. McCarthy doesn’t acknowledge that Donald Trump bears the least responsibility for any of this.
McCarthy’s statement appeals to President-elect Joe Biden to “work together to lower the temperature and unite the country to solve America’s challenges.” And he doesn’t spare high-flown rhetoric in his statement:
The coronavirus is still coursing through our communities, businesses and workers are facing unprecedented stress, and children are falling behind. Threats from adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran are increasing. As leaders, we must call on our better angels and refocus our efforts on working directly for the American people. United we can deliver peace, strength, and prosperity our country needs. Divided, we will fail.
In a statement a day earlier, the Majority Leader acknowledged his role in casting doubt on the integrity of the election. He noted that “millions of Americans” questioned that integrity, without referencing the role of the President, Congressional Republicans, and conservative media in spreading lies. He further proclaimed the challenges served “to ensure that our country follows an accurate and accountable process.” He doesn’t note that after the Trump mob trashed the Capitol, McCarthy (and 139 of his House colleagues, plus 8 Senators, Republicans all) returned to the chamber to challenge the integrity — without any factual basis — of the election results in Pennsylvania.
Never mind McCarthy’s role in the campaign to delegitimize the election; never mind doubts about the sincerity of his appeal to unity. What is indisputable is that McCarthy declines to ascribe responsibility to Donald Trump for either the welter of lies regarding the election or the full-court press to overturn the results.
In the Senate, Marco Rubio’s stance is instructive. While Rubio, a perennial weathervane in the Republican caucus, stood with the majority of his colleagues in rejecting the challenges, he is not prepared to hold Donald Trump responsible for his anti-democratic crusade. Instead, Rubio has decided to change the subject. He has gone on a tear, first criticizing Biden’s comments — which “makes everybody blow up and go back in their corner” — and which equally characterized Rubio, who never left his corner. Then the next day he turned his attention to a perennial Republican grievance: Rubio tweeted that Twitter, in banning Trump, would “only stoke new grievances that will end up fueling the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent,” another charge that applies equally to Rubio and his tweets.
Senator Rubio, like Kevin McCarthy, is loath to even nod to the possibility of holding Donald Trump accountable.
We shall see, if and when the Democratic House moves to impeach Donald Trump, what fraction of Republicans acknowledge Trump’s role in delegitimizing and seeking to overturn a free and fair election, which culminated in the attack on the Capitol. I suggest — based on recent history — that there will be no more than a handful.
January 11 updates: David Frum called out Rubio for a hedged and contorted statement on the violence in the senator’s 4-minute “blame-everybody-but-me video” (which I hadn’t seen) that “joined 20 seconds of forthright condemnation to nearly four full minutes of blame shifting and excuse making.” The video consists of shameless grievance-mongering. There are two passing references to Donald Trump, but the principal blame for the attack on the Capitol falls on Trump’s and Rubio’s political opponents.
Jonathan Bernstein weighed in on Republicans’ retreat “to the flimsiest of defenses against impeachment and removal,” defenses that “say nothing about whether the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and nothing about whether his offenses are so grave that they demand the extraordinary action of impeachment and removal in the last days of his term. Surely that’s what matters, not whether standing up for the republic is divisive or hurts the feelings of those who oppose it.”
(Image: Sky News.)
Who do you believe? Donald Trump (+GOP leaders, Fox News, Levin, Limbaugh…) or your own eyes?
Sixty-six percent of registered voters blame Donald Trump (either a great deal, 55%, or somewhat, 11%) for the storming of the Capitol building. The consensus of opinion is hardly surprising: Trump was there. He had urged his supporters to come to the Capitol on January 6 — “Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted — after spending months crying fraud after losing the election decisively to Biden (a “fake president”), trying to overturn the results in court after court, in appeals to governors, state legislators, secretaries of state, and others. He implored the crowd of his supporters on January 6:
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down–
We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol–
And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
He meandered through a string of lies about the results of the election, made-up charges of voting fraud, complaints of disloyal Republican officials, and — despite his pledge to march with the crowd — drove directly back to the White House. The revved-up Trump enthusiasts took it from there.
Only 28% of Republicans blame Trump for the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. Instead, a majority — 52% — of Republicans blame Joe Biden: 35% place a great deal of blame on Biden, while 17% say he is somewhat to blame.
There’s nothing in the water that Republicans drink that explains this perception. Rather, Republican voters are — unsurprisingly — listening to the national leadership of their party: the President, Republican senators and members of Congress, and most emphatically, Fox News Channel, along with conservative talk radio and websites on the right trafficking in alternate facts. And these sources have been on a raging campaign of disinformation for months, with nary a dissenting voice.
This is their tribe. And though it was folks at the Trump rally, waving Trump flags (American flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags) and banners (“Stop the steal,” “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President,” “Unleash the Kraken,” “Q”), and enthusiastically cheering Trump on, who marched to the Capitol, broke through police lines, smashed through doors and windows, and trashed the place — Joe Biden (the fake president), the man who somehow, someway stole an election (without leaving a trace of evidence), was responsible.
To come to any other conclusion contradicts what these voters are convinced they know. For certain. After hearing it day in, day out.
The message from the most influential source (apart from Trump himself) — Fox News Channel — for those in the bubble, is delivered slickly, professionally, with the look and feel of a genuine news report — with clear intent to deceive. When the actual news is inconvenient, shift attention to something else (even something manufactured out of whole cloth).
Kevin Drum offers a summary of the disinformation technique as mastered by Laura Ingraham:
In a nutshell, it goes like this:
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- Introduce scary story about minor state legislation that has no chance of ever going anywhere.
- Invent out of whole cloth a segue into racism as a public health issue.
- Conclude that liberals want to lock up white people they disapprove of.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the pros do it.
Editor’s note: more to come.
(Image above headline: ABC News.)
The nation is at the mercy of a raging Donald Trump — with a strong assist from the GOP
In the past week, Donald Trump, who has shrugged off most of his responsibilities as president (while he watches TV, talks to folks who encourage his crusade against the election results, and golfs — and, yesterday, decides to take off for Mar-a-Lago), has found ways — nearly every day since the election — to keep the attention of the media on himself, as well as to breach the guardrails of American democracy in unprecedented ways.
With cascades of lies and howls of grievance, Trump has fought against the fact of his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. Last Friday, he hosted a White House meeting (described as “raucous” by the New York Times, which broke the initial story) featuring conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell (whom Trump considered naming special counsel to investigate voter fraud); retired Lt. General Michael Flynn (who recently suggested on Newsmax that Trump declare martial law, so battleground states he lost could have do-over elections); and, by phone, Rudy Giuliani (who has advocated that the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines as a step to overthrow the election). White House chief of staff Mark Meadows (former chair of the House Freedom Caucus and no slouch when it comes to disruptive far-right antics) pushed back with White House counsel Pat Cipollone (who appealed to the Constitution) against Flynn and others.
Trump has turned on his closest allies (Senators McConnell and Thune and Vice President Pence), after previously attacking Georgia’s governor and election officials, and even Fox News Channel; dismissed the significance of the recent sprawling cyberattack and endeavored to shift blame from Vladimir Putin’s Russia; and threatened to unravel legislation to provide overdue relief to Americans during an economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the spotlight shifts inevitably toward Joe Biden, Trump satisfies his craving for attention, rewards those he deems loyal, and lashes out at those he faults for disloyalty. Trump is still president for four more weeks. He can wield power in ways unprecedented in American history. No one else has departed the presidency as he is doing. His avalanche of shady pardons and commutations is a case study in Trump’s governing style.
With few checks on the president’s pardon power, Trump can enjoy instant gratification with the stroke of a pen. He can pardon and commute sentences without the cooperation of Congress, the courts, or any executive branch department. This power is his alone to use as he sees fit.
Unique among American presidents, Trump has dished out pardons overwhelmingly to his friends, political allies, and family members. George H.W. Bush pardoned Casper Weinberger and other Reagan officials caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, while Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and Marc Rich (the big money donor who had fled the country to escape prosecution). These, though, were exceptions, neither routine, nor representative of the pardons granted by either Bush or Clinton.
Among the crooks, grifters, scofflaws, and war criminals whom Trump has pardoned or whose sentences he has commuted, the vast majority have had a connection to Trump; or they have benefited from special pleading by friends, family, celebrities who have Trump’s attention, Republican members of Congress, and conservative media, led by Fox News Channel.
Last month, Jack Goldsmith, law professor at Harvard noted:
First, of the 41 people who received pardons or commutations (or both) from Mr. Trump, 36 (or 88 percent) have a personal or political connection to the president. They advanced an aspect of Mr. Trump’s political agenda, knew the president personally (or had a connection to someone close to him), were someone he learned about on television (usually on Fox) or a celebrity he admired. By contrast, only five of Mr. Trump’s pardons lacked a personal or political connection and appeared to be vetted through the traditional Justice Department clearing process. No president has come close to using the pardon power in such persistently self-serving ways.
That pattern, with Trump’s recent pardon spree, hasn’t changed. And yesterday’s White House announcement was especially noteworthy.
Paul Manafort—Today, President Trump has issued a full and complete pardon to Paul Manafort, stemming from convictions prosecuted in the course of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, which was premised on the Russian collusion hoax. Mr. Manafort has already spent two years in prison, including a stretch of time in solitary confinement – treatment worse than what many of the most violent criminals receive. As a result of blatant prosecutorial overreach, Mr. Manafort has endured years of unfair treatment and is one of the most prominent victims of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American history. As Mr. Manafort’s trial judge observed, prior to the Special Counsel investigation, Mr. Manafort had led an “otherwise blameless life.” Since May, Mr. Manafort has been released to home confinement as a result of COVID-19 concerns.
Roger Stone— Today, President Trump granted a full and unconditional pardon to Roger Stone, Jr. President Trump had previously commuted Mr. Stone’s sentence in July of this year. Mr. Stone is a 68-year-old man with numerous medical conditions. Due to prosecutorial misconduct by Special Counsel Mueller’s team, Mr. Stone was treated very unfairly. He was subjected to a pre-dawn raid of his home, which the media conveniently captured on camera. Mr. Stone also faced potential political bias at his jury trial. Pardoning him will help to right the injustices he faced at the hands of the Mueller investigation.
With the stroke of a pen, Trump’s defiance of the Mueller investigation is complete. The many successful convictions expose the White House lies (attesting to a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”), but Trump has triumphed in the end. The cover-up — ensuring that neither Stone, nor Manafort turned on Trump, and in exchange are let off the hook — has to rank as one of the greatest successes of the Trump presidency.
It also represents a blow against democracy. The Constitution provides means to check a president. In the past four years, the Republican Party — with control of the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court — has been intent on ensuring that Donald Trump would evade the most significant checks on his power. The Senate, especially, has enabled and emboldened him.
We’re living with the consequences of the Republican Party’s decision. Our country — with a rampaging president who won’t accept the results of a democratic election, and who brandishes his power to distort the rule of law to benefit himself — increasingly resembles a tin pot nation, not the world’s oldest democracy. The Republican Party has embraced this authoritarian model, which will have repercussions long past the next 30 days.
(Image: CNN on YouTube.)
Trump is obsessed (on Twitter) with losing the election, but can’t be bothered to do his job
“December is shaping up to be the U.S.’s worst month of the pandemic by a significant margin . . .”
“First-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 853,000, an increase from the upwardly revised 716,000 total a week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting 730,000.”
“Days after several US agencies confirmed their networks were compromised in a massive data breach, federal officials are still struggling to understand the scope of the damage — highlighting the sophistication and breadth of an ongoing hacking campaign that has been tied to Russia.”
What’s Donald Trump thinking about? Let’s look at a sampling of the 34 tweets and retweets he has blasted out in the past 24 hours: The great majority related to his bogus claims that he won the election (“We won Wisconsin big. They rigged the vote,” “We won the Presidential Election by a lot,” and “Just released data shows many thousands of noncitizens voted in Nevada.“), including a Washington Examiner report of Peter Navarro’s 36-page report on “voting irregularities“; complaints about “so-called ‘Republicans,‘ ” in Georgia who won’t agree to “give us the State“; and no less than ten tweets and retweets commending Tommy Tuberman, who heaps praise on Trump and “may save the Republic” by disrupting the Electoral College count in January as a man of courage, in contrast to Republican senators who lack toughness.
Trump also offers swipes at the Supreme Court and the New York Times, insists that “I have NOTHING to do with the potential prosecution of Hunter Biden, or the Biden family. It is just more Fake News,” and offers more than one tweet each regarding Liz Cheney, Peter Strzok (adding a complaint about “the Russia hoax), and a Daily Caller report of a move to strip Lincoln’s name from a high school. Trump’s nod to legislation is a threat to veto the defense bill, which mentions Lindsey Graham’s attacks on social media companies.
Trump’s references to the pandemic (“the China virus”) include four tweets on the vaccine, including the approval of Moderna’s candidate and praise for the FedEx and UPS drivers delivering the doses across the country and three retweets of Buck Sexton, who couches his insistence that “Masks work” is no more than a mantra and his ridicule of California’s failures to stem the rate of infections as defenses of freedom of speech.
Trump references the economy — that is, the rising stock market, not unemployment or struggling businesses on Main Street — once (one of his four tweets referencing the vaccine): “All-time Stock Market high. The Vaccine and the Vaccine rollout are getting the best of reviews. Moving along really well. Get those “shots” everyone! Also, stimulus talks looking very good.”
He hasn’t tweeted (or spoken of) the Russian incursion into U.S. government and corporate databases, much less offered criticism of Putin’s mischief or assurances of taking any action to counter the threat.
Thirty-three days to go until January 20. Joe Biden will have his hands full.
(Image from “Donald Trump: A Study in Leadership.”)
Is it time for a Barr reappraisal? Not a chance.
A headline at TPM’s Editor’s Blog asks, “A Barr Reappraisal?” and suggests an affirmative response from a reader, based on the recent report that the investigation of Hunter Biden, begun in 2018, was kept secret (from the press and the President). Reader JG suggests, since the investigation (if made public) “would have been weaponized in the campaign,” we must give Barr credit for keeping it under wraps. JG offers the view that Barr has used “DoJ as a shield for Trump, not a sword to go after political enemies.”
Josh Marshall is skeptical, “I need to see a lot more to convince me we’re getting the full or true story here. As it is the facts just run too counter to Barr’s tenure and that of the DOJ for the last four years. Something does not add up.”
I agree and suggest an alternative to JG’s view: Just because something could be “weaponized,” it doesn’t follow that it would be effective politically to weaponize it (as the Trump campaign certainly would have done). Bill Barr has reason to regard himself as a savvier operator than most of the sycophants surrounding Trump. It is hardly a stretch to believe that in his judgment revealing the indictment would have generated as many votes for Biden as for Trump. (Furthermore, Barr stayed out of the line of fire — from Democrats, the press, Trump, and Trump’s accolytes — by keeping the report quiet. There is little reason to think that any flak from a leak would have “effected a different outcome in the election,” to borrow a phrase.) And so Barr didn’t leak the report before the election.
Whether this pragmatic judgment is right or wrong, it’s defensible; and furthermore, given the evidence of the past year and a half, it’s a more plausible account of Barr’s motivation than the idea that he kept the indictment secret because ethical or professional or reputational constraints held him back.
It is far more likely that he saw no point in releasing the information, no clear advantage to the Trump campaign. It’s laughable, after all we’ve seen since Barr came on board, to think that leaking an investigation of Joe Biden’s son was a bridge too far for the A.G.
Last week, Bill Barr said, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” separating himself from Trump. While this is striking, in the sense that Barr has acted, at times, like another Trump sycophant. He is not and never was simply a Trump flunky.
Instead, he has been a devoted partisan of the Republican Party. That partisanship led to his defenses of the Republican president — when the the party’s and Trump’s interests coincided (fortifying a strong executive, undermining the Mueller investigation, pushing back against Nancy Pelosi’s House, and so on).
As I posted earlier, “Bill Barr is carrying water for the Republican Party ….” Trump’s interests (to salve his wounded ego and pump up his brand) and the GOP’s interests (winning two senate seats) diverged in a way that frightened the Republican Congressional leadership. So — placing party first, as he has always done — Barr separated himself from Trump.
There’s no paradox, no change of heart, no signs of “Barr’s limits” (in Marshall’s words). There’s an unflagging allegiance to the Grand Old Party. Same as it ever was for Bill Barr — going back decades.
(Image: Bill Barr and Donald Trump at the 38th Annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service via Wikimedia Commons.)
The Republican Party has become an authoritarian threat to our nation’s democracy
Since Election Day, State and Federal courts throughout the country have been flooded with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election. The State of Texas has now added its voice to the cacophony of bogus claims. Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees. Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for President is legally indefensible and is an afront to principles of constitutional democracy.
. . .
Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated. — Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
The quotation (the first and last paragraphs of the preliminary statement) is from Pennsylvania’s response to the suit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the Supreme Court to prohibit four battleground states where Biden beat Trump – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin – from appointing electors to the Electoral College based on the results of the election. Instead, Texas proposes a do-over, asking the court to order each of the four states to call a special election, which would determine the selection of electors.
Seventeen Eighteen states have joined Texas’s appeal.
One hundred and six House Republicans (over half the caucus) filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit. [Update: the number has reached 126.]
Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is seeking allies in the House (and Senate) to cast votes against official certification of the Electoral College results.
“In my judgment, based on what I know to be true, Joe Biden was the largest beneficiary of illegally cast votes in the history of the United States,” Brooks said in a phone interview with AL.com today. “And I can either ratify that illegal vote system, or I can object to it, in hopes that our election system will become more secure in future elections.”
Almost all Republicans in both the Senate and the House, including leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, continue to play along with Trump’s defiance of the election results, refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect.
A whining, blustering Donald Trump is throwing a tantrum over his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. The President of the United States is determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is acting openly, persistently, in plain sight.
Governors, legislators, attorneys general, party leaders, and others have heard from a desperate Trump, who has sought to have Republican-controlled state legislatures nullify the decision their voters made.
Though his efforts, in the courts and among state officials, to throw out votes have met with consistent failure, Trump’s rampage represents a frightening erosion of democratic principles and practices. Yes, state election officials have stood firm. (This time.) But this threat to democratic governance is far more consequential for having found such broad support across the Republican Party at the national, state, and local level.
The voices we are hearing are not marginal figures in the Republican Party. Nor are the elected Republicans who have chosen to give tacit backing to Trump’s fever dreams. This is the primary message of the party right now — weeks after the results of the election have become clear. What we are witnessing is not a fringe movement within the party. This fierce fight against democracy — against the sanctity of elections and accepting the possibility of victory by ones opponents — has been embraced by the Republican Party.
The GOP’s party line is beyond the pale — beyond reason, facts and evidence, and democratic principles. The Arizona Republican Party asks whether its followers are ready to give their lives for the fight against the Trump loss in a democratic election.
Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are the last candidates standing in the way of Democratic control of the Senate. While Perdue is in hiding, Loeffler’s campaign consists of repeating, like incantations, scary names for her opponent and an insistence that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
The campaign message in Georgia (an increasingly diverse state with enough Democratic constituencies to appear more like the nation, and less like the solid South that Republican pols have become used to) is the message of the national Republican Party.
And, unsurprisingly, the Republican majority of the Georgia state senate has responded to Trump’s loss with promises of investigations of “fraudulent activities,” “misconduct,” “criminals” (purported out-of- staters who may have infiltrated into the state to cast votes), and — of course — additional proposals to suppress the vote and reduce turnout in future elections:
The Republican Party, trafficking in “discredited allegations and conspiracy theories,” is furiously pushing back against the results of the 2020 presidential election.
That the grounds for overturning the election are flimsy, that the efforts are meeting with failure after failure, that it is tempting to regard the whole spectacle as pathetic and ridiculous — none of this diminishes the indecency of the GOP’s refusal to acknowledge the outcome of the election.
These are the actions of a political party that has become authoritarian. That transformation constitutes a grave threat to our democracy, to “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
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Grand old Party sees only traditional American politics as usual in Trump’s lies and rampages
President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election.
Hours before he is scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation. He also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do. — Amy Gardner and Colby Itkowitz, “Trump calls Georgia governor to pressure him for help overturning Biden’s win in the state”
More than 2,900 Americans died of COVID-19 on December 3, one month after the election. The death toll has topped 2,600 every day this month, while the United States leads the world in overall fatalities at more than 285,000. The President of the United States — who predicted that the virus would “disappear” and asserted that it would no longer be featured in the media after November 3 — has demonstrated complete indifference to the raging pandemic since his defeat in the election. Instead he throws holiday parties in the White House.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die (written during the first year of the Trump administration) suggest, “Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has been lying.” Certainly the man has proven to be a prodigious liar; as of October 22 — reflecting the most recent update — Trump had told more than 22,247 whoppers since the inaugural.
Note also Donald Trump’s disregard for the welfare of the American people and refusal to serve the public interest — as we can plainly observe — which constitute among the most egregious violations of the governing norms that other presidents have adhered to. We have, before Trump, taken for granted that our presidents were committed to acting in our best interests.
This president is hell-bent on evading the decision of the electorate to remove him from office and put Joe Biden in the White House. His torrent of lies, attacks, and conspiracy tales in recent weeks have focused on discrediting the electoral process, denying the outcome, and — as in his phone call to Governor Kemp — to overturning the decision of the people.
This behavior is straight out of the authoritarian handbook. Trump lost the election. His off the rails conduct to fend off this fact does grave damage to democratic institutions, Americans’ trust in the integrity of our elections, and the nation’s standing in the world.
This would all be bad enough. The damage is compounded by the complicity of the Republican Party, whose leadership (with few exceptions) has made the decision to go along to get along with the Republican in the White House. Consider the 249 elected Republicans in the House and the Senate:
The lies, the disregard of the public good, the defiance of a free and fair election — these are the acts of a would-be authoritarian strongman, not a leader committed to democracy — no matter the wishes of the Republican base.
As Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, it is political parties that sustain governing norms threatened by authoritarian incursions. Responsibility for opposing extremists, and upholding democratic institutions, falls on our political parties.
Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.
The Republican Party has absolutely failed to safeguard democracy. After limited efforts at constraining Trump fell short, the GOP has chosen to remain loyal to an erratic, reckless leader. To do otherwise, as Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, would damage careers. So:
. . . Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican Party, which has helped make it acceptable to much of the Republican electorate. . . . There is no “containment” strategy for an endless stream of offensive tweets. Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president, Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable.
Recall that this was written during Trump’s first year in office. By the end of 2020 — in a process accelerated following a near party-line vote to acquit an impeached president — the ongoing redefining required thrashing core democratic institutions, such as fealty to the results of free and fair elections; graceful, timely embrace of the peaceful transition of power; and (as outlandish as it appears today) doing what one could to ensure the success, for the benefit of the American people, of the incoming president. Instead, Trump is deliberately sabotaging his successor — through vindictive purges, frantic rulemaking, capricious national security actions, and — by doing nothing, except boxing Biden in – ensuring that both the raging pandemic and the faltering economy are far less manageable on January 20, than they are today.
All this — with the GOP’s silent blessing — has been redefined as American politics as usual. Citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concept of defining deviance down, Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, “in the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.”
The Republican Party, in the wake of Donald Trump, sees no scandals among its partisans (though mean tweets from Neera Tanden may threaten her cabinet appointment).
(Image: Trump in Georgia via NBC News.)