Arizona Republic: Trump Meant to Empower White Nationalsts

If one traces Donald Trump's history, it soon becomes obvious that the man is a racist and has been one for decades. Be it racial discrimination 40+ years ago in Norfolk, Virginia, his fanning of the birtherism insanity against Barack Obama, or his accusations against young blacks in New York City all of whom were acquitted of any wrong doing, the man has shown himself to be a bigot time and time again.  Hence, his effort to establish a false equivalence between white supremacists and Neo-Nazis as in contrast to those who oppose racism and fascism should come as no surprise.  Now, with his pardon on Joe Arpaio, a man who engaged in brutal civil rights abuses Hispanics, Phoenix's Arizona Republic, a leading Arizona newspaper is calling Trump out for what he is in fact and stating the obvious: Trump is seeking to empower white nationalists and Neo-Nazis.  Here are editorial highlights:

While America was talking about tearing down monuments that offend historically oppressed people, Donald Trump effectively erected yet another one.

His pardon of Joe Arpaio elevated the disgraced former Maricopa County sheriff to monument status among the immigration hardliners and nationalists in Trump’s base.  This erases any doubt about whether Trump meant to empower them after the violence in Charlottesville.

Arpaio is their darling. Arpaio is now back on his pedestal thanks to their president.  This insult wasn’t a surprise. Trump told us it was coming during his rally-the-base speech in Phoenix Tuesday.  But that doesn’t lessen the sting or diminish the significance of Trump’s decision to put Arpaio back on the national stage.

Maricopa County had a bellyful of this showboat sheriff and voted him out of office last year. A federal court found Arpaio in criminal contempt for ignoring a judge's order in a long-running case over racial profiling of Latino motorists.  It was a dose of hard-won justice for a too-flamboyant sheriff who showed little respect for the Constitution as he made national news as an immigration hardliner – and let real crimes go uninvestigated.

Donald Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great. Many will characterize it as a slap to the Latino community – and it is. The vast majority of Latinos in Arizona are not undocumented, yet they all fell under heightened scrutiny as Arpaio honed his image.

The pardon was a slap to those who worked through the judicial system to make Arpaio accountable, too. It robbed the people hurt by his policies of justice – even before a judge could mete out a sentence. The pardon was a sign of pure contempt for every American who believes in justice, human dignity and the rule of law.

Arpaio was riding high in 2010 when then-Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070, a draconian law written to intimidate people. Then Arizona came to its senses. It recognized the dangers of scapegoating – or at least the economic risks of alienating a growing demographic group.

Then came Trump. He resurrected Arpaio’s rhetoric and made a hit on the national stage. He used Arpaio as a warm-up act during campaign rallies and modeled his own speeches on Arpaio’s rambling populist routine.

After Trump was elected, many hoped he would abandon his habit of appealing to the worst instincts of disaffected white Americans who have been left behind by economic changes that had little to do with undocumented immigration.  

Trump spent last week demonstrating that he wants to be president of the few.  By pardoning Arpaio, Trump made it clear that institutional racism is not just OK with him. It is a goal.  That should trouble every American who believes that our duty as a nation is to continue working on behalf of equal justice.

In another piece, the Arizona Republic looks at how the  Arpio pardon threatens the rule of law in America and gives us a preview of how Trump will use the pardon of family members and political cronies to thwart the Russiagate investigation.  What is most disturbing, is that a majority of Republicans support this trashing of the rule of law.  And let's not forget that evangelical Christians remain Trump's most loyal supporters.  Both groups have underscored their moral bankruptcy. 

The Reichstag Warning

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, history - some more recent and some from the more distant past - provides us with lessons and warnings.  At this perilous time in America's history, only the foolish ignore these warnings, especially with an unstable occupant in the White House who seemingly wants to rule American in manner akin to how Vladimir Putin now rules Russia.   Trump supporters whether due to indoctrination via Fox News or the lure of Trump/Pence appeals to racism and bigotry, do not want to see or hear these warnings.  Why, because ultimately, they demonstrate their complicity in the normalization of the reprehensible and what is nothing less than an assault on the rule of law and constitutional government. A piece in the New York Review of Books underscores the dangers that face the nation and the need for the majority of Americans to be on guard against any attempt that may be made to end civil rights in the face of a terror attack whether real or manufactured.  Note, that the Reichstag fire is now believed by some to have been started by the Nazis themselves and that Putin's secret police caused the "terror attacks" he that used to seize power.  Here are excerpts:

On February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. “There will be no mercy now,” he exulted. “Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.”

The next day, at Hitler’s advice and urging, the German president issued a decree “for the protection of the people and the state.” It deprived all German citizens of basic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly and made them subject to “preventative detention” by the police. A week later, the Nazi party, having claimed that the fire was the beginning of a major terror campaign by the Left, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections. Nazi paramilitaries and the police then began to arrest political enemies and place them in concentration camps. Shortly thereafter, the new parliament passed an “enabling act” that allowed Hitler to rule by decree.    

The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception. The American Founding Fathers knew that the democracy they were creating was vulnerable to an aspiring tyrant who might seize upon some dramatic event as grounds for the suspension of our rights. As James Madison nicely put it, tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency.” What changed with the Reichstag fire was the use of terrorism as a catalyst for regime change. To this day, we do not know who set the Reichstag fire: the lone anarchist executed by the Nazis or, as new scholarship by Benjamin Hett suggests, the Nazis themselves. What we do know is that it created the occasion for a leader to eliminate all opposition.

In 1989, two centuries after our Constitution was promulgated, the man who is now our president wrote that “civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.” For much of the Western world, that was a moment when both security and liberty seemed to be expanding. 1989 was a year of liberation, as communist regimes came to an end in eastern Europe and new democracies were established. Yet that wave of democratization has since fallen under the glimmering shadow of the burning Reichstag. The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror—real or fake, provoked or accidental—can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.

The most consequential example is Russia, so admired by Donald Trump. When Vlaimir V. Putin was appointed prime minister in August 1999, the former KGB officer had an approval rating of 2 percent. Then, a month later, the bombs began to explode in apartment buildings in Moscow and several other Russian cities, killing hundreds of citizens and causing widespread fear. There were numerous indications that this was a campaign organized by the KGB’s heir, now known as the FSB.

Putin blamed Muslim terrorists and began the war in Chechnya that made him popular. He thereafter exploited more terrorist attacks to consolidate his rule: three years later, Russian security forces ended up gassing to death Russian civilians in a botched response to an attack at a Moscow theater. Putin used the negative press coverage as a justification for seizing control of television. In 2004, after the Beslan massacre, in which terrorists occupied a school and killed a large number of parents and children during a violent confrontation with Russian forces, Putin abolished the position of elected regional governors. And so the current Russian regime was built.

Once an authoritarian regime is established, the threat of terrorism can be used to deepen repression, or indeed to promote it abroad. In 2013 and 2014 the Russian media spread hysterical reports about a non-existent Ukrainian terrorist threat as the Russian army prepared and then fought a war in Ukraine. In 2015, Russia hacked into a French television channel, pretended to be ISIS, and broadcast messages apparently intended to frighten the French population into voting for the National Front, the far-right party financially supported by Russia (and whose leader, Marine Le Pen, is expected to reach the second round of the French presidential elections to be held this April and May).

It is aspiring tyrants who say that “civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.” Conversely, leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse.

If we know the history of terror manipulation, we can recognize the danger signs, and be prepared to react. It is already worrying that the president speaks unfavorably of democracy, while admiring foreign manipulators of terror. It is also of concern that the administration speaks of terrorist attacks that never took place, whether in Bowling Green or Sweden, while banning citizens from seven countries that have never been tied to any attack in the United States.

It is alarming that in a series of catastrophic executive policy decisions—the president’s Muslim travel ban, his selection of Steve Bannon as his main political adviser, his short-lived appointment of Michael Flynn as national security adviser, his proposal to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—there seems to be a single common element: the stigmatization and provocation of Muslims. In rhetoric and action, the Trump administration has aggrandized “radical Islamic terror” thus making what Madison called a “favorable emergency” more likely.

If we face again a terrorist attack—or what seems to be a terrorist attack, or what the government calls a terrorist attack—we must hold the Trump administration responsible for our security. In that moment of fear and grief, when the pulse of politics might suddenly change, we must also be ready to mobilize for our constitutional rights. The Reichstag fire has long been an example for tyrants; it should today be a warning for citizens. It was the burning of the Reichstag that disabused Hannah Arendt of the “opinion that one can simply be a bystander.” Best to learn that now, rather than waiting for the flames.

Mitch McConnell's Effort to Muzzle Coretta Scott King.

Click image to enlarge

As I have noted before on this blog, I lived in the Mobile, Alabama area from 1977 to 1981.  Back in that time period, Jeff Sessions was Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and was considered reactionary even by many wealthy conservatives. Things did not get better with time with Sessions. While I was still living in Mobile, a 19 year old black man named Michael Donald was murdered in what was the last recorded lynching in the United States. Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, and hanged his body from a tree.  Session's office did not prosecute the case, but both men were arrested and convicted.  Subsequently, due to the efforts of Thomas Figures, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Mobile, FBI agent James Bodman, and Michael Figures, a state senator and civil rights activist, the killers were ultimately arrested over two and a half years after the murder and were prosecuted, with one receiving the death penalty.After dropping the ball on the Donald case, Sessions prosecuted three black community organizers in the Black belt of Alabama, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s former aide Albert Turner, for voter fraud, alleging tampering with 14 absentee ballots. The prosecution stirred charges of selective prosecution of black voter registration. The defendants, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted of all charges by a jury.

Fast forward to this week and hearings on the nomination of Sessions to the office of Attorney General of the United States are taking place (sadly, Senate Republicans confirmed him). During the hearings Senator Elizabeth Warren sought to read into the Senate record a 1986 letter written by Coretta Scott King (see the image above) who, based on the facts recited above, held Sessions in low regard.  Mitch McConnell, among the most despicable and hypocrisy filled members of the Senate invoked an arcane Senate rule to silence Warren.  A piece in Slate makes the case that McConnell - who clearly hates Warren - was most motivated by his desire to muzzle the words of Coretta Scott King.  Here are article highlights:

By design, the U.S. Senate is a deliberative body in which members have every opportunity to speak their minds on the subject at hand. There are exceptions tied to decorum: Attack or impugn a colleague and the chamber reserves the right to strip speaking privileges from the offending member. On Tuesday night, it did just that to Elizabeth Warren. . . . This extraordinary step was initiated by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader. What did Elizabeth Warren say? How did she “impugn the motives and conduct” of the senator from Alabama? She read a letter. Specifically, Warren read from a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the subject of then–federal prosecutor Jeff Sessions, submitted in opposition to his nomination for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. It was because of the letter that McConnell sought to silence Warren. And it’s in revisiting that letter that we can see how McConnell was right to be shook. Not because King was mistaken, but because her 30-year-old indictment of Jeff Sessions is now an indictment of the entire Republican Party. In Sessions, King saw a throwback to the Jim Crow officials who fought to disenfranchise black Americans throughout the South. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge," wrote King in her 10-page statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which ultimately rejected Sessions in a 10–8 vote with two Republicans joining eight Democrats in voting against Ronald Reagan’s nominee. “Mr. Sessions’ conduct as U.S. Attorney, from his politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights law, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.” King went on to describe Sessions’ role in pursuing and prosecuting a trio of black voting rights activists in Perry County, Alabama:

“Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists ... who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among Blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. The only sin they committed was being too successful in gaining votes.”

King detailed clear abuses of authority, from selective prosecution—ignoring allegations of similar behavior by whites—to pressuring and intimidating witnesses. “Many elderly blacks were visited multiple times by the FBI who then hauled them over 180 miles by bus to a grand jury in Mobile when they could more easily have testified at a grand jury twenty miles away in Selma. These voters, and others, have announced they are now never going to vote again,” King wrote.

For McConnell and his Republican colleagues, King’s critique of Sessions’ work was a personal attack. He saw this well-grounded accusation of racism as worse than the actions it described. And so he called for silence.

Despite the pivotal role the letter played in Sessions’ confirmation hearing in 1986, the then-chair of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, never entered it into the congressional record. Now that we have the letter, however, we can see how relevant it is not just to Sessions’ bid for the attorney general’s office but as a judgment on the Republican Party as a whole.