Historian: Almost Inevitable that Trump Will Attempt a Coup

Perhaps many of us are growing accustomed to the normalization of the reprehensible and destruction of political norms after 100 days of misrule by Der Trumpenführer, Reichsmarschall Pence, and his propaganda ministers.  As I speculated over the weekend, perhaps Trump lacks the self-discipline and consistent ideology to be another Adolph Hitler.  But one historian sees Trump as a continuing danger to American Democracy.  Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, is the award-winning author of numerous books including the recent “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” and a new book, "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.”  Snyder, in fact believes that Trump will attempt a coup as he finds himself unable to increase his popularity and unable to pass any meaningful legislation be it good, bad or indifferent.  A piece in Salon looks at why Snyder sees a continuing threat.   It also tells us that we must resist and not dive into the flow or become complacent.  Here are excerpts:

American democracy is in crisis. The election of Donald Trump feels like a state of emergency made normal.

Trump has threatened violence against his political enemies. He has made clear he does not believe in the norms and traditions of American democracy — unless they serve his interests. Trump and his advisers consider a free press to be enemies of his regime. Trump repeatedly lies and has a profoundly estranged relationship with empirical reality. He uses obvious and naked racism, nativism and bigotry to mobilize his voters and to disparage entire groups of people such as Latinos and Muslims.

Trump is threatening to eliminate an independent judiciary and wants to punish judges who dare to stand against his illegal and unconstitutional mandates. In what appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, Trump is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself, his family and his inner circle by peddling influence and access to corporations, foreign countries and wealthy individuals.

How long does American democracy have before the poison that Donald Trump and the Republican Party injected into the country’s body politic becomes lethal?

Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University . . . . explores how the American people can fight back against Donald Trump’s incipient authoritarian regime.

The Greeks understood that democracy is likely to produce oligarchy because if you don’t have some mechanism to get inequality under control then people with the most money will likely take full control.

With Trump, one sees the new variant of this where a candidate can run by saying, “Look, we all know — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — that this isn’t really a democracy anymore.” He doesn’t use the words but basically says, “We all know this is really an oligarchy, so let me be your oligarch.” Although it’s nonsense and of course he’s a con man and will betray everyone, it makes sense only in this climate of inequality.

As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism. . . . . Another thing that’s clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.

In your book you discuss the idea that Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler’s Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government by declaring a state of emergency. How do you think that would play out?

Let me make just two points. The first is that I think it’s pretty much inevitable that they will try. The reason I think that is that the conventional ways of being popular are not working out for them. The conventional way to be popular or to be legitimate in this country is to have some policies, to grow your popularity ratings and to win some elections. I don’t think 2018 is looking very good for the Republicans along those conventional lines — not just because the president is historically unpopular. It’s also because neither the White House nor Congress have any policies which the majority of the public like.

Whether it works or not depends upon whether when something terrible happens to this country, we are aware that the main significance of it is whether or not we are going to be more or less free citizens in the future.

My gut feeling is that Trump and his administration will try and that it won’t work. Not so much because we are so great but because we have a little bit of time to prepare. I also think that there are enough people and enough agencies of the government who have also thought about this and would not necessarily go along.

The thing that matters the most is to realize that in moments like this your actions really do matter. It is ironic but in an authoritarian regime-change situation, the individual matters more than [in] a democracy. In an authoritarian regime change, at the beginning the individual has a special kind of power because the authoritarian regime depends on a certain kind of consent. Which means that if you are conscious of the moment that you are in, you can find the ways not to express your consent and you can also find the little ways to be a barrier. If enough people do that, it really can make a difference — but again only at the beginning.

You have to accept there is a time frame. Nobody can be sure how long this particular regime change with Trump will take, but there is a clock, and the clock really is ticking. It’s three years on the outside, but in more likelihood something like a year. In January 2018 we will probably have a pretty good idea which way this thing is going. It’s going to depend more on us than on them in the meantime. Once you get past a certain threshold, it starts to depend more on them than on us, and then things are much, much worse. It makes me sad to think how Americans would behave at that point.

Every day you don’t do something, it makes it less likely that you will ever do something. So you’ve got to get started right away. “On Tyranny” is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. There are plenty of other great ideas from people coming from other traditions, but the basic thing is you have to change your protocol of daily behavior now.

Don’t obey in advance because you have to start by orienting yourself against the general drift of things. If you can manage that, then the other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016. You have to set your own habits now.

I hope he's wrong, but I can all to easily see Trump using a national emergency real or manufactured - to seize power, mussel the media and curtail civil rights. 

Why the GOP War on Democracy Must be Stopped

This blog has looked at the Republican effort to subvert the Electoral College in several posts, but  many readers still underestimate the danger this effort poses.  If successful, thanks to previously gerrymandered districts, majority rule would simply no longer matter.  A future president could win the White House even though his/her opponent won millions of more votes.  Democracy in effect would be dead in America.  What makes the situation even more frightening is that the party pushing for this disingenuously crafted de facto revolution is the party of racism, greed, religious extremism and open bigotry against millions of Americans.  It is the most serious threat to democracy as I have known it in my lifetime.  America now has wealthy disparities worthy of a banana republic of old.  If the GOP succeeds our system of government will also reflect the rigged elections of the former banana republics.  One can only hope that American wake up to the threat and begin their assault on the GOP immediately, beginning in states like Virginia which have elections this year.  The bastards MUST be voted out of office.  They are literally a threat to democracy.  A piece in Daily Kos quantifies the threat we are now facing.  Here are highlights:

Republicans can't win national elections anymore, having lost the popular vote in five of the last six, and with demographics shifts moving solidly against them, rather than try to better represent the will of the American electorate, they're instead going to try to break the system so that the will of the American electorate no longer matters. And it would be perfectly legal, because we choose our presidents through the Electoral College, and there are very few rules about how the electors are allocated. Make no mistake: This is a war on the very concept of democracy and republic. This is a war on the very nature of our system of governance. If it succeeds, it will tear this country apart.

Last week, while much of the country was focused on President Obama's second inauguration, or was distracted by a three-day weekend, a quiet coup by Virginia state Senate Republicans disappeared a Democratic state Senate seat. Virginia's upper house is evenly split, but with Sen. Henry L. Marsh III in Washington for the presidential inauguration, the Republicans used his absence and a party line vote to approve a new redistricting plan that eliminates a Democratic Senate seat, thus giving themselves a likely more permanent majority, beginning in 2015. But that was only the beginning of what they want to do. Virginia's Republicans have an even more cynical plan for 2016:

A Republican-backed bill that would end Virginia's winner-takes-all method of apportioning its 13 electoral votes in presidential elections cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday.

How would the new system work?

The bill would apportion electors by congressional district to the candidate who wins each of the state's 11 districts. The candidate who carries a majority of the districts would also win the two electors not tied to congressional districts.

And what would it have meant, last November?

Last fall, President Barack Obama carried Virginia for the second election in a row, making him the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win Virginia in back-to-back presidential elections. For his victories, he received all 13 of the state's electoral votes.Under (the Republican sponsor's) revision, Obama would have received only four Virginia electoral votes last year while Republican Mitt Romney would have received nine.

President Obama won Virginia by 149,298 votes, or 3.88 percent, yet under this new Republican plan he would have won less than half of Virginia's electoral votes. Whatever you want to call it, that is not democracy, it is not the will of the people, and it is antithetical to every precept by which representative government is supposed to work.
Think about what it would do to this country, and what it would tell the rest of the world. President Obama won the national popular vote by close to 5 million votes, but if the Republican plan had been in effect Mitt Romney might now be president. No matter your political allegiance, if you believe in such basic concepts as democracy and representative government and will of the people and fair elections, such a plan should leave you not just angry but infuriated and aghast. Unless this effort is buried, it should be the issue and the the story, because nothing even approaches it in importance. Every political issue is by it trumped, because it would trump every issue, and in countless cases countermand what the people of this nation want done on the issues.

Unless this effort is buried, all elected Democrats must understand and act on the reality that Republicans with this effort are proving they are neither responsible nor responsive, and that their every pretense of patriotism and honor is nothing but a lie. The danger of this effort cannot be overstated. And if it is allowed to happen, it is a certainty that if on election night 2016 a Republican has by these rigged rules stolen the presidency despite losing the popular vote by millions, the traditional media will shrug it off, just as they shrugged off the later proved stolen election of 2000. But this would be so blatant that even the traditional media's best efforts wouldn't be able to obfuscate it. It would tear the country apart, as every person of principle and conscience awakened to the reality that the dreams and ideals of democracy and republic were dead. But it would be too late. It would be legal, even though the rule of law itself no longer would have any basis in popular consensus.

The time to speak out is now. This can only succeed if done quietly, in the shadows. Already, Florida Republican leaders are backing away from the idea, and the more Americans hear about it, the more they will be outraged by it. Regardless of partisan affiliations, you can be sure that the vast majority of Americans still has a basic sense of fairness, and a respect for the ideals by which this country is supposed to work. The time for Democratic leaders to speak out is now. The time for Republican leaders to be forced to take public stands for or against representative government is now. All Americans of conscience and integrity must stand up and be heard, or anything good and just about the American system of government will fall and be silenced.

Continued Turmoil at UVA and in Charlottesville

The backlash against the coup lead by Helen Dragas to fire University of Virginia president Teresa Sulliavn continues to roil the University and the City of Charlottesville which is dominated by the University.  Faced with Gov. Bob McDonnell's ultimatum that they fix the mess by Tuesday or be removed the members of the Board of Visitors who thought so highly of themselves have certainly reaped a well deserved whirlwind.  While state financial support of the University of Virginia has dwindled to a pittance give the GOP controlled Virginia General Assembly's anti-tax and ant-knowledge agenda, Ms. Dragas and her fellow conspirators forgot that UVA is still nevertheless a PUBLIC university.  Actions that one can get away with in a privately owned corporation - like the one Dragas inherited from her far more diplomatic father - simply do not fly in a public university context.  Adding to the uproar is the Richmond Times-Dispatch report that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges will be contacting the University to ensure that it is in compliance and can remain accredited.  Ms. Dragas and her henchmen truly need to go NOW.  An article in the Washington Post looks at the continued controversy.  Here are highlights:

While the leadership limbo continues at the University of Virginia, the verdict from students on the ouster of President Teresa A. Sullivan is clear: They feel angry, bewildered and betrayed.

Most of the university’s 21,000-plus students have dispersed across the state and the globe for summer break. But they have made their collective frustrations heard here loud and clear. What’s driving them is more than just admiration for a popular president.

News of Sullivan’s ouster, which reached most students via mass e-mail nearly two weeks ago, has prompted strongly worded Facebook posts, chiding tweets, trips back to campus to protest and lobbying campaigns.

A student-led “Rally for Honor” is scheduled for Sunday afternoon on the university’s iconic Lawn.

Why such intensity?  .   .   .   .  the actions this month of the governing Board of Visitors don’t square with how decisions are typically made at U-Va., several student leaders said. They say they are not accustomed to being caught off guard by major university changes. This is a school where admissions tour guides rave about the “community of trust,” where students refer to founder Thomas Jefferson as if the third U.S. president were a close friend and where those caught cheating on homework face the judgment of their peers, not administrators.

“It seemed that almost everyone kept going back to this notion that what had unfolded just doesn’t happen at U-Va.,” said Stephen Nash, chairman of the Honor Committee, a 170-year-old student-run judiciary system that upholds the university’s code of honor. All students pledge not to lie, cheat or steal, and the committee holds them to that.

The Honor Committee issued a statement last Sunday that chastised the governing board for creating “an environment that is inconsistent with the value of trust that runs through the very fabric of our University.”

The words “trust,” “integrity,” “honor” and “community” have been used repeatedly as students have tried to pinpoint why this situation has struck a nerve.

At other times when controversy has struck at U-Va. — such as the case of former student George Huguely V, convicted this year of murder in the death of his ex-girlfriend, classmate Yeardley Love — most students and faculty have refused to talk to reporters.  Not this time.

“When there’s one entity that isn’t part of the community of trust, that hurts that community. People begin to talk about it,” Vroom said. “It’s logical to me that there would be such an outcry.”

Anti-Gay Hate Crimes Surge in Honduras

In the six months since its president was deposed in a coup, human rights advocates say that anti-gay brutality and the murder of gays in Honduras has surged. As I made mention in an earlier post last week on this topic and the murder of LGBT activist, Walter Trochez, one of the groups thought to behind the coup is the Catholic Church. It is disturbing to me personally to think that in the land of my mother's birth, I could be callously murder with the Church backing the murderers and the government doing nothing. It is a sick and disgusting situation that again makes me wonder whether a world without institutionalized religion might not be a far better place. UPI has coverage on the surge in murders of gays since the coup. Here are some highlights:

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TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, Dec. 21 (UPI) -- Up to 18 gay and transgender men have been killed in Honduras in the six months since its president was deposed in a coup, human rights advocates say. That is as many homophopic hate crimes as were recorded in the Central American country the prior five years, The Miami Herald reported Monday.
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Activists contend the killings are a result in a breakdown in the rule of law in Honduras since the ouster of former President Manuel Zelaya. The Herald reported that HIV-positive gay activist Walter Trochez was slain last week, just days after escaping a six-hour kidnapping ordeal, in a crime indicative of the dangers facing not only gays but Zelaya's supporters.
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`Walter was afraid," Reina Rivera, director of the Center for the Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights, told the newspaper. "He was a leader in the (pro-Zelaya) Resistance, but we thought he was in a precarious situation because he was also HIV-positive and gay in a patriarchal, machista and homophobic society."

More on the Coup Bush/Cheney Have Worked in the USA

I posted about this phenomena before, but found this great run down of the facts on Andrew Sullivan's blog (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/11/a-quiet-coup.html). It is important just how badly the U. S. Constitution has been subverted by this regime, all with little real resistance. It is yet another example of how Hitler came to power in the 1930's: no one paid attention until it was too late. Here is the main factual summary:

The facts are as follows: this president believes that he is not ultimately subject to the rule of law in waging war since 9/11; he believes he can ignore any laws passed in this respect - even those passed with veto-proof majorities if necessary - by signing statements, whose frequency has soared under the Cheney-Bush presidency; he believes that the parameters of the war powers include the territory of the United States and every citizen of the United States; he believes he has the right to seize any individual in this country or the world without charging them and hold them indefinitely or subject them to kangaroo military courts where basic due process protections are absent; he has clearly authorized the torture of many individuals using this power, while redefining the word torture against the plain meaning of the term in law and in English. He has done all this with barely any real push-back from the Congress and only minimal interference from the Supreme Court which he has bolstered with Justices who uphold great deference to the executive branch in wartime.

And all these emergency powers - sanctioned by the notion of an emergency and defended with references to previous emergencies (such as the Civil War and the Second World War) - are, unlike in the past, indefinitely awarded to the executive branch, because this war is against an amorphous entity that by definition cannot surrender. And so we have transformed emergency powers - controversial even under those circumstances - into the permanent balance of power in American democracy. If this is not a quiet coup, what would be? And why should conservatives, of all people, support and enable this assault on the constitution and individual liberty, in the name of a war against an abstract enemy that will never be defeated? Has anybody ever read "Nineteen-Eighty-Four"?

What has been allowed to occur is down right frightening. Under different circumstances and in an earlier time, Bush would be potentially facing impeachment, if not treason charges.