Saturday, August 05, 2023
Friday, August 04, 2023
The Trump/GOP Threat to Democracy Is Now Systemic
The long-awaited federal indictment of Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election may be necessary to contain the threat to American democracy that he has unleashed. But it’s unlikely to be sufficient.
The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.
With polls showing that most Republican voters still believe the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests.
The most telling measure of that dynamic inside the GOP is that Trump remains the party’s central figure. Each time GOP voters and leaders have had the opportunity to move away from him—whether in the shock immediately after January 6, or the widespread disappointment over the poor performance of his handpicked candidates during the 2022 election—the party has sped past the off-ramp.
Polls now show Trump leading in the 2024 GOP presidential race by one of the biggest margins ever recorded for a primary candidate in either party. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has been exploring ways to expunge his two impeachments and/or block the investigations he faces. Even the other candidates ostensibly running against him for the 2024 GOP nomination have almost uniformly condemned the indictments against him, rather than his underlying behavior.
While the key state-level Republicans rejected Trump’s direct demands to invalidate the results in their own states, most House Republicans voted to reject the election results and most Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to decertify the outcome in the key swing states won by President Joe Biden. In the election’s aftermath, the majority of Republican-controlled states, inspired by Trump’s baseless claims of endemic voter fraud, passed laws on a party-line basis making it more difficult to vote, or increasing partisan control over election administration.
U.S. history has no exact precedent for a party embracing a leader so openly hostile to the core pillars of democracy. Presidents have often been accused of violating the Constitution through their policy actions, he said, but there is not another example of a president moving as systematically to “manipulate the apparatus of government or elections in order to subvert the will of the people.”
The closest parallel to Trump’s actions, Wilentz said, may be the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War. Those included violent attacks on abolitionists, suppression of antislavery publications, and the promulgation of extreme legal theories such as the denial of basic rights to Black people in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, all of which were designed to protect slavery against the emerging national majority dubious of it. That decades-long “antidemocratic thrust” from the South, Wilentz noted, “finally culminated in the greatest violation of the American Constitution in our history, which was secession.”
[T]he GOP’s continued embrace of Trump amid the evidence of his misconduct contrasts sharply with the party’s refusal to defend Richard Nixon in the final stages of Watergate. “When Richard Nixon was about to be impeached, he didn’t storm the Capitol to get rid of Barry Goldwater,” Wilentz said, referring to the conservative Republican senator who warned Nixon that he would lose a Senate vote to remove him. “He resigned.”
All of this suggests that personal accountability for Trump is unlikely to erase the tolerance for antidemocratic actions that has spread in the GOP since his emergence. Yet many experts who study the health of democracy still believe that prosecuting him remains essential. . . . . it is crucial to show the “silent majority” of Americans who support the constitutional system that no one is above the law. “They need to see that the Department of Justice prosecutors are willing to take the risk of indicting Trump,” Parker told me. “They need to see the election workers ensuring that people get their vote counted. They need to see the police officers standing up to the rioters. They need to see people within the system working.”
[F]ailing to indict Trump would have been far more dangerous, because such a decision would have suggested that there is no effective way to hold presidents accountable for misbehavior. Neither of Trump’s two impeachments really damaged his position in the party, Waldman noted, in part because virtually all GOP elected officials defended his behavior. But the multiple criminal indictments facing Trump, he said, show that “the criminal-justice system still is producing tangible legal consequences” that future presidents cannot brush off as easily as an impeachment.
[T]he trials of hundreds of January 6 rioters already demonstrate that prosecution can have some deterrent effect. . . . “The fact that this stuff is not just a bad idea but illegal and you can go to jail for it really makes a big difference,” Waldman said.
John Dean, the White House counsel whose Senate testimony helped doom Nixon during Watergate, also considers prosecution of Trump to be “essential,” he told me. President Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon and preempt a trial, Dean said, was “a historical disaster,” because it emboldened presidents to believe they would never face criminal charges for their actions. Allowing Trump to avoid consequences, Dean believes, would send an even more dangerous signal than Ford did with Nixon. “Trump’s corruption is so much more fundamental to the system than Nixon’s,” Dean said.
Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election required the cooperation of many other GOP officials and conservative activists and lawyers. Now a growing number of them face consequences of their own, including disbarment proceedings, ongoing state and local investigations, and the potential of further federal charges from Special Counsel Jack Smith against the six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the Trump indictment. . . . Republican operatives and activists may hesitate as the evidence mounts that participating in an attempted coup puts you in legal jeopardy. That’s important, because Trump can’t carry out his plots by himself.”
Yet although all these possible sanctions create legal reasons for the GOP to resist another Trump-led attack on democracy, the party’s political incentives point in the opposite direction. . . . . the more immediate danger is that Republicans won’t accept any presidential race they lose. Traditionally, presidential nominees from each party, including Al Gore and John McCain, have made statements in which “the losing side specifically affirms the legitimacy of the winner,” Nyhan said. But for the GOP next year, he added, “we can no longer take that for granted whether or not Trump is the nominee, and that’s really worrisome.”
Trump may constitute a unique threat to America’s democratic traditions. But he has always connected his claims of pervasive electoral fraud to the widespread anxiety among white, Christian conservatives that they are losing control of the country to a racially diverse, secular, and LGBTQ-friendly Democratic coalition centered in the nation’s largest cities.
Whether Trump is convicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election or not, voters who accept that argument will remain the most powerful force in the GOP coalition. And they will continue to demand leaders who will fight the changes that they believe threaten their position in American society. . . . Republican leaders may not attempt to overturn an election as brazenly as Trump did with the conduct Smith catalogs in his indictment. But, as Wilentz told me, for the foreseeable future, they are likely to pursue other means “toward the same end: that majoritarian democracy cannot be tolerated under any circumstances if the outcome is not what you wanted it to be.”
Be very afraid of what the GOP may try to do moving forward as their base shrinks and normal democratic efforts fail to allow them to remain in power.
Thursday, August 03, 2023
The Republican Party Leadership's Moral Abyss
The latest indictment of Donald Trump - this time for trying to organize a coup to overthrow the 2020 election - underscores what has been obvious for years now to moral, decent people who believe in the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, namely that Trump is a menace to the nation and is the poster boy of moral bankruptcy. These people who recognize Trump for the cancer that he and his followers are on America are the true American patriots, not Trump's unwashed, hate and grievance filled MAGA base or congressional Republicans who talk of patriotism yet continue mouth countless apologies for Trump if not outright aid and abet his lies and crimes. Given the details of the newest indictments - Jack Smith likely has more damaging evidence that will come out at trial - the question again becomes whether or not the GOP can save itself from the moral abyss supporting Trump embodies or whether the GOP is truly now the party of immorality and demagoguery notwithstanding its alliance with "conservative Christians" who have made it clear they are in no way followers of Christ despite feigned piety and false displays of religiosity. A piece in The Atlantic and another at CNN look at the moral cliff the GOP stands atop, ponders whether the GOP is beyond saving, and how moral people need to regard Trump's continued supporters. First, these highlights from The Atlantic:
Donald Trump stands indicted for attempting to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and subvert the rights of American citizens. This is the moment that will decide our future as a democracy.
Over the past year, state and federal prosecutors have alleged that Donald Trump went on something like a crime spree as a presidential candidate, as the sitting president, and then as a private citizen after his defeat. The charges, from Manhattan to Mar-a-Lago, include business fraud, the illegal retention of classified material, and the destruction of evidence.
All of these accusations, however, pale in importance next to the indictment handed down today.
Trump is accused of multiple conspiracies against the United States, all designed to keep him in power against the will of the voters and in violation of the Constitution. The former president . . . is accused of knowing that he lost a free and fair election, and, rather than transferring power to a duly elected successor, engaging in criminal plots against our democracy, all while firing up a mob that would later storm the Capitol. (The Trump campaign issued a rambling statement that called the charges “fake.”).
Long before now, however, Americans should have reached the conclusion, with or without a trial, that Trump is a menace to the United States and poisonous to our society.
The GOP base, controlled by Trump’s cult of personality, will likely never admit its mistake: As my colleague Peter Wehner writes, Trump’s record of “lawlessness and depravity” means nothing to Republicans. But other Republicans now, more than ever, face a moment of truth. They must decide if they are partisans or patriots. They can no longer claim to be both.
The rest of us, as a nation but also as individuals, can no longer indulge the pretense that Trump is just another Republican candidate, that supporting Donald Trump is just another political choice, and that agreeing with Trump’s attacks on our democracy is just a difference of opinion.
I have long described Trump’s candidacies as moral choices and tests of civic character, but I have also cautioned that Americans, for the sake of social comity, should resist too many arguments about politics among themselves. I can no longer defend this advice.
The indictment handed down today challenges every American to put a shoulder to the wheel and defend our republic in every peaceful, legal, and civilized way they can. According to the charges, not only did Trump try to overturn the election; he presided over a clutch of co-conspirators who intended to put down any further challenges to Trump’s continued rule by force.
This is why we can no longer merely roll our eyes when an annoying uncle rhapsodizes about stolen elections. We should not gently ask our parents if perhaps we might change the channel from Fox during dinner. We are not obligated to gingerly change the subject when an old friend goes on about “Demonrats” or the dire national-security implications around Hunter Biden’s genitalia. Enough of all this; we can love our friends and our family and our neighbors without accepting their terms of debate. To support Trump is to support sedition and violence, and we must be willing to speak this truth not only to power but to our fellow citizens.
Trump and his media enablers, of course, will fume that any criticism of choices made by millions of voters is uncivil and condescending—even as they paint other American citizens as traitors who support pedophiles and perverts. Trump has made such accusations, and the implied threat of violence behind them, part of the everyday American political environment. This brutish bullying is aimed at stopping the rest of us from speaking our mind. But after today, every American citizen who cares about the Constitution should affirm, without hesitation, that any form of association with Trump is reprehensible, that each of us will draw moral conclusions about anyone who continues to support him, and that these conclusions will guide both our political and our personal choices.
The piece at CNN continues this theme and the reality that both the media - always so wrapped in false equivalency - and decent people need to shun those who continue to support Trump and his acolytes. Here are excerpts:
For most of my life I have identified myself as a Republican and, with few exceptions, have voted the same. But I now find that the GOP leadership of today is unrecognizable when compared to the party I supported enthusiastically during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
I was Bush’s minister for the last 11.5 years of his life, and had occasion to witness the rectitude with which he approached governing and that guided his views on politics. But men like him are in short supply. A GOP that once welcomed character, decency and morality is sinking quickly into an abyss. These days, the party values polls and raw power more than principle and probity.
How unlike Bush is the severely morally challenged GOP of today, with failings that eclipse even those of former President Richard Nixon. We are where we are largely because of former President Donald Trump, with his history of sex abuse, shady corporate business deals, abuse of presidential office to attack his perceived enemies — and other transgressions too numerous to name. Yet, for some reason — either by design or default — the GOP is failing to hold him to account.
Wallace asked [RNC Chairwoman] McDaniel whether the Republican Party would have a problem nominating a presidential candidate who is under federal indictment or who is a convicted felon. The GOP chairwoman fumbled, stumbled and diverted so much that she sounded like a toddler trying to explain an advanced calculus problem. In the end, the best answer she could come up with was “It’s not up to me. It’s up to the voters. They’re going to make their decision.”
It was as egregious as missed opportunities go — but it was just one of many by leaders of my party. The GOP’s elected and appointed leaders have decided — either by design or default — that voters must remain sheeplike as they ignore the moral dangers of Trump’s antics. The collective leadership of the GOP appears willing to stand by, hands on hips, witnessing the party’s descent into the loutishness of Trump and his acolytes. It may take a generation or more for the party to recover from the looming disaster — if it recovers.
What’s needed now is full-throated condemnation of the former president from members of his party.
It was the summer of 1974, after the scales of devotion to disgraced Nixon had fallen from his eyes. In the midst of the Watergate crisis, [George H.W.] Bush, who at the time was GOP chair (the same position now occupied by McDaniel), wrote in his journal that he was making a clean break with Nixon over Watergate.
“I want to make damn clear the lie is something we can’t support. But this era of tawdry, shabby lack of morality has got to end… because what we need at this juncture in our history is a certain sense of morality and a certain sense of decency,” he wrote in August 1974.
Even Nixon had enough of a moral compass to understand when it was time to leave office and not put his own interests above that of his party or the nation — especially when party leaders were showing him the door.
Trump, by contrast, has pledged that if convicted, he will continue to pursue the presidency — yet another example of that sheepdog on the edge of the cliff, giving little thought to the disaster he would be setting into motion.
If you are a Republican like me who hopes to prevent this impending disaster, do not count on the current leadership of the GOP to do the job.
We in the party can do infinitely better for ourselves. More of the same will only lead Republican voters hurtling down a precipice and into a pit of ethical nihilism — led there by the poll-leading but immoral former president.
If, instead of the bottom of the abyss, you are seeking to return the Republican norms and values that our party once embodied, then turn the page with me and offer a hearty amen to a great, late president Bush — and Republican presidential contenders cut from a similar cloth who still understand the importance of grace, morality, decency and dignity. It is there that we will find our party’s future leader.
Wednesday, August 02, 2023
Trump: Indicted At Last for January 6th
Late yesterday the federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., investigating the January 6, 2021, coup attempt by Donald Trump and his co-conspirators handed down four indictments against Der Trumpenfuhrer. It is what many decent Americans not brainwashed by Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and its imitators or lusting for power in order to inflict their hate and prejudices on the nation have long awaited and in some cases feared would never come. It is both a sad and an inspiring development for the democracy and America. It is sad because never before did voters put anyone as corrupt and dangerous in the White House and/or someone so willing to destroy democracy in order to stoke his own ego and avoid accountability. It is an inspiring day in that it demonstrates that perhaps America's legal system will do what far too many Americans refuse to do as they remain cult-like followers of a truly evil and morally bankrupt individual: hold Trump accountable for his crimes. Trump will lie and claim he is being persecuted - and seek more money contributions from the stupid and those who only care about their hatreds and prejudices - and frighteningly many Republicans will repeat the lies and further prostitute themselves to Trump. But just maybe a sizable majority of voters will vow to make sure Trump never, ever darkens the door of the White House again. A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican looks at yesterday's developments. Here are highlights:
Some Americans thought this day would never arrive. Many doubted that Attorney General Merrick Garland possessed the boldness and wherewithal to overcome historically risk-averse career staff at the Justice Department. He certainly did not move swiftly to investigate the effort to concoct phony electoral college slates after the 2020 presidential election.
But now, in one swift blow, special counsel Jack Smith has defended the rule of law — and made history.
On Tuesday, a federal grand jury indicted former president Donald Trump for his role in the 2021 Capitol insurrection. Those concerned with the fate of our democracy should appreciate the magnitude of the charges laid out in the indictment. All Americans should savor a sense of relief that the Justice Department is seeking to hold everyone involved in the coup plot accountable under the law.
Trump has spent his life evading responsibility for his conduct; within the space of a few months, he has been indicted three times in criminal court and held liable in civil court for defaming and sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.
[T]he four-count indictment contains no exotic charges. Trump is charged under Title 18, Section 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States; Section 1512, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; and Section 241, conspiracy to “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Six co-conspirators were not named but they appear to include former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, who assisted in the phony elector scheme. Smith identified seven states in which the fake elector scheme operated.
In describing the campaign to pressure Mike Pence to change the election results, the indictment contains specific allegations regarding the then-vice president’s pushback, including his conversations with Trump. Pence apparently gave Smith critical testimony. While not alleging that Trump instigated violence, the indictment asserts he “exploited” it. . . . It documents, as did the House Jan. 6 committee, Trump’s inflammatory tweet claiming Pence didn’t have the “courage to do what should have been done.”
If special counsel Smith can prove that Trump and one or more other people conspired to block the counting of ballots, that could serve as a stand-alone Section 241 charge in an indictment. If not its own charge, then the scheme to stop the counting of ballots can form the basis for the initial part of the overall charged scheme to deprive Americans’ voting rights in the 2020 presidential election.” In the indictment, Smith does not specify which people were deprived of the right to have their vote counted, but one can assume it includes those in states that Trump tried to steal.
Smith did not overcharge nor clutter the indictment with repetitive charges. He appears intent on keeping the case relatively simple. Simple does not mean unserious, however. Choosing not to bring the dicey charge of sedition or conspiracy to commit sedition, Smith nevertheless captures the enormity of the crime — the assault on our democracy.
Now, unlike in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, Trump will face a judge he did not appoint, in a circuit that has shown little to no sympathy for his delaying tactics or absurd claims of privilege. The court will likely move expeditiously, although it remains an open question whether a trial can start, let alone finish, before Election Day in 2024.
Three overriding issues should not be lost in the legal weeds.
For starters, if Trump ran for president under the mistaken notion it would protect him from prosecution, it was a colossal miscalculation; instead, his decision forced Garland’s hand, drawing into the case an incorruptible, aggressive and determined prosecutor who, in roughly eight months on the job, filed two mammoth criminal cases against the former president. Had Trump not declared his candidacy, the Justice Department might still be “working it way up the chain” in its Jan. 6 investigation. Trump remains his own worst enemy.
Second, Republicans have a fundamental choice: Do they nominate a thrice-indicted criminal defendant who sought to overthrow our democracy? General election voters will not avert their eyes from the blizzard of facts or the seriousness of the charges. If Republicans proceed with Trump, they become the party of insurrection and deceit. The GOP will be stained for a very long time by sticking by Trump’s side.
Third, Smith has done his job — faster and more completely than even his most ardent supporters expected. The judge and jury will be expected to follow their oaths. But it is up to the voters to make certain an abjectly unfit character never assumes power. There is no shirking that obligation, no matter what the results in court.
All praise certainly goes to Smith for halting the hemming, hawing and general lack of initiative evident in the Justice Department’s early approach to investigating Trump. . . . . It’s all the more remarkable since he had to bring a separate case based on the Espionage Act.
But before memory fades, we cannot forget the work of the House Jan. 6 committee, its staff and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who pushed forward by appointing two admirable Republicans to the committee after Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) yanked his members.
It was the Jan. 6 committee that first presented the country with a coherent view of the coup, brought forth witnesses such as former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson and scores of other Republicans to describe the coup plotting; showed how Trump and his cohorts endangered the lives of poll workers; and explained that Trump knew militia men were armed when he egged them on to the Capitol. They put all the pieces together in a compelling narrative.
After the entire country saw evidence of the conspiracy set forth by the committee, the Justice Department would have been hard pressed to justify declining to prosecute. In short, the Jan. 6 committee made this week’s jaw-dropping developments possible. Democracy is in their debt.
Tuesday, August 01, 2023
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