I’ve had this essay in the works since early fall, looking ahead—hopefully—to Trump’s departure. (And I do mean hopefully in the correct sense of the word.) 

Originally it was titled “The Case for Prosecution,” the idea being to argue for why holding Donald Trump account for his various crimes—both via impeachment and ordinary criminal prosecution, among other mechanisms—was in the best interest of the nation. Even in the fall that was not a super controversial position, although a second impeachment was not yet on the horizon, and there was some concern about the banana republic-brand pitfalls of an incoming administration pursuing legal action against its predecessor.

But the events of January 6th pretty much put an end to that debate. 

After watching Donald Trump openly incite a violent insurrection that sent a bloodthirsty mob into the US Capitol to murder Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and stop the certification of the Electoral College results (note to people emerging from comas, time travelers, and alien visitors from distant galaxies: yes, that really happened), most Americans agreed that he must be held accountable under the law one way or another.

According to an ABC News poll taken in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, 67% of the American public blamed Trump for it, and 56% thought he should be removed from office before the end of his term. According to an earlier poll by JL Partners and the Independent taken in October, about half of all Americans (49%) believed he ought to be investigated for criminal liability once he was out of office…..and that was before the insurrection. Afterward, that number rose to 54% who now think he should face criminal charges, according to a Washington Post/ ABC News poll. 

Of course, we don’t do things just because a majority thinks we should—the Framers built in some protections on that count. But those numbers speak to the vox populi and a mandate for justice. 

So you’d think that’s that. 

But you’d be wrong. 

Once again, the members of the Republican Party are engaged in a wantonly dishonest, howlingly hypocritical, anti-democratic crusade to shield themselves and their once and forever leader from answering for what they have done. 

Therefore let us spend some time surveying the case for accountability.

GIMME A ‘U’

By now we are all familiar with the Republican argument for giving Trump yet another free pass: that America needs “unity,” and that holding him accountable will somehow prevent us from “healing” and “moving on.”

That might be the most ridiculous and galling argument the GOP has put forward in five decades of world-beating deceit and dishonesty, going all the way back to Nixon’s claim to be the champion of “law and order,” with honorable mention for “tax cuts for the wealthy will help everyone.” 

Over the past few weeks, many many many many many many many pundits, observers, and other critics have taken that argument apart like a starving wolverine descending on a pork chop, so I’ll just summarize:

Cries for unity are rich coming from the party that just plunged this country into four of the most bitterly contentious years in contemporary American history, under the thumb of the most hateful, bigoted, and divisive president in modern times. But even if you accept that “unity” is a worthy goal, the Republican plea is transparently self-serving. Appeals for “unity” usually come from the guilty in an attempt to escape repercussions for their misdeeds, and this case is no exception. 

To state the blindingly obvious, there can be no unity without accountability. Period dot, end of sentence. 

Republicans argue further that Trump didn’t really foment a riot, and that crimes committed in the last two weeks of office don’t count; we’ll delve into these equally laughable defenses next week when we get into the weeds of the impeachment. But the main GOP thrust remains centered on this wildly disingenuous call for a rousing nationwide chorus of “Kum-ba-ya,” after playing “The Horst Wessel Song” at top volume for four years. 

Worth remembering: the liberal organization MoveOn arose in the Clinton years and is so named because its original argument was to censure Bill and “move on.” Note that it did not call for ignoring or excusing what he’d done, only that censure was more appropriate than impeachment. Republicans, by contrast, feel that their leaders never need to answer for their actions at all, no matter how egregious or even openly criminal. (Let’s recall that with Clinton the crime in question was one count of perjury over an extramarital affair—not violently trying to overthrow the US government.)

So no, we can’t just “move on” with no accountability at all.

It’s not merely a matter of justice, though that ought to be sufficient, but of deterrence going forward. Grant Tudor of the policy group Protect Democracy notes, “Moving on might make us feel better in the short term, but in the long term, sweeping really dangerous behavior under the rug and crossing our fingers that it won’t happen again has, time and again, proved to be a pretty dangerous strategy.”

That too should be apparent even to those Americans no more sentient than a tree stump. Of which it appear there are plenty.

As a group of more than a thousand historians and scholars wrote on Medium, “Throughout his presidency, Trump has defied the Constitution and broken laws, norms, practices, and precedents, for which he must be held accountable now and after he leaves office…..No future president should be tempted by the example of his defiance going unpunished.”

Even after January 6^th attack on the US Congress, some conservatives have continued to argue for impunity, like the writer Jonathan Rauch, who had a piece in Lawfare  titled “The Case for Pardoning Trump” in which he argued that “If we want Biden’s presidency to succeed, accountability to be restored and democracy to be strengthened, then a pardon would likely do more good than harm.” Ryan Cooper reporting in The Week, took that absurdity right apart:

This is an astoundingly terrible argument. Trump’s monstrous presidency was in no small part the product of previous elite impunity, and he should absolutely face legal liability as any other citizen would in his place.

Preach. 

ANOTHER COUNTY HEARD FROM

So is impeachment punishment enough, or do Trump’s actions demand both that and something more? The always incisive John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker:

In other democracies, a leader who tried to overthrow an election result and incited a violent insurrection might well be cooling his heels in prison by now. In this country, the job of policing the President falls largely on the legislative branch. For four years, it has failed dismally to carry out this task. Even after the unprecedented events of last week, it’s far from clear that Congress will prove up to the task now. But this time, surely, and for the sake of American democracy, Trump must be held accountable.

He is quite right, of course, as 45 Senate Republicans—all but five of their number—voted against even impeaching him. Luckily, elections have consequences and the new Democratic majority prevailed, joined by five Republicans who could muster the bare minimum of moral courage. But it looks highly unlikely that a two-thirds majority will vote to convict, despite being both eyewitnesses to and victims of the very crime for which they will serve as jurors.

That failure adds impetus to calls for criminal prosecution of Trump in the regular criminal justice system, as opposed to the purely political process of impeachment.

Ahead of Biden’s inauguration, The New York Times noted:

(M)any Democrats say that impeachment is not enough. Once President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office on Jan. 20, wide segments of his party are eager to see investigations and prosecutions of an array of Trump aides and allies—an effort, they say, that would bolster the rule of law after a presidency that weakened it and serve as a warning to future presidents that there will be consequences for illegal actions taken while in office.

(In June 2019, then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris told NPR she would definitely launch a criminal investigation of Trump after he leaves office.) 

But as you might imagine, Republicans who don’t think Trump ought to be impeached certainly don’t think he should stand trial like—gasp!—an ordinary criminal.

We expect Republicans to mount a dishonest, hypocritical argument for letting Trump skate. But what of Democrats and others who are taking that bizarre view?

Yahoo Finance columnist Rick Newman opined:

One thing seems clear: There would be no partisan unity under Biden if his Justice Department pursues legal claims against Trump that wind through the courts for years. There might not be any unity regardless, even if Biden lets Trump off the hook. But Biden won’t even get credit for trying if he turns over Trump’s tax returns or sends prosecutors after his predecessor. Anybody who voted for Biden hoping he’d offer an olive branch and lower the volume might think differently when they vote in the 2022 midterms or the 2024 presidential election.

Yes, because it’s up to Biden and the Democrats to heal the breach, while the QAnon Party continues to insist that the new administration isn’t even legitimate, and readies its hockey sticks and fire extinguishers (and guns) for the next violent attack on federal and state buildings.

Then there was Jim Comey, who even after the insurrection weighed in against punishing Trump, saying “The country would be better off if we did not give him the platform that a prosecution would for the next three years.”

Thanks, Jim, but after October 28, 2016, I’m not sure I need to hear even one more word from you ever again. 

In an op-ed for NBC News, Michael Conway, a Democrat and former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, goes even further, arguing that Biden should himself pardon Trump in the interest of unity: 

A Biden pardon of Trump, like the pardoning of former President Richard Nixon 46 years ago, would be intended to heal the nation and foreclose the possibility of an ongoing cycle of retribution after political parties change control of the government.

Let’s spend a little time with this argument, as Mr. Conway’s piece is an absolute howler of bad advice, especially coming from an accomplished attorney and Democratic operative, suggesting an old man wildly out of touch with contemporary America. (Conway, like Biden, is in his 70s.) 

He starts off OK, writing:

Trump would, of course, be one of the least deserving recipients of a federal pardon in history. His pardon could not be justified based on his innocence or his contrition because Trump is not contrite; to the contrary, he is currently endangering our democratic processes by relentlessly undermining the legitimacy of Biden’s election and thwarting a peaceful transition.

Conway then argues that accepting the pardon would be an admission of guilt by Trump. But Nixon never admitted guilt as part of accepting the pardon from Ford; do we really think Trump would feel compelled to abide by that norm? (Don’t make me spit milk out my nose.) Would his rabid fans….or would they cheer it as exoneration, and weakness by Biden?

Conway also argues that Trump would still face charges at the state level. But is that a reason for forfeiting federal prosecution?

Mr. Conway’s central argument is that a pardon would free Biden and his team from allegations of pursuing a partisan vendetta, making him “better” than Trump, who wanted to jail his political enemies, and was unable to do so only because they’d committed no crimes. (Clever bastards.)

But who cares? Republicans certainly never cared about the bad optics of their actions. On the contrary: they reveled in them. Merely not prosecuting Trump—or leaving it to his DOJ, without White House interference—would accomplish the same thing without the farce of a pardon. And Joe Biden is already “better” than Trump by every imaginable metric.

Biden already pledged last May that he absolutely would not pardon Trump. Conway argues it’s OK for him to break that pledge, because we now see how many Americans voted for Trump and would be happy if he were absolved…..that even an investigation of Trump, let alone a prosecution, would make him a martyr and create further divisiveness. 

So did going to war with the Confederacy. Should we have let that slide?

After the Trump-Biden race, America needs healing. We can’t continue as a nation so divided.

The 73 million Americans who voted to re-elect Trump two weeks ago will be just as angry about a good faith federal investigation of Trump after he has left office as Democrats were angry about Trump’s baseless chant to lock up his former political opponents.

They may be, but that doesn’t mean we should appease them.

Conway writes that “American democracy cannot tolerate the prosecution of political opponents.” But it can and should when they’ve committed unconscionable crimes. You know American democracy cannot tolerate? Looking the other way when violent, sadistic, openly corrupt kleptocrats hijack it, and sitting on our hands and hoping it doesn’t happen again.

See above. No accountability, no unity. No justice, no peace. 

PICTURE YOURSELF IN A BOAT ON A RIVER

Conway ignores the fundamental fact that a pardon for Trump would send exactly the wrong signal: that the rich and powerful can get away with murder (close to literally in this case). It’s not about revenge, it’s about justice and affirmation that we are nation of laws and no one—not even the president—is above them.

We’ve been here before, of course, as Conway himself alluded.

Gerald Ford went to his deathbed claiming there was no quid pro quo in his appointment as Nixon’s vice president and subsequent pardoning of his erstwhile boss in 1974. 

And John Lennon claimed “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” wasn’t about LSD.

If the history is to believed, Ford apparently was telling the truth, and—incredibly—there really was no deal with Tricky Dick over a pardon before he assumed the vice presidency, not even a discussion of it. (For the record, Lennon was telling the truth too, although he had the excuse of being high as a kite.)

But the absence of a dirty little deal still leaves the question of whether the pardon was the right call. Ford faced a hurricane of criticism for his decision, and may well have lost the 1976 presidential race right then and there. But since then a revisionist view has arisen among historians that he actually did the right thing. 

I beg to differ in the strongest possible terms. 

I humbly submit that far from “sparing the nation more trauma,” “healing the country,” allowing us to “move on” from our “long national nightmare,” Ford’s excusal of Nixon’s crimes, even if well-intentioned (and Ford was certainly likable enough when he was an original cast member of SNL), did grievous harm. It legitimized the hustle. It told America that you were a sucker if you played by the rules. It said that if you were rich enough and powerful enough the laws didn’t apply to you—that there was one set for those folks and another for the rest of us in the hoi polloi. It was a giant fuck you to ordinary Americans who were expected to obey the law and could bet their bottom dollar that Johnny Law would come after them if they didn’t.

In fact, Ford missed a tremendous opportunity to reinforce the rule of law, as it would have been Nixon’s own party punishing him, rather than the opposition doing so. Ford might have set an important example and precedent by insisting Nixon answer for his crimes, rather than granting him a get-out-of-jail-free card. 

It was the original IOKIYAR(President). And it will be even more so if we let Trump slide on crimes that make Nixon look like a jaywalker.   

Ford, of course, only got the job in he first place because Nixon’s first vice president, the incredibly corrupt Spiro Agnew, was forced to resign ahead of being charged with taking bribes and kickbacks—envelopes full of cash, no less—from the time he was governor of Maryland all the way through his years as Vice President of the United States. And Spiro was fuckin’ lucky:  given the evidence prosecutors had, anyone else would have been thrown in prison for the rest of his days. But US Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who would later seal his fame with his noble actions during the Saturday Night Massacre, was justifiably worried that Nixon would be impeached or resign, leaving the country with Agnew as president. So the decision was made to let him resign and get away basically scot free for the greater good of the nation. (See Rachel Maddow’s book and podcast on the Agnew tale, Bag Man.)

That was probably the right decision for the country, but it was an incredible miscarriage of justice nonetheless. However, it was at least part of a utilitarian calculus aimed at catching the bigger fish. Nixon’s pardon did not even have that flimsy basis.

Ford’s logic that a trial would only extend America’s suffering and be even more divisive was ludicrous. (Shame on you, Yale Law School.) Try it the next time you’re on trial:

“Your Honor, it does appear that I robbed that bank. Yes, there’s video of me sticking a six-gun in the teller’s face. But wouldn’t putting me on trial just cause everyone more grief and suffering?”

Yet Trump’s apologists—and, again incredibly, even some others—are making the same risible proposal now. 

Fool me once, shame on….uh…..can’t get fooled again, as another Republican president once said.

ONLY THE LITTLE PEOPLE GET PUNISHED

War story. (Cold War, but it still counts.)

When I was a young lieutenant in Germany in the ‘80s, I was stationed at a remote kaserne not-so-lovingly nicknamed the Rock, as part of the 1^st Brigade 3^rd Armored Division. With two infantry battalions, two armor, one field artillery, and one combat support, there were upwards of 3000 troops stationed there—all men but for maybe twenty women in that CS battalion. 

Near the end of my three-year tour, the brigade commander, a full colonel, was caught having an extramarital affair with one of those women, a young Military Police second lieutenant. The scandal prompted a great debate within the ranks about what should happen to the Old Man. (It was more than thirty years ago, so bear in mind that this was very much pre-#MeToo.)

One school of thought was that, notwithstanding his undeniable transgression, his punishment should be mitigated in light of his many years of faithful service, including Vietnam. The other school was very much the contrary: that he should be hammered with the full force of the Big Green Machine’s might, because he should have known better, and as a lesson to the troops that no one is above the law, and that leaders above all have an obligation to set the example and are held to an even higher standard. 

The latter won out: that colonel was unceremoniously cashiered, forced into immediate retirement, his career and reputation ruined, plus I don’t know what other non-judicial penalties, reduction in rank, loss of retirement pay, and other financial punishments. He was shipped out of Europe literally overnight, gone on the next thing smoking. Today he might have also faced criminal prosecution for sexual harassment, but for the time, it was harsh.

Moral of the story: whatever its many other flaws, the Pentagon holds its senior personnel to a high standard. 

I guess our civilian leadership doesn’t feel that same ethical obligation. 

CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTING

Some weeks ago I had an open dialogue in these pages on this very topic with my friend Tom Hall, who writes the brilliant blog The Back Row Manifesto. Tom’s central point (if I may paraphrase) was that America must have an acknowledgment of our wounds before we can begin even to think about healing. 

Unity depends on the polis having faith that we are a nation of laws, where some semblance of justice obtains. That faith requires holding our leaders to account—even if that means taking steps that are unprecedented. 

That means holding not only Trump accountable but also his accomplices and enablers: the Republican politicians who abetted him, the broadcasters who spread his lies, the donors who funded him, the law firms and consultancies and think tanks and media companies that are now being pressured not to hire his former underlings as they pass through the revolving door into the private sector.

If we do not do so, distrust in our democracy and the rule of law will only rise, and contempt will fester, and belief in the rule of law and justice in America—already on life support—will wither and die. Witness the bitter taste left after not one single person from Wall Street or the financial services industry went to prison for the criminal actions that led to the 2008 crash.

But this accountability, of course, brings it own risks. We cannot become a nation where each administration prosecutes the previous one for its policymaking. As destructive as the decision to leave the Paris climate accord was, I don’t favor charging Trump for being an accessory to mass murder in criminal court, even though it would be reasonable to do so purely on the facts. But other acts—like bribery, obstruction of justice, pressuring state officials to overturn an election, and above all open, violent sedition—take us into a different league. These matters are well within the purview of the US criminal justice system. Others, like the kidnapping and caging of migrant children, or criminal negligence in handling a pandemic might be best handled in the International Criminal Court as crimes against humanity, especially if it is shown that the administration deliberately allowed the virus to spread in communities of color, and withheld federal aid as a political tool (and there is evidence that it did both), or that it deliberately sought to seize children as a deterrent with no plan to ever return them, which we know it did. 

Republicans like the despicable Matt Gaetz are furious—furious!—that Democrats are even discussing criminal liability for Trump and members of his administration, tweeting, “This is now the Left’s goal – throw President Trump, his administration officials, his family and his supporters in prison. This is where we are now. Disgusting.”

Yes, what kind of monsters would build a political movement around the idea like “lock ‘em up”?

But while Gaetz is a human skidmark on the underwear of mankind, the question of political retribution is indeed fraught. That’s why we objected to MAGA World’s incarceration fetish in the first place. 

Beyond impeachment and criminal prosecution, whether domestic or international, there may be other ways to hold Trump and his henchmen accountable, including systemic changes to our democratic institutions. (More on that complex question in a future post.) But what cannot be denied is that not reckoning with the sins of the Trump years would be a hugely self-destructive mistake.  

Do we need something like South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission? The Times quotes former US Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia, who was a special adviser for the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, as noting that countries that have suffered national trauma and “skip the accountability phase end up repeating 100 percent of the time—but the next time the crisis is worse. People who think that the way forward is to brush this under the rug seem to have missed the fact that there is a ticking time bomb under the rug.”

Needless to say, we don’t want to spend all our time on Trump, especially when it’s been such a relief to be rid of him these past two weeks. But as the cliché goes, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and we have to reckon with what we’ve been through. That is especially true as we continue to struggle with suppressing a violent domestic insurgency of pro-Trump fanatics who have not gone away….and a political party that represents them and is currently engaged in its own civil war over whether it wants to return to being merely obstructionist reactionaries, or prefers to be the openly seditious party of lizard people hunters carrying guns on the floor of Congress and searching for Jewish space lasers.   

VENDETTA VS. JUSTICE, AND HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE

In a piece for The Atlantic this past October titled, “Trump Has Justified Breaking One of America’s Most Sacred Norms,” Paul Rosenzweig—a former DOJ prosecutor and senior counsel in the Whitewater investigation, and Bush appointee at the Department of Homeland Security—writes that “The tradition of granting post-term immunity from prosecution to those who leave the White House now comes at too great a cost.”

The powerful should be held to account. For society to function, all Americans must believe that crime doesn’t pay and that everyone is equal before the law. To avoid strife, we may exempt a president from criminal investigation for his political actions (however heinous and criminal they may be), but if we go further, and extend to him the kingly prerogative of impunity for his lifetime, we go a long way to destroying the faith in the rule of law that undergirds democracy.

To be fair, this quote is pulled from a longer and more complex piece about how fraught that is, which we will leave for another day. Let’s turn instead to another piece from The Atlantic, by Barton Gellman, who writes:

Trump and his party brainwashed tens of millions of people with a proposition that could only lead to violence. What choice is there but rebellion against a pretender to the throne? Sedition, for Trump’s true believers, became the patriotic choice.

History is not finished with Trump, Cruz, or Hawley. If we value our democracy, they will face justice now. The reckoning has only begun.

Next week I will attack the question of the wisdom or folly of impeachment. (One guess where I land.) Down the road, we will tackle Rosenzweig’s much more complicated issue of how to hold Trump accountable in ordinary criminal prosecutions, and other possibilities. Stay tuned.  

But in all these venues the very first thing we must do is acknowledge the seemingly self-evident need for accountability, despite Donald Trump’s lifelong lucky streak of avoiding it, and the general injustice of American life. Trump must answer for his sins, and so must his capos. Absent that, we have no accountability, no unity, no rule of law, no hope for the future of the republic, no nothin’. 

Not hard to understand, is it?

Here endeth the lesson.

*************

Joe Biden has been in office for ten days. Why hasn’t the pandemic been stopped, the economy turbocharged, the country healed, and the Buffalo Bills won a Super Bowl?

You think I’m joking, but Republicans are already asking those questions (OK, not the Bills one, but they’re thinking it)…..that is, when they’re not complaining that the monsters in the Democrat(ic) Party are picking on poor old Donald Trump by holding him accountable for trying to overthrow the government. 

The nerve of those libtards!

It’s to be expected of course. The contemporary Grand Old Party remains comprised of the worst people in America who are not on a registered sex offender list. (And some who are both.)

But the joke is on the GOP, because Joe Biden actually is taking swift and effective action on COVID, the economy, and many many other fronts. Indeed, starting the very afternoon he was inaugurated, he and his team have been working overtime with a blitz of executive orders and other actions designed to do just that. The fact of the matter is, that is what Republicans are really upset about: action, not alleged inaction.

Are any of these matters an easy fix? Hell no—there’s a long way to go. But what Biden has done so far is admirable and remarkable and speaks to his seriousness of purpose and commitment to keeping the promises he made on the campaign trail. What a refreshing change of pace. 

Over the four years that I’ve been writing this blog, the overwhelming number of posts have been angry screeds, mostly related to something bad done by Donald Trump. (Did anyone notice? I think I covered pretty well.) So it is a pleasure now to write something positive about the man occupying the office of the President of the United States. 

So let’s have a report card for Biden’s first ten days. (Because that’s the way Democrats get treated.) 

EXECUTIVES EXECUTE

As of this writing Joe Biden has issued 42 executive orders, aggressively reversing the policies of the Trump administration per his electoral mandate, and bringing the United States back into the community of nations where we were once the global leader.

He reopened Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces for Americans in need of coverage during the pandemic.

He revived DACA.

He canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline.

He stopped construction of the border wall.

He dispensed with Trump’s Muslim ban. (Yes, it’s fair to call it that.)

He made masks mandatory on federal property.

He lifted Trump’s ban on trans people in the US military.

He extended the federal moratorium on eviction and foreclosure.

He reversed a Trump ban on federal funds for international aid groups that perform or inform about abortions, the so-called Mexico City rule, and ordered a review of rules preventing funding for US clinics that offer abortion referrals, like Planned Parenthood.

He put the US back in the Paris Climate Accord.  There are indications he will also bring us back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal, which would be damn smart. 

He ordered the DOJ not to renew contracts with private prisons. (Not yet addressed: privately run prisons for immigration detainees run by the Department of Homeland Security.)

He moved forward with the promise of a task force to reunite the migrant children kidnapped by the last administration with their parents. (One of the hardest of the new administration’s tasks, as well as one of the most appalling of the last one’s sins.)

He ordered HUD to investigate Trump’s dismantling of fair housing policies in order to discriminate against people of color. 

He extended the pause on student loan payments. 

He brought the US back into the World Health Organization.

He allowed Dr. Anthony Fauci to speak frankly to the American people. (Fauci’s delight was palpable.) 

He issued an executive order to re-establish “federal respect for tribal sovereignty.” (Coulda used that in 1492 but better late than never.)

He elevated climate change to a national security matter and re-established a task force of scientific advisors on the topic. (Science! What a novel idea!) In connection with that, he issued a sweeping order to initiate a review and possible reversal of a whole slew of Trump actions that devastated environmental protections. 

He launched a $700B program to encourage the federal government to buy more American-made products—ironically, a program that sounds like it might have come out of the last administration, with its flag-waving America First windowdressing, except that this time it’s genuine, and not merely misdirection while Trump’s line of ties get made in China, and his Trump brand suits in Indonesia, and Trump brand vodka in Europe.

He unceremoniously fired Trump loyalists within the federal bureaucracy who refused the customary request to resign, and has taken aggressive action to remove “stay-behind” bureaucrats that Trump try to embed within the government to sabotage the new regime. 

And last but not least, he let Vladimir Putin know there’s a new sheriff in town by ripping him a new rectum over arms control, interference in the 2016 election, the Solar Winds cyberattack, and the treatment of Navalny. I am picturing Vlad sitting at his desk in the Kremlin sighing wistfully, and gazing at a picture of Trump while listening to Streisand sing “The Way We Were.” Misty watercolor memories indeed.

WHAT’S SO FUNNY ‘BOUT PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING?

And this is but a sampling. Most of all, of course, Biden has been spinning up the plans and mechanisms to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, including a massive nationwide rollout of the vaccine, almost from a standing start given the Trump administration’s criminal refusal to take even the most basic steps to address that urgent, life-and-death public health issue.

Of course, there’s lots more damage left to undo, and the biggest moves may be yet to come. For one, Chuck Schumer has suggested that Biden declare a national emergency in order to obtain broader authority to fight climate change, as Trump did in order to try to build his beaded curtain along the southern border. 

It’s clear that the Biden team carefully prepared this blitz of executive orders, proposed legislation, and other actions during the months of the transition and even before, during the campaign itself. Unlike school, IRL that’s not cheating, folks—it’s prudence and foresight, the actions of competent, experienced, professional public servants. (That includes doing its level best to pre-plan its COVID response, given that the Trump administration willfully refused to share information during the transition period—an act of almost unfathomable pettiness and sheer evil.) 

My litany of specific executive orders also leaves out broader and more intangible aspects of the new administration, reflecting the return of competent adult supervision of the federal government in general. 

For instance, we now have daily press briefings again, ones that don’t play like scenes from Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. From day one White House press secretary Jen Psaki has been an instant rock star, offering a return to an intelligent, informative, mutually respectful exchanges between the administration and the press, and she’s done it all while missing a crucial vowel in her surname. An inspiring story of triumphing over adversity.

Bonus points for bringing in, for the first time, an ASL interpreter…..which, as some wag on MSNBC said, it’s hard to believe we never had before. I know that’s the kind of thing that makes right wingers snicker, because hey, common decency, basic humanity, and equality are for weaklings and cucks, right?

But every one of these seemingly little things is a brick in the reconstruction of sane governance in the US of A, and even ambitiously trying to improve what we once had. Building back better, some might say.

RASHOMON ON THE POTOMAC

Anticipating your complaint: I am aware that Republicans do not think these are great accomplishments by Joe Biden. Very much the contrary. They are not impressed by the speed with which he is working—they are appalled by it. 

It was the same when progressives looked at what Trump did, like the Muslim ban, which he put into place at the end of his very first week in office. One of the knocks on Trump is that he didn’t do enough as president, and it’s a fair cop. Instead of playing golf and eating cheeseburgers and tweeting from the toilet, he could have been doing lots of things to help the country, like, oh I dunno, fighting a pandemic. But in another sense, Trump did plenty as president…..it’s just that almost all of it was bad. Like kidnapping children, yanking us out of the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal, diverting money from schools for the children or servicemembers to pay for his border fence, cozying up to dictators, serving as Putin’s man in Washington, and more.  

Per above, the Republicans are therefore not actually focused so much on complaining that Biden isn’t doing enough—that will come later. For now they are mainly complaining that he shouldn’t be doing these things at all, clutching their pearls and collapsing on their fainting couches over the idea of spending money to fight the pandemic, for example. (Deficits, ohmygod!) And they are definitely complaining that Joe’s fellow Democrats in Congress are pursuing an impeachment that would hold Trump accountable for actions that are the very definition of a high crime.

When Republicans see a headline like “Biden dismantling Trump’s legacy,” they greet that with predictably Biblical rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. (Dog bites man.) As the New York Times reports, they have the gall to claim that by so doing, Biden is “betraying his pledge to seek unity.” 

Right on! Where does Joe Biden get off pursuing policies that he and his party believe in, and were duly elected and given a mandate to pursue, instead of continuing the repudiated policies of his predecessor, whom the American people definitely chucked out of office, no matter how much he wants us to believe otherwise???? The nerve of these freakin’ Democrats!

As we are frequently reminded, elections have consequences. It is usually the people who just won the last electionwho do the reminding, and the ones who lost who need it. It was Elizabeth Warren who had the best retort on that point, which was that when it comes to unity, “How about if we’re unified against insurrection? How about if we’re unified for accountability?” 

Of course, there is another more subtle irony to this dishonest Republican call for unity. It presupposes that there is a deep, problematic divisiveness in American society that is crying out for such healing. 

And who gave us that divisiveness?

One guess. 

FAKE NEWS PHASE II

So in detailing this laundry list I am not trying to convince any Trump supporters that, hey, this new guy is all right. I am speaking to my own tribe, and to independents and undecideds (if any still exist), to conservatives who grudgingly voted for Biden and are watching him warily to see how he does, and to Bernie bros who are doing the same.

Also to the Fifth Estate.

Along with the expected Republicans bitching, you won’t be surprised to learn that the mainstream media also feels obligated—presumably out of the same false sense of “objectivity” that Trump exploited throughout his reign—to criticize Biden too. Muscle memory, I guess. 

This week the New York Times Editorial Board (!) published a piece titled, “Ease Up on the Executive Actions, Joe,” which argued that “President Biden is right to not let his agenda be held hostage, but legislating through Congress is a better path.”

As Brian Williams quipped on MSNBC, “I don’t know what Congress they’re looking at.”

The muckity mucks at the Times go on:

These directives, however, are a flawed substitute for legislation. They are intended to provide guidance to the government and need to work within the discretion granted the executive by existing law or the Constitution. They do not create new law—though executive orders carry the force of law—and they are not meant to serve as an end run around the will of Congress. By design, such actions are more limited in what they can achieve than legislation, and presidents who overreach invite intervention by the courts.

Thanks for the civics lesson, New York Times, but what exactly would you have Mr. Biden do instead? 

The editorial board goes on to decry “the whipsaw effect” of each president undoing the orders by fiat of his or her predecessor, using fiat of his/her own. A valid point. So what’s your solution, Gray Lady?

To be fair, the Times did acknowledge Republican hypocrisy in decrying the exact kind of executive overreach in which the GOP itself gleefully engaged—“Satan’s pen,” as John Hudak of the Brookings Institution dubs it. But it scolds Biden—virtue-signaling its own much-vaunted “objectivity,” kinda sorta—without offering any substantive ideas or alternatives. 

By way of example, it cites how the establishment of DACA, followed by its suspension, followed by its reinstitution, has been hard on the Dreamers. No doubt. But would it have been better not to have reinstated it? Or never to have created the policy at all?

“Dreamers deserve better than to be subject to the whims of whoever holds the White House, “says the Times. “It is long past time for Congress to establish a clearer, more permanent path for them.” No shit. So what do you propose President Biden do, when faced with an obstructionist GOP minority that will hold the administration hostage using every available lever?

Undoing some of Mr. Trump’s excesses is necessary, but Mr. Biden’s legacy will depend on his ability to hammer out agreements with Congress. On the campaign trail, he often touted his skill at finding compromise, and his decades as a legislator, as reasons to elect him over Mr. Trump. The country faces significant challenges to recovering from the pandemic, from a global recession, from years of safety nets and institutions and trust being eroded. Now it is time for the new president to show the American people what permanent change for a better nation can look like.

Jesus Christ, are they kidding? Putting the burden of compromise on Biden, when his opponents won’t even repudiate a violent attempt to seize power by their own once and forever leader? 

(Tell me more about the liberal bias in the media, please.)

This is coming barely a week after the monstrous Donald Trump left office. I fear that this sort of blinkered pre-2016 “bothsidesism” from the mainstream media—never mind the right wing media—is what we have to look forward to during the Biden era. I can’t say I’m surprised, except maybe by the speed with which it happened. But still:

Shame on you, you ink-stained wretches. 

GHOSTS OF PRESIDENTS PAST

Several times in the past week I’ve heard a news reporter say, “The President did or said such-and-such” and found myself surprised that the President actually did or said something good. Then, quickly, I am reminded—after four years of operant conditioning—that the President is now a decent human being and competent leader, and not a malignant pusbag with a Swiss bank account.

This is a bit like my wife’s story of being a kid in the 70s, watching Nixon on TV and asking her mother, “Why does the President sometimes wear a white wig and sometimes he doesn’t?”

Not every president is George Washington…..and fortunately, not every one is Donald Trump either. 

The challenges that still lie ahead for Joe Biden and for the country he leads—that’s us, folks—remain daunting, to a historic degree. Comparisons to the challenges that faced FDR when he took office in March 1933 are not out of order. There are going to be failures, and stumbles, and mistakes, and setbacks.

But he is off to a good start, no matter what the Sons of the Confederacy, the White Power Party, Orange County QAnon Moms for Putin, and the New York Times would have us believe. 

********

Photo: AP

This blog also available on Medium and Substack.

In July of 2018—two and a half years ago—I published an essay on this blog called “Will Trump Ever Leave Office (Even If He Loses in 2020)?” As the title implies—spoiler alert— it asked this question:

Will Donald Trump willingly leave office even if he is defeated in November 2020? And if he balks at doing so, or worse, refuses outright, will the Republican Party do anything about it?

I went back and looked at that essay recently in the wake of Trump’s attempted self-coup, culminating in the January 6^th Capitol insurrection. I’m sorry to say that much of it was right on the mark. 

In the interest of post-mortem, I offer here some highlights from what at the time struck many people as wacko, left-wing fearmongering. 

Now we just call it US history.

***********

July 23, 2018:

(T)he notion of a massive indictment hanging over his head as soon as he surrenders power will incentivize Trump to stay in office at all costs, like the cornered rat he is.

The irony is rich. In a twist worthy of Roald Dahl or O. Henry, one of the most egregiously guilty sonsabitches in US criminal history will find himself in the only position in American life in which he is protected from prosecution. So you can bet your life that he will do everything within his power to stay there. And we have all seen that the spectrum of what Donald Trump is prepared to do in his own self-interest is, uh, rather wide.

That means that even if he loses the 2020 election, he will contest the results with every fiber of his being, try to delegitimize his opponent’s victory, and mobilize his mouthbreathing hordes and his shameless accomplices in the right wing media to help him. (For that matter, he and the GOP will try to rig the election in the first place. But that’s a topic for another day.)

If he fears he might lose, he will gin up a faux national security emergency Reichstag fire-style to try to justify postponing the elections. Failing that, he will create some transparently false excuse for claiming that the election was rigged and declare the results null and void. (Hell, he was pre-emptively saying precisely that on the campaign trail in 2016. Turns out he was right, though in exactly the opposite way he claimed.).

And his followers will obediently, enthusiastically sign on.

When I floated this possibility at my friend Pete, who is a lawyer, he was beyond skeptical. “Are you really suggesting that Donald Trump would stand in the way of a peaceful transition of power?” said he.

“Yep,” said I.

Do you doubt it? Before the election in 2016, when almost everyone—even Trump—assumed he would lose, he was asked if he would honor the results or contest them. He equivocated. “I’ll let you know,” he said, coyly, already causing damage to the fabric of American democracy. Little did we know that that scenario would soon look enviable compared to what would really transpire.

And that was when he had far far less at stake. Do we really think he will be more accommodating and respectful of the bedrock of American democracy if he is facing what amounts to life in prison, the obliteration of his family fortune, and the destruction of everything he cares about…..which is to say, himself?

COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP, DONNY

I’ll concede that the very idea smacks of hysteria and overreaction.

But I put it to you that we are living in an era when the absolutely unthinkable has already happened over and over again. Accordingly, far from trafficking in alarmism, it would be foolish and naïve not to consider a scenario like this, however extreme or remote it might be.

It is unlikely that Mueller will try to bring a criminal indictment against a sitting president. (Not impossible—Mueller may uncover skullduggery of such profound implications that he feels compelled to break with DOJ norms—but it is unlikely.) That means that any criminal prosecution of Trump will have to wait until he is out of office. And no matter how powerful or airtight the case Mueller presents, it is equally unlikely that Trump will be impeached and removed from office because of it. The numbers and the politics simply militate against it.

Even if Democrats flip the House in the midterms—enabling them to impeach Trump by simple majority—they’re not likely to gain control of the Senate, let alone obtain the supermajority necessary to convict him and chuck him out of the White House. Short of those sixty-one partisan votes, it is equally implausible that they will be able to woo enough Republican Senators to vote for conviction, judging by the yellow-bellied stain of opportunism and cowardice that the GOP leadership has spread across Washington DC thus far.

We know that Trump’s Kool Aid-drunk based will shrug off anything and everything that Mueller delivers. They have not been bothered by Trump hiding his tax returns, or insulting Gold Star families, or making fun of the handicapped, or the vast evidence we already have of his financial crimes, wanton corruption, and collaboration with our enemies. They were not bothered by Access Hollywood, or Charlottesville, or taking babies from their mothers, or most recently, the appalling bootlicking and borderline treason of Helsinki. What could possible change their minds now?

A NOUS LA LIBERTE

“OK,” I hear you saying, “that’s what Donald Trump would try to do. We know he’s a lunatic. But the American people would never stand for it.”

Really?

Famously,  a Washington Post poll taken last August showed that a majority of Republicans (52%) would support suspending the 2020 presidential election if Trump proposed it. 

Per above, not even the egregious, jawdropping public display of subservience to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki gave the majority of Republicans pause. As former US diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford wrote in an LA Times op-ed, “As the dust settles after Helsinki, this too has become clear: There is no line Trump can cross that will spur meaningful Republican action against him.”

In a piece for Salon called “How Low Will Trump Go?” Lucian Truscott IV writes:

This man is not going to be driven from office by either Congress or the courts. He’s going to fight, and fight to the death of democracy if necessary, because he has no loyalty to the Constitution or love of democracy. All he has is love of Trump.

He’s preparing his base for the day he fires Sessions, Rosenstein and Mueller. He’ll pardon every single American who has been charged or pled guilty, and then he’ll order the entire work product of the Mueller investigation to be collected and burned. He’ll send his supporters into the streets to demonstrate in favor of firing Mueller and ending the investigation. When counter demonstrations hit the street, he’ll call them a threat to “national security” and start making arrests. He’ll begin with Antifa and Black Lives Matter, then he’ll move on to anyone found demonstrating on a street where violence or damage to property has taken place.

When demonstrations break out…..between anti-Trump protestors and Trump supporters, he’ll declare martial law. He’ll declare that the Democratic Party is the “enemy of the people” and issue an executive order to postpone elections. His base will support him all the way.

COWARDS AND OPPORTUNISTS: A FIELD GUIDE

So let’s forget about the GOP base for now. Its capacity for welcoming authoritarianism—as long as that authoritarianism is of the ideological stripe it admires—is well proven. What about GOP lawmakers? My friend Pete’s contention was that GOP lawmakers would not stand for Trump disrupting the peaceful transition of power; that regardless of right wing public opinion, Republican legislators would in effect be the last line of defense for democracy.

I respectfully disagree. That argument is predicated on the idea that the Republican leadership has more integrity than the party’s rank and file. I have seen no evidence that that is the case. As is none, nada, zero, zilch, bupkes. In fact, there may be a strong argument that they have shown a lot less.

I have written before that we are witnessing a slow motion coup d’etat by the Republican Party to secure permanent, anti-democratic control of the United States government. (“The Elephant in the Room: Trojan Trump and the Invisible Coup,” July 12, 2017). They have suppressed the vote; engaged in outrageous gerrymandering far beyond even historical precedent; tried to skew the census; weaponized the infusion of dark money into campaign finance; spread the vile lies of voter fraud, birtherism, and beyond; marshaled a massive Orwellian propaganda machine that has done irreparable damage to public discourse; and turned a blind eye to ongoing foreign attacks on our electoral system that are tantamount to war.

The GOP “leadership” takes its lead from the base, not the other way around. (Maybe most politicians behave that way, but rarely in such a brazenly craven and conspicuous way.) Those profiles in courage Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have shown absolutely no integrity or sense of principle and no willingness to defend the rule of law against even Trump’s worst offenses, given that they and their party are benefitting from his rule—at least in the short term—beyond their wildest wet dreams. The most they ever offer by way of censure is mealy-mouthed statements of discomfort when Trump really pushes the limits—mere lip service to the principles of democracy—which is almost worse.

At least Trump and his hardcore followers own their awfulness; they are monsters, but not hypocrites (except when it comes to Obama). The same can’t be said for Mitch, Paul, and the rest of the gang—and I do mean gang.

As for respect for the sanctity of the electoral process and peaceful transition of power, Republican leaders uttered barely a mouse-squeak when Trump deliberately undermined those principles on the campaign trail. Since he took office, they have condoned and even abetted his attacks on the rule of law, the law enforcement and intelligence communities, a free press, and the patriotism of the loyal opposition (not to mention reliable conservative bogeymen like immigrants, minorities, and poor people). Should he be defeated, what makes anyone think that Trump questioning or even physically opposing the results of the 2020 election would be a red line for them?

Perhaps most tellingly, with their unconscionable obstruction of Merrick Garland’s nomination, Republicans ruthlessly subverted one of the fundamental norms of American democracy in order to keep control of the Supreme Court. Do you think they will do any less to maintain control of the Presidency?

Speaking to Rolling Stone, John Dean recently had this to say on the subject (and he should know):

(I)f Trump loses the 2020 election, his term will end, and the new president will be sworn in—and he will contest it, claim a rigged election, and make life miserable for the world. However Trump’s presidency ends, I expect it to be ugly. He has no respect for the rule of law, or historical norms, or standards of conduct. Because he is shameless, he will do it his way, which will be un-American and unprecedented.

CASSANDRA VS CHICKEN LITTLE

In closing, I realize that the right will scoff at this sort of speculation as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” the hysterical ravings of hair-on-fire liberals who don’t know whether to shit or go blind over the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the ascent of Donald Trump. They openly delight in (what is to them) the comic spectacle of snowflakes who just can’t “get over it,” as the late, inexplicably venerated Justice Scalia flippantly said of the Supreme Court handing George W. Bush the presidency.

Of course, the right has no credibility on this point, given eight years of their own sky-is-falling rhetoric over Barack Obama on what were empirically far less persuasive grounds. (Infinitely so, in fact.) Moreover, from the moment of Trump’s rise in the GOP primaries, the right has pooh-poohed concerns of the damage he would do, how bad he would be, and how far he would go, only to be proven disastrously wrong at nearly every turn. So their scorn carries no weight.

But I know that even mainstream conservatives, independents, and even some liberals and progressives—like my friend Pete—find such scenarios alarmist and absurd. I do realize that all this talk of martial law and a president-for-life sounds extreme. It is.

But in case you’ve been in a coma, we are living in extreme times. Over and over again the unthinkable has happened, each time moving the Overton window of what we believe possible in this country.

No one thought Trump would get the GOP nomination or win. No one thought he would get away with not releasing his tax returns, or that he would continue to brazenly violate the emoluments clause once in office. No one—at first—thought collusion with Russia was credible, and no one foresaw that it would be revealed to be as bad as it has been (with more to come). No one thought he’d attack NATO, cozy up to dictators, insult Canada, start trade wars, risk nuclear armageddon with North Korea and then turn around and surrender to them. No one imagined we’d be building concertina-ringed camps along the southern border to hold migrants indefinitely, and no one thought we’d be ripping babies away from their mothers and marching one-year-olds before judges in immigration courts.

I could go on.

Vizzini-like,  Trump is fond of the word “inconceivable.” At this point, nothing is inconceivable in Trump’s America.

I truly hope I am wrong and Pete is right. Should Trump take things to the extremes that this essay contemplates, I fervently hope that both rank-and-file Republicans and the GOP leadership locate their principles—and their balls—and stand up and stop him for the greater good of everything this country is supposed to stand for.

Man, that would be a rather low bar, and I’m not sure they can clear even that. But I hope so.

*********

The blog also available on Medium and Substack.

As you might imagine, us left-leaning bloggers all hang out, wearing our silk smoking jackets and puffing on pipes while swirling snifters of brandy, discussing Marcuse, and listening to Gang of Four. (Secret handshake optional.)

Among that club, one of my very great friends, Tom Hall, writes the trenchant blog The Back Row Manifesto. Last week in his post “Trauma” (January 19), he called for a public acknowledgment of our shared national trauma, writing: 

The battle for how we remember, process, understand, and overcome the trauma of Trumpism will define how we triumph over it. The first and most crucial step in the formalization of post-traumatic collective memory is to invest in transparency and truth.

No truer words. 

That call also included a critique of Biden on that point:

Transparency begins with Joe Biden, and yet his calls for unity and the focus on his agenda has frustratingly ignored the lingering impact of the trauma of the Trumpist years. Biden has laughed off Trump and ignored every ridiculous indignity, instead focusing on building his own transition process with seriousness and determination…..I’m not sure he understands how deeply the nation has been injured. We need to be heard, to be understood, and to share in the validation and legitimization of our experience….

Tom also raised fears the Biden will “appease a movement hell-bent on establishing authoritarian, anti-democratic power in the hands of Trumpist Republicans,” and that he seems to share the Trumpist call to “put the past aside, to forget and move on.”

While I am in agreement with the main point about the need for reckoning, I had problems with this preemptive critique. I would not say that Biden has failed to understand or acknowledge the nation’s wounds, nor do I think he is pursuing a policy of appeasement, or asking us to forget the past and move on—even though there are strong forces that would like him to do so. In any event, it’s far too early to render that verdict.

But I do think he’s walking a tightrope. 

No one is more open-minded and ready to have a dialogue than Tom, so I wanted to discuss it with him. But rather than confine our conversation to the bloggers’ private bar over those brandy snifters, we decided to make our emails about this matter an open exchange of letters. 

***********

THE KING’S NECKTIE: Tom, I couldn’t agree more about the need for accountability— a reckoning, in fact—after this criminal administration. I’d also agree that the calls for “unity” from the right wing are disingenuous at best, an attempt at inducing mass social amnesia (as you cogently explained) and dodging responsibility for the shitshow they presided over and its lasting damage. I’m hopeful that most thinking Americans won’t be suckered in, despite the longing for a return to normalcy. As I wrote some weeks ago, there can be such return, because “normalcy” is long gone, if in fact it ever existed. The “normalcy” some want to go back to is the very thing that the George Floyd protests were about putting an end to.

But I take issue with your critique of Biden on that front. Let me throw this over to you first, in the interest of conversation, and then I’ll detail my complaints.

THE BACK ROW MANIFESTO: Thanks, Bob. With the Trump “transition” (aka sedition) and the acknowledgment of our experience of living through the trauma of the Trump years, I think President Biden was put in yet another difficult position. On the one hand, he was forced to focus his time and attention on preparing to become president in a vacuum of Trump’s making, and on the other hand, he wanted to set a tone that he would unify the country and stand above the pettiness of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the election results. In fact, when asked about Trump’s refusal to accept the election results, Biden laughed for a moment and said “He will.” 

That moment really troubled me because it underlined for me Biden’s rock solid faith in our institutions, institutions which, for the most part, have been shown to be deeply flawed and have, in innumerable instances, failed us during the Trumpist era. 

I call it the “Trumpist” era; I won’t call it the “Trump era” because the catastrophe of the last four years would have been impossible without the enabling of the Trump Administration by so many people across multiple sectors of our lives. 

TKN: I like your rationale for the term “Trumpist era” versus “Trump era.” (It’s catchier than my sobriquet for it, Hell™.) Although by that logic, it ain’t over, because Trumpism is still with us even though Trump is gone. And I am soooooo ready for the post-Trumpist era. 

To that matter of Biden laughing off Trump and his sins: I think when Biden is nonchalant and makes light of Trump like that, he’s not being dismissive so much as tactical. In line with his chosen role as Unflappable Grownup Who Will Make Everything OK, I think he is trying to minimize Trump’s power and knock him down a peg and take away his impact as a bogeyman. That is very different than not holding him and his accomplices to account. 

As you know, Ferne and I spent a lot of time wrestling with this issue of laughter/ridicule/satire and its power (or lack thereof) as a weapon against tyranny, and with that, the risks that it poses. One of the risks, of course, is underestimating the enemy by treating him/them as mere clowns and not genuine dangers. I can’t believe that after all the horrors of the past four years anyone on the Biden team, from the top on down, is that blithe or naive. I really think it’s a strategy—the way one learns in grade school never to let a bully know that they have ever gotten under your skin. 

To your point about Biden’s faith in our institutions, you wrote: 

After years of gaslighting and the demolition of belief in the ability of our institutions to stand up to their debasement at the hands of Trump, we need more than just the truth; we must demand that our shared experience is validated and, most importantly, we must see vindication for our belief that our system is still capable of delivering equal justice under the law.

I’m with you there. I don’t have any truck with the oft-heard, self-congratulatory cry that “the system worked!” The system only worked because of Team Trump’s haplessness and because a handful of people of good faith happened to be in key positions that came under attack. With a better demagogue or weaker local officials in crucial roles, “the system” would have collapsed like wet cardboard.   

BRM: Biden’s bemusement at Trump’s childish petulance, his almost disbelief that American leadership could have fallen so low, stands for me as a symbol of the failure of institutionalism to imagine the impact of Trumpism on every day life in America. What has been unleashed has, as many have pointed out, always been there, and Trumpism is just saying out loud what we have refused to acknowledge as a nation, etc. 

But it was also normalized, it was framed by fealty to the office of the Presidency and institutions of government as being the official business of the nation. I call the effect of this sort of official normalization the “Haberman-ization” of Trumpism, but it is an undeniable fact; the people of America have been forced to live under a deeply corrupt, venal, and cruel sociopath for four years, and that experience has lead to a deformation of normalcy, of institutions, of what America actually is.

TKN: I don’t think it’s a failure of imagination. I think it’s a pose—in a good way—and an attempt to stir (positive) patriotism, along the lines of, “We’re better than this.” Even though the past four years suggest that we very much are not. 

The normalization of all that shite is indeed one of the most terrifying aspects of this nightmare. We shall see how much of it sticks now that this eminently decent and norm-respecting President is in office. (I hesitate to use the word “institutionalist,” now that Bill Barr has utterly devalued the term.) 

I agree with your assessment of the tough spot Biden was put in. That gets to the heart of my aforementioned quibble. I think Biden is trying mightily to set a reassuring, measured, non-incendiary tone…..I think he (rightly) sees his job as Uniter-in-Chief. That said: unity is not a suicide pact. As Rev. Al said recently when this question was posed to him, unity vs. accountability is a false choice. There can be no unity without accountability. Now, that’s a great bumper sticker, but what does it really look like? I think it looks like prosecuting the motherfuckers. I think it looks like impeachment, conviction, and barring from public office. I think it looks like not letting Trump’s enablers pretend like it’s postwar France and we were all in the Resistance together. I do NOT think it means reaching across the aisle and making nice with racists, misogynists, fascists, and their sympathizers. 

BRM: I don’t think Biden is being disingenuous when he calls for “unity”, as you and I rightfully understand those calls from Trumpists and their apologists on the right. But while I think his belief in the country framed his response to Trump, the reality of our collective experience has not yet been acknowledged properly. Until that happens, calls for unity, no matter how well-intentioned, ring hollow. 

TKN: This is the crux of my pushback to your last blog. As I’ve said, I totally agree about the need for accountability, which includes not only legal consequences for the lawbreakers, but also the kind of moral rehabilitation you describe. But I think Biden is correctly cautious about his role in that, particularly on the first point, but also on the second, which is a real minefield.

On the first, I’m sure Biden is among those who are justifiably nervous about establishing the precedent of an incoming President prosecuting his or her predecessor, banana republic style. The problem is, what do you do when the predecessor is genuinely a criminal whose actions rightly demand that kind of beatdown?

I think Joe is keen to stay out of it and above it, and leave that to Letitia and Cy and Merrick. I don’t think that’s a bad approach.

But the second aspect of this national rehabilitation is trickier. We do need the new President to preside (yswidt?) over a kind of truth and reconciliation process. Biden has to wield his moral authority here, but he can’t do it in a way that feels partisan or merely vindictive. I think that now he is in power, he may be a little freer in doing that…..and I think that his natural style lends itself to that sort of eminence grise kind of thing. 

But per above, I totally agree that, as I wrote some weeks ago, “normalcy” is dead and buried. But for that very reason, we now have an opportunity to address some really deep, entrenched, systemic problems and possibly affect real change. (To build back better, some might say). It will be ironic if Joe Biden, a creature of Washington and near-embodiment of the sclerotic Old Guard, can re-invent himself, seize the opportunity, and be the one to lead that revolution.

BRM: I think you are missing my point. Your argument keeps coming back to Biden’s political tightrope walk as President between holding Trump accountable for his crimes and his desire to unite the country. But while I am of course thinking of how to best hold Trumpists accountable for their crimes, I have to first think about the way in which our collective trauma is acknowledged. 

Without a fundamental agreement about the impacts of Trumpist criminality on the country, on us as a people, the will and pretexts for justice become impossible. In other words, if we cannot acknowledge the pain and suffering of the victims of Trumpism, there is no moral argument for holding him to account, and the discussion immediately pivots to the politics of accountability, erasing the experience of the people. If we don’t acknowledge our shared trauma, we erase it.

It is hard to talk about this in context without drawing comparisons between historical examples that far outweigh the social damage of Trumpism, and because so many legitimate far-right comparisons are contemporary (thanks for nothing, global surge of far-right government!), I struggle to point to an efficient analysis of how this works. I won’t make Nuremberg or Truth & Reconciliation in South Africa or Rwanda references, because the scale of those crimes and the level of that trauma is incompatible with our own experience in America under Trumpism, and I don’t want to diminish those examples by way of comparison. 

That said, they are examples of taking deep, systemic trauma seriously, of using trauma as a form of “moral standing” to prosecute crimes. But more than just a mechanism for accountability for the criminal, acknowledging trauma also empowers and validates those who have suffered. It makes the crimes real, it makes justice moral. 

For all of the credit he has received for being the “empath in chief,” for knowing loss, Biden’s personal losses are the result of tragedy and not the result of willful victimization at the hands of the state. Democrats need to begin making the case immediately that Trumpist crimes have consequences, not just for Trumpists, but for all of us. They need to articulate those consequences, not just their impact on our institutions, but on us as people.

TKN: Yes, Biden’s personal tragedies were not the result of state-sponsored crimes, but that doesn’t make him any less empathetic. And I am definitely concerned with the political tightrope he has to walk. But this is not just inside baseball stuff, or shortsighted partisanship. It’s critical to the success of our effort. 

To that point, I fear you’re asking for something abstract (and universal) that may not be there. Lots of Americans thought it was great to rip children from their mothers and cage them. 

The acknowledgment of trauma only speaks to the 66% of the country that is in its right mind. I don’t think it is hard for Biden to do that. The bigger question is how to manage the other 33%. Maybe there is a way for Joe to be the president for all while still definitively repudiating what we just endured. Ironically, like I said above, his model-of-moderation, comforting-old-white-dude persona may make him the perfect guy for that job. 

BRM: The failure of institutions doesn’t mean that cold, government buildings collapse; institutions are people making decisions, making choices. In government, those choices are meant to serve the people.  When the power we bestow upon those institutions is used to traumatize the people they serve, we need more than just a reckoning for the decision-makers, we need proactive repair—acknowledgement and support—for those impacted by the decisions; Orphaned children, 400,000 dead, families on food lines, a militarized police culture unleashed on peaceful demonstrators, the dismantling of the already threadbare safeguards against discrimination, a Capitol attacked with the intent to eliminate democracy as we know it, all driven by a daily, hourly flood of lies intended to deny the legitimate experiences of those who were the targets of state power.

So, for me, the discussion doesn’t begin with the mechanics of accountability, it begins with the acknowledgement of the trauma, which will legitimize and drive accountability forward. This is how justice works.

TKN: I’m down with that, and I concur about the need for proactive repair, but we may getting into a battle of semantics here. 

What, in your view, does an “acknowledgment of the trauma” look like? To me, it is inextricably connected to the mechanics of accountability, which is why I am fixated on that. I understand your point that acknowledgement of the trauma legitimizes and drives accountability, and you might say that I am skipping that step. But to me, that acknowledgment is implicit (if we prosecute Trump for inciting a riot, or bring civil suits for his willful malfeasance in responding to COVID-19, or whatever) and at the same time difficult to formalize.

I fear you are looking for something more profound and poetic than we as a nation are able to summon. I will settle for indictments.

BRM: Accountability is a remedy, but there also has to be an acknowledgement that this experience was real, that it happened, and those who suffered because of it must be given priority in the media, in our narrative, to have that experience validated by consequences. 

I think justice is essential, but I don’t think trauma is solved solely through justice. I see signs, multiple, aggravating signs, that the Republican narrative machine is going to be effective in re-shaping this conversation to avoid dealing with the actual pain that people experience. I do not just mean the pain of COVID, I mean the daily feeling of fear that ICE will come and deport you, that people seeking to protest will be battered and arrested by right-wing police that don’t live in their communities and who want their union to back the President who encouraged their brutality, that disaster management would leave you without help, that white-supremacists and nationalists would be allowed free reign in American cities to act out their violence and be publicly venerated by the President, that our system and institutions would be bent, consequence-free, to attack you. 

It may seem poetic and profound to say that the stories which we give priority matter, but they do; they frame everything. 

Look at the insurrection itself: It is not even three weeks since the mob attacked US Capitol at the order of the President to physically prevent lawmakers from certifying a free and fair election. The most obvious, blatant lie, that the election was “stolen”, told precisely and reinforced by a network of propaganda on TV and social media, was a narrative that, after the failure of the mob, was still supported by over 150 lawmakers in Congress. They voted to overturn the election results in multiple states. The result? Nothing. No consequences. And they immediately pivoted to typical Republican obstructionism and seeking to shame Joe Biden for acting to implement his agenda as somehow not being about “unity.” And they get away with it, because “both sides.” And so, the media have already turned to profiling Biden as “divisive,” interviewing Trump supporters to find out how they feel about Biden uniting the country….Kevin McCarthy this weekend said that “everybody across the country has some responsibility” for the insurrection at the Capitol….Newt Gingrich going on Fox News saying Democrats want to “exterminate” Republicans….Josh Hawley saying he ever wanted to overturn the results of the election….Rand Paul claiming Biden was sowing division by calling out white supremacy. 

TKN: I think it remains to be seen what the consequences are. I’d like to see Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley removed from the Senate, and the 150 House members too. At a minimum I’d like to see them censured, stripped of committee memberships, and more intangibly, made pariahs except in Alex Jones World. I’d like see them criminally prosecuted for inciting violence. Maybe some of that happens or maybe none of it does. It’s up to us to keep the pressure on.

In the mean time, there’s no doubt about the Republican gaslighting, and the Big Lie at its cold black heart. But I don’t view those pieces—from reliably mainstream outlets like CNN or MSN, let alone a progressive outlets like Mother Jones or Towleroad—as evidence that the media is promoting the right wing spin, as long as they are properly framed and not presented as “parties differ on shape of planet.” We can’t expect right wing troll world to stand down, at least not voluntarily; the question to me is how do we best combat it?

To that end, banning Trump from Twitter increasingly looks like the best thing since sliced bread, despite its dangers and complexity. Can you imagine if we had to deal with his running commentary and infusion of toxic bullshit into the collective bloodstream 24/7, the way we have for the past four years? 

This is a slightly different discussion about the wisdom of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, and combatting fake news a la HyperNormalisation, the dangers of weaponized social media, a la The Great Hack or The Social Dilemma (or Feels Good Man).  

BRM: This is what “moving on” looks like, a narrative that gives a platform to deniers and liars, that will likely allow Trump to once again claim he was “exonerated” by spineless Republicans in the Senate, and will never allow us to fully come to terms with the avalanche of criminality of the Trumpist years. How will we ever tell the truth about the past and build a future if there is no priority given to really grappling with trauma, with using every avenue to tell the story of what happened truthfully? That is the narrative that can deliver justice. No. We need a full reckoning, we need the full experience of life under Trumpist rule to be validated, we need to fight to tell the truth of every single thing we know to be true, in their entirety. We need the truth to triumph and make the “lie” obvious in its insanity.

**********

As Tom is my guest here, I’ll give him the last word there (not counting this epilogue), and because I concur with his dire warning about not letting the right control the narrative, not accepting the euphemism of “moving on” as cover for impunity for Trumpist crimes, and the general need for reckoning, which is where this whole discussion started. 

Opinions will differ on how President Biden handles these delicate but urgent matters, and the inevitable Republican gaslighting and disinformation blitz. It’s the earliest of days, so plenty of material for that debate (and his performance evaluation) is yet to come. In the mean time, we can all agree that Republican calls for “unity” are as credible as the claims of George Floyd’s killers that they’re the real victims. It remains to be seen if rational voices rise up to call out that vile absurdity, and that hypocrisy, and if the American people will listen.

More to come on the reckoning with the sins and damage of Trump and Trumpism in a future post.

************

Check out The Back Row Manifesto.

This blog also available on Substack and Medium.

I deliberately posted my farewell to….what’s his name again? I’ve already forgotten. Anyway, that last guy. I deliberately posted my farewell to him on Tuesday, before the Inauguration, because Wednesday belonged to President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. and Vice President Kamala Devi Harris. 

Don’t worry, I’ll get back to hating on He Who Must Not Be Named shortly. Sadly, we’re not done with him, not by a long shot. But for now, let’s revel in our welcome return to sanity. 

I don’t mean to romanticize these figures, Joe and Kamala. They are not superhuman, nor perfect, nor will they solve all our problems by mere dint of their arrival. But as I wrote earlier this week in that farewell to their ghastly predecessors, they are competent, decent, empathetic human beings and it is a massive relief—and an unfamiliar feeling—to have people like that in charge again.

WALKING PROUDLY IN OUR WINTER COATS

I was stunned at how quickly Tr—p left my headspace….almost as soon as Marine One powered up and flew off the White House lawn, taking out the trash. I hope that is a harbinger of a nationwide psychological phenomenon. 

The rest of the day was a blur, full of poignant moments. I’m not ashamed to say I choked up more than once, again surprising myself. I guess I’m a much more sentimental SOB than I like to think, or perhaps just more wrenched than I understood. 

A brief survey of the highlights:

• Amanda Gorman, instant rock star. 

• An inaugural address that didn’t sound like the monologue that a Bond villain recites to Sean Connery before trying to laser beam his testicles off. 

• The stagecraft. Whoever managed it deserves an Emmy. The idea of 400,000 US flags to represent the victims of the pandemic, standing in for the live audience who could not be there—the federal government’s first expression of communal grief at this national tragedy—was a masterstroke. Inevitably, it also recalled in macabre counterpoint the opening gambit of the last regime, Sean Spicer’s laughable/chilling lie that his boss’s Inaugural crowd was the biggest ever. (Factcheck: Not even close.) 

• Three of the four living Ex-Presidents all in one place (save for Jimmy Carter, who was too frail to travel), and not including the soon-to-be ex who ain’t invited into the club.

• A bunch of Broadway all-stars ripping out the scorching finale to “Hair.” 

• A Zen-like Hillary Clinton, in what must have been a bittersweet moment for her, both revisiting her crushing disappointment, and reveling in the vindication that she was right as right can be all along.

• Lady Gaga. After all the absurd racist controversy surrounding the national anthem over the past few years, how moving was it to see Gaga—with her instinctive, brilliant sense of theater—turn to the Stars & Stripes at exactly the right moment in the song, just two weeks after a violent mob of right wing insurrectionists tried to overthrow the US government, and sing: “Our flag was still there,” lyrics written after the last time the US Capitol was attacked?

(And bonus: I know MAGA Nation fucking hated it.)

• Speaking of MAGA Nation, I am confident that it set its collective hair on fire over a Woody Guthrie song being sung at the Inauguration, with a dollop of Spanish to boot.

• Enough purple to make Prince smile down from Heaven.

So yes, it was the best Super Bowl halftime show ever, even with the ghostly streets of Washington lined with police barricades and concertina wire and 25,000 DC National Guardsmen in full battle rattle. And we all know who’s to blame for that.

Of course, I am leaving out the most moving and important moments of the day: when the first woman, Black person, and South Asian person of either sex was sworn in as Vice President, and when a reasonable, qualified, sane human being—the most politically experienced and qualified candidate to ascend to the Presidency ever, in fact, whatever else you think of him—was sworn in as President, taking over from his polar opposite.

It was the first inauguration in my lifetime that I really appreciated the significance of that transfer of power, having come so close to losing our democratic form of government twice in the past couple of months: lately, in a violent attempt to nullify the election, but also on Election Day itself, given that a Tr—p victory would have spelled the end of American democracy as we know it just as much as the violent mob of January 6, had it succeeded. 

Or perhaps we can view those two events as merely related battles in a single campaign. After the election, I put out a piece called “How We (Narrowly) Avoided a Coup” (November 9, 2020), referring to Tr—p’s failed attempts to delegitimize the vote, fended off at the polls by Biden’s undeniable numbers and the integrity of stalwart election officials at the local level. At the time I didn’t know that there was another, much more violent phase of the coup yet to come. We avoided that disaster in an equally narrow escape, and it’s not at all clear that we’ll be so lucky next time.  

DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH

During the Inauguration, it was a relief to see at least the pretense of old school, pre-Tr—p (or maybe pre-Gingrich) bipartisan civility, with McConnell and McCarthy attending mass with the Bidens, and going through the usual protocols with their Democratic counterparts, shaking hands and being collegial and all that. 

That said, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. Same goes for the rest of sentient America.  

When it comes to civility, that word “pretense” is operative. The GOP gets no credit for going through these motions, which are less a matter of contrition or expression of decency going forward than they are merely performative, part of their effort to induce collective amnesia. Already Republicans are trying to convince us that they comprise a reasonable political party that didn’t just violently try to seize power, or spent the last four years abetting a neo-fascist kakistorcracy that almost burned America to the ground.

Nice try, fellas.  

President Biden of course will soon face gale force howling hypocrisy from that same Republican cabal. If you want a preview—and a good laugh—read conservative WaPo columnist Marc Thiessen’s new piece suggesting three things Biden can do to help achieve “unity.”

They are (not in this order, and I swear this is not satire):

1. Find a big project to do that the GOP will like…

2. Drop the impeachment, and… 

3. Be nice to the GOP and give them a lot of what they want, because “unity requires compromise….you can’t restore unity while trampling the rights of the minority at the same time. If (Biden) wants to restore unity, he and fellow Democrats will have to moderate their demands, agree to some Republican priorities and sometimes accept ‘no’ for an answer.”

Yeah, you know, the way the Republican Party under Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump were so generous and accommodating to the Democrats.

I’m surprised that guys like Thiessen don’t have big long ZZ Top beards, because I don’t know how they can look at themselves in the mirror to shave, nor why a major newspaper like the Post gives column inches to this drivel.

PARDON IS SUCH SWEET SORROW

Thiessen’s fishwrapping is but one of the reminders that we will be dealing with the rancid detritus of the Tr—p era for some time to come.

Here’s another:

It emerged yesterday that one of the senior generals in the room at the Pentagon as the decision was made not to send the National Guard (let alone active duty US military) to protect the Capitol from domestic terrorists was Lieutenant General Charlie Flynn, Mike Flynn’s brother, and the DCSOPS for the entire US Army—that is, deputy chief of staff for operations, the equivalent of the most senior G3 in the entire service branch. (The 3 being the preeminent officer on any military staff.) 

To be clear: Flynn would not have been the decision-maker in a situation like that, but he definitely would have been involved in that decision-making, as the senior staff member in charge of advising the Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Army on operational matters, and responsible for planning and executing them.

Like stopping insurrectionists from overthrowing the government.

To be clear once again: we have no evidence that General Flynn shares the views of his disgraced older brother, himself a retired three-star and convicted (and pardoned) felon who “publicly suggested that President Donald Trump declare martial law and have the US military oversee a redo of the election.” But it’s not a great look that he was part of the mechanism by which military assistance to repel the attack on the Capitol was rejected….especially when you ask yourself why, for days, the Army denied that he was even in the room for the call, until forced to admit it had been lying.

As DCSOPS, Flynn had good reason to be in the room. There was no need to lie and say he wasn’t.

Unless there was. And thanks to the Army’s actions, we are left wondering.

Speaking of pardons, in December I predicted that Tr—p would try to self-pardon but apparently he didn’t (nor pardon his kids, nor Giuliani, both of which I also expected). That is, unless there was a double secret dog dare pardon, as Lawrence O’Donnell has repeatedly speculated. We shall see, if and when Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department brings federal charges. 

Not sure that’s gonna play. “Oh, obstruction of justice? Sorry—I pardoned myself before I left office. Did I forget to mention that?” I doubt he’ll get five Supreme Court justices to sign off on that, though I am sure he will get two. (What does it say that the worst two SCOTUS justices aren’t even Tr–mp appointees?)

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (ADJACENT)

As the past four years of this blog will attest, I didn’t like the 45^th president of the United States. But during his pathetic farewell at Andrews Air Force Base (I can’t bear to call it JBA), the disgraced soon-to-be private citizen did have one moment of vulnerability, and that very much shocked me. It was when, amid the rest of the ad libbed, characteristically megalomaniacal bullshit, he said almost wistfully, “I did my best.” (Or words to that effect. I don’t want to go back and watch it again to get it verbatim.)

On one level, I was merely appalled. That was your best? Yikes.

But on another level, I did glimpse in him, for just a moment, a flicker of sadness. Not—without getting into a debate about free will—anything close to something that would excuse or forgive or even mitigate in any way his vast transgressions. But a moment of pathos nonetheless.

For truly he is a pathetic human being. How must it feel to have the whole world dance in the streets at your defeat? To have to beg or force your underlings to attend your grubby little goodbye, and then watch the bulk of the country, and the kind of A-list celebrities whose company you crave, mount a nationally televised party (with fireworks!) for your opponent. All this miserable excuse for a human being has wanted his whole life is that sort of love and affection, the kind of love that he never got from daddy. It’s ironic, n’est-ce pas?

Of course, the lesson is, if you want love and affection, don’t be a fucking monstrous, racist, misogynist, sadistic, piece of shit asshole. 

Pro tip.

TEAR DOWN THIS WALL

So now “The Trump Show” has been canceled. Catch the re-runs on Fox. (I’ll use his name here only in the interest of the joke.) For the rest of us, we now return to our regular pre-2015 programming, the kind that was not managed by a group of rabid chimpanzees who had taken over the broadcast booth. 

During Watergate, in February 1974, Garry Trudeau published a famous Doonesbury strip showing the White House and transcripts of the Nixon tapes (“I want you all to stonewall it”) behind a wall that bricklayers were building brick by brick, until in the final panel it obscured the entire strip. (He reprised it for Tr—p’s threatening call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger this past December.)

When Nixon resigned, Trudeau ran a bookend strip that had no text, only workers dismantling that wall until it revealed the White House with the sun shining down on it once again. 

That’s how I feel right now.

I have already experienced some snickering ridicule from right-of-center friends over the kind of optimism many of us feel surrounding the new administration. That strikes me as deeply cynical and destructive. But I don’t care—I remain optimistic nonetheless. 

The past 11 weeks have seen at least four dates that are destined to go down in history: November 3, which was Election Night; November 7, when the major news organizations called the election for Biden and spontaneous celebrations in the street broke out all over the world; January 6, when Tr–p’s attempt at a self-coup climaxed in the assault on the Capitol; and this past Wednesday January 20, when Tr—p finally departed, Biden was sworn in, and a new day dawned. 

I am still shaking my head that my young daughter, who is not yet ten, lived through such momentous events. 

The road ahead remains immensely difficult. But at least we are on the right road, not the highway to hell, autobahn to nowhere, or waterslide to madness that we’ve been stuck on for the past four years. 

Now let’s get to work.

***********

Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP

This blog also available on Substack and Medium.

For more essays, go to The King’s Necktie Archive.

It has been four very long years. So, now, on the eve of a historic transition, let us pause to savor the ignominious, much-deserved departure of Donald John Trump, a man who had no business being President of the United States (no business in public life full stop, if you ask me), who discharged the job in the worst manner of anyone ever to hold it, and who is now leaving in greater disgrace than any of his predecessors, even that guy from California who had such enthusiasm for tape recording technology.

It will take years of effort and encyclopedia-length volumes to detail all of Trump’s horrors, and I will not attempt a thorough survey here. We know them all too well, so let’s not be masochists and subject ourselves to a review right now. Plenty of time for that. 

Suffice it to say that this man has left the country damaged in almost every imaginable way, our international standing dealt a grievous blow from which we may never recover, bigots and racists given the high sign to come out brazenly into the light and parade their vile views, divisiveness at a historic worst in the post-Civil War era, the very concept of Truth and objective reality devalued, not to mention 400,000 of  our fellow Americans dead—the same number killed in World War II—felled by a historic pandemic that he criminally mishandled and even actively made worse. 

Oh, and also: The further demonization of immigrants; the normalization of wanton graft and corruption by elected official; the debasement of discourse and coarsening of our national dialogue; the empowerment of violent domestic insurgents to include neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and militia members; the weaponization of lies, the politicization of the military, the applauding of police brutality; the kidnaping and caging of children; the emboldening of foreign dictators; the craven surrender to the Kremlin….

I did say I wasn’t going to go into the laundry list, didn’t I? My bad. It’s pretty tempting. 

In short, Trump proved to be far worse on every front than even the most dire predictions from his critics, belying the bluff confidence of condescending Republicans, up to and including perhaps the most egregious sin possible for an American president: violently attempting to oveturn a fair election, thereby interrupting a heretofore unbroken string of 240 years of peaceful transfer of power. 

So in light of all that, Republicans, you’ve forfeited the benefit of the doubt until further notice. I recommend you go to your room and think about what you’ve done. We’ll let you know when you’re allowed to come out.

Pay no attention to that hammering sound: it’s just us barricading the door from the outside, Exorcist-style.

THE GASLIGHTERS’ BALL

As the brilliant Michelle Goldberg wrote in an epic piece for the New York Times: 

There’s a bleak sort of relief in the arrival, after everything, of comeuppance. The question is whether it’s too late, whether the low-grade insurgency that the president has inspired and encouraged will continue to terrorize the country that’s leaving him behind.

Fittingly, Trumpelstiltskin is going out as the only US president ever impeached twice (and in a single term, no less). And don’t talk to me about how it was pointless or divisive to do so with less than two weeks left in office. Actions have consequences—conservatives used to preach that, didn’t they? Actions like inciting a violent insurrection. But IOKIYAR I suppose.

Last week, even after the attack on the US Capitol and attempted insurrection by Trump supporters at his behest, Republicans continued to insist risibly that “there will be a peaceful transfer of power on January 20.”

Sorry, guys: that boat has sailed, with Captain Queeg at the helm. (Days Without a Coup D’état: 14.) 

On that point, the citizens (and leaders) of many foreign countries are rightly wondering why Trump is not under arrest. Good question. Given due process, our version of proper repercussions (at least in the short term), would be the exercise of the 25^th Amendment, but it falls to Mike Pence and the Cabinet to invoke it, and they remain his allies, even as Pence was to be assassinated as part of the plot. 

What we will see next is what The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins aptly describes as a Republican effort to induce mass amnesia in America. 

“Republicans call for unity but won’t acknowledge Biden won the election fairly,” as the Washington Post headline tidily put it. This is the GOP gaslighting we can look forward to for the foreseeable future. We might even see Mitch McConnell vote to convict Trump as part of that attempt. I’d welcome that vote, but he ought to do it on principle (cough cough), and even if he does, it won’t begin to constitute sufficient contrition and penance. 

For this is the Big Lie, the ticking time bomb Trump has left the country with. 

Thanks to his efforts, and of people like McConnell who abetted him, President-elect Joe Biden will enter office with almost seven in ten Republican (69%) believing that he stole the election. (Country first, right guys?) Bear in mind that only 25% of Americans identify as Republicans (31% identify as Democrats and 41% as independents), bringing the total number of batshit possible insurrectionists down to 17%. But that is still uncomfortably scary.

Meanwhile, the vile Lindsey Graham went on Fox News this past weekend and made a straight-faced, sanctimonious demand for his longtime Senatorial colleague Joe Biden to force Chuck Schumer to dismiss the article of impeachment, in the interest of healing and moving on. (Lady G made the same demand in a written letter.) It’s the same dishonest rationale that was behind Nixon’s pardon. And do note the veiled threat by Graham of more violence if Biden doesn’t let bygones be bygones.

This from a man who was one of Trump’s chief megaphone-wielders in spreading the Big Lie of a stolen election that resulted in the insurrection of January 6^th. 

(Speaking to Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, Graham also blamed Nancy Pelosi for the poor security around the Capitol on that day. Curiously, he didn’t have any thoughts on the culpability of those who sent those insurrectionists there. Like himself.)

So spare me, Lindsey, you spineless opportunist. 

By poisoning the body politic in this way, Trump amd his enablers have ensured that the destruction he has wrought will continue to wreak havoc for years to come. Just my opinion, folks, but we ought to never never never let the Republican Party or the so-called “conservative” movement forget that they foisted this cretin upon us, and the damage he did. Because make no mistake: they are already pretending they didn’t, while out of the other side of their collective mouth continuing to pander to the mouthbreathing base that descended on the US Capitol two weeks to the day before the Inauguration.

GOOFUS AND GALLANT

Trump reportedly has not reached out to Biden (nor Melania to Dr. Jill Biden), nor offered any of the usual courtesies nor engaged in any of the protocols of a normal transition. Needless to say, he will not attend the Inauguration. CNN reports: 

The Inauguration Day snub of the Biden’s comes on the heels of a series of broken norms and childish behavior that comes directly from the President of the United States, who has been vocal about his disinterest in preserving any semblance of decency towards the man who will succeed him.

What a petty, pathetic little man to the bitter end. One former Trump White House official called Trump’s behavior “abhorrent”—and that’s coming from someone who thought it was OK to work for Donald Trump.

But are we surprised? On the contrary: it would have been astonishing if he had done anything decent.

(And it’s not just a matter of manners. His smallness created national security risks complicating the handoff of the nuclear football.) 

“If I lost, I’d be a very gracious loser,” Trump bragged back in December, with characteristic lack of self-awareness. So says the very stable genius, with the very very large a-brain, who knows more about ISIS than the generals, and is not a puppet you’re the puppet. 

But Trump’s petulant departure is the natural reaction of a man who tried to steal an election and failed without winding up in prison. (Yet.) Axios’s podcast “How It Happened: Trump’s Last Stand” reports that Trump had a very clear plan for how to hang onto power “focused on the so-called red mirage.” It began with his months-long effort to delegitimize mail-in voting, and carried on with his post-November 3^rd lawsuits, and propaganda campaign, and strongarming of state officials, and attempts to get Congress and even his own vice president to decertify the results of the Electoral College, all the way up to his final card, the fomenting of a violent assault to stop that process. In other words, his attempt to undermine the will of the people was not some ad hoc improvisation but a conscious, pre-planned strategy to hold onto the presidency regardless of the outcome of the vote. As Axios’s Jonathan Swan writes, “His preparations were deliberate, strategic and deeply cynical.” 

Likewise, the Capitol insurrection itself—even the word “riot” misrepresents its true nature—was carefully planned, orchestrated, and financed (possibly in part by foreign powers, and through evangelical Christian fundraising networks), as opposed to the peaceful little protest that got out of hand, which some on the right would have us believe. (I watched a few minutes of “Huckabee” this weekend and nearly had to vomit.) 

The GOP will continue to try to sell us this lie, but the more details that come out, the harder that will be for them. But I am confident that they will keep trying.

THE FINAL DAYS

Sources say that in the closing weeks of his administration, an enraged Trump has banned his staffers from even uttering the word “Nixon.” Don should be so lucky as to be compared to Tricky Dick, who sent 21,000 US soldiers to needless death in Vietnam, undermined the Paris peace talks, subverted the Constitution, wiretapped his political foes, and (apocryphally) called a disastrous play for the Washington Football Team in the 1971 NFL playoffs. 

Child’s play. 

But there are plenty of Nixonian echoes in the images of Trump’s twilight hours. 

Will he try to squeeze a pardon out of Pence, despite having tried to have him killed? Or will he leave having “secretly” pardoned himself and/or his offspring and minions, as Lawrence O’Donnell has hypothesized? I guess we’ll find out. Two days ago The New York Times ran a piece headlined “Prospect of Pardons in Final Days Fuels Market to Buy Access to Trump,” subtitled, “The president’s allies have collected tens of thousands of dollars—and potentially much more—from people seeking pardons.” Jesus Christ. That’s a fitting epitaph for America, when a headline from the Old Gray Lady blithely refers to the market to buy pardons from the president and that’s not itself a national scandal.

In any case, he’s in need of some lawyers. Reportedly Trump has told his accountants not to pay Rudy Giuliani’s legal fees, causing Neal Katyal to quip that he wasn’t sure who was getting the shorter end of that stick: Giuliani, who was being stiffed, or Trump, for having Giuliani as his attorney in the first place. 

Or how about the image of the nutjob CEO of MyPillow entering the West Wing to propose the imposition of martial law, without bothering to conceal his notes to that effect. (Or maybe McConnell sent him over to smother Trump.) This is who Trump has left with him in the bunker.

We recently learned that Melania hasn’t even let him sleep in the presidential bedroom for all four years, consigning him to the den like a husband permanently in the doghouse, forced to sleep on the couch. (Typical, quipped Ric  Groves: an immigrant who wouldn’t even do the job she was brought here to do.)

Elsewhere in Trumpian domestic affairs, we are told that Jared and Ivanka wouldn’t even let the Secret Service agents guarding their lives and those of their children use any of their six bathrooms. (Let them eat urinal cakes!) As result, the American taxpayer was forced to shell out $3000 a month for the USSS to rent a nearby flat for when nature called. 

And of course, as we speak we have more troops deployed to secure Washington DC than we do in Iraq or Afghanistan….and it’s not because we’ve wisely drawn down from foreign wars, but rather, because we’re facing a proto-civil war of our own making here at home. America First, right?

I can only imagine what Hillary Clinton thinks, watching what America has come to under the man who unaccountably bested her in 2016. Four years after his own inauguration where he railed about “American carnage,” Trump himself has laid our nation lower than any foe since 1812, as the spectacle of the nation’s capital turned into a battlefield attests. 

Will you indulge me in a little overheated Stephen Milleresque rhetoric? The only difference is, what I’m describing is real. For this is America at the end of the Trump era:

Children ripped from their parents and put in cages. White nationalists armed to the teeth who feel free to patrol the streets. Economic suffering at near-Depression levels while the rich get tax cuts. Millions of Americans frothing at the mouth after being fed toxic lies. 400,000 dead from an out-of-control virus that America botched worse than any major nation (and many minor ones), hospitals straining at the seams, reefer vans brought out to relieve overflowing morgues. Our enemies gleeful as the US abdicates global leadership, dictators emboldened, and nuclear proliferation on the rise…. 

Sorry—got carried away again. I’ll just no-look pass it over to Barton Gellman, who observes in The Atlantic:

A healthy democracy does not need a division-size force to safeguard the incoming president in its capital. Generals and admirals in a thriving republic do not have to enjoin the troops against “violence, sedition and insurrection” or reaffirm that “there’s no role for the US military in determining the outcome of a US election.” A nation secure in the peaceful transfer of power does not require 10 former defense secretaries to remind their successor that he is “bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration.”

This is a moment of historic fragility in America. We are a long way yet from a second civil war, but there is no precedent for our fractured consensus about who holds legitimate power.

Just checking: is America great again yet? 

DEPLORABLE

Donald Trump is the worst human being I can think of. Yeah, I know there are worse: pedophiles and serial killers and so forth. For that matter, one of my great grievances is that Trump is only a dictator manqué, a dangerous clown, not even a proper despot like Putin or Kim or Orban or Duterte. Not that I’d prefer that, but it’s a uniquely American humiliation to be ruled by a clueless, deranged game show host.

Yet it’s hard to think of any public figure in this country or any other who presents such an appalling combination of so many vices: greed, selfishness, misogyny, racism, dishonesty, disloyalty, marital infidelity, cowardice, bullying, laziness, hypocrisy, demagoguery, megalomania, pathological narcissism, and on and on, and always always always doing the absolute worst possible thing in almost every given situation. 

Truly, this man is a human colostomy bag. 

That millions of Americans flat out worship him as part of a literal death cult is about the scariest and most headspinning thing I’ve experienced in my nearly sixty years on this planet. 

In his interview in this blog way back in 2017, the educator Matt Bardin derided the school of journalism he called “DTBM”—Donald Trump Bad Man. I can understand the weariness with reportage that does nothing more than repeat the litany of his awfulness without offering any insight or call to action. Then again, that weariness is part of what Donald Trump (Bad Man) counted on to abet his crimes. 

It’s astounding to me all the time I spent thinking about Donald Trump since 2015. (The aforementioned Michelle Goldberg had a piece in late October titled “Four Wasted Years Thinking About Donald Trump.”) If, in the 1980s, you’d told me I’d spend that much time consumed with this know-nothing con man from Queens at a time when he was but a Spy Magazine punchline, I’d have laughed and gone back to listening to “Tainted Love,” which was playing nonstop during throughout decade. (“Take my tears and that’s not nearly all…..”)

What will Trump’s legacy be, if you can call it that? A skidmark on the underwear of America might be a better description. The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last opines that we already know that answer, predicting history’s verdict in one sentence:

He oversaw a disastrous response to a global pandemic, because of which more than 400,000 Americans died on his watch.

That’s it. That’s his legacy. And if he gets a second line in the history books it will be this:

He incited an insurrection on the US Capitol which led to a second impeachment.

Sadly, that second impeachment—essential as it is—will unavoidably keep him in our lives a bit longer. Jesus, we can’t get rid of this guy, even after soundly rejecting him at the polls. 

But as some consolation, Trump is leaving office far more damaged—perhaps fatally—than he was just two weeks ago. Remember the talk that even as John Roberts was swearing Biden in, Trump would be holding a huge campaign rally on live TV and announcing his candidacy for 2024? The Capitol insurrection put the kibosh on that idea. We were told that Trump was going to be a kingmaker within the Republican Party, and possibly the Napoleonic kind, who crowns himself. Instead he is leaving office with his power considerably diminished, and it’s his own fault. Instead he went from being merely a lame duck to a turkey buzzard with his head dangling from a lone tendon after accidentally shooting himself with the farmer’s twelve gauge shotgun. 

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

That said, I am not writing him off. He’s defied the odds too many times (there is no God), and we’ve all seen too many horror movies where we’re led to believe the monster’s dead, only to have him pop back up in the final reel. 

Gellman again:

Here is the nub of our predicament. Donald Trump attempted democracide, and he had help. The victim survived but suffered grievous wounds. American democracy now faces a long convalescence in an environment of ongoing attacks. Trump has not exhausted his malignant powers, and co-conspirators remain at large.

The president of the United States lost an election and really did try with all his might to keep the winner from replacing him. He did his level best to overthrow our system of government, and tens of millions of Americans marched behind him. But a coup d’état in America had seemed so unlikely a thing, and it was so buffoonishly attempted, that the political establishment had trouble taking it seriously. That was a big mistake.

ON YOUR BIKE

Since the election, a number of people have asked me if I’m going to stop writing this blog. (We’ll discuss the hopeful, pleading look in their eyes later.) 

The answer is fuck no. Unfortunately for all of us, the United States will continue to be hampered by grievous problems for the foreseeable future—many of them the same ones we have wrestled with throughout the Trump era—and much as I would like to retire and do nothing but watch “Seinfeld“ reruns all day, I feel compelled to bloviate about them. For as we’ve said many times, Trump is but a symptom of America’s ills, not their cause.

We have talked at length in these pages (and by “we” I mean “me”) about how we managed to wake up to find Donald Trump in the White House in the first place, and how to go about fixing the ills that led to that disaster. I’ll warn you that many more column inches are going to be devoted to that going forward, both here in The King’s Necktie and myriad other places I’m sure. It’s a long, difficult, and dangerous road ahead. 

But for now, let us rejoice in Trump’s overdue departure, his defeat, his disgrace, and do everything we can to erase his legacy and repair the damage and never let ourselves be maneuvered into a nightmare like this again. And let’s give all praise dues the arrival of President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. and Vice President Kamala Devi Harris. Even if you don’t agree with every single one of their policies, either from the left or the right, it is a welcome and unfamiliar feeling to have decent, competent, empathetic national leadership again. 

So buh-bye Donald, and don’t you come back no more no more no more no more.

It’s about to be morning in America once again. 

*************

Illustration: Nighthawks (1942), by Edward Hopper

Detournment via @joeheenan / Twitter

This blog also available on Substack and Medium.

Behold the ironic end of Mike Pence, worthy of a Greek tragedy, or at least an O. Henry story.

After four years of non-stop, hard-to-watch, servile obsequiousness toward Donald Trump—a moneygrubbing sexual predator and pathological liar who embodies the diametrical opposite of the Christian faith that Pence claims to revere—Mike found out just how much goodwill that bootlicking earned him.

Less than zero, as Elvis would say. 

From the very beginning, Pence had calculated that pleasing Trump and the MAGA base was his ticket to the Republican nomination in 2024. But Donald Trump is not exactly known for his loyalty. In fact, he has a lifelong habit of savagely turning on business associates, wives, employees, and even friends (if he can be said to have any) in the blink of a heavy-lidded Adderall-addled eye. 

Even so, I doubt Pence thought his reward for his groveling servitude would be to wind up hunkered down with his family behind hastily barricaded doors in the US Capitol after Trump sent a bloodthirsty mob to murder him. 

Can there be a more fitting image of what it means to serve Donald Trump? 

Pence’s humiliating fate is emblematic of the entire GOP and the bleached-boned corpse of the conservative movement, thanks to its prostration at the feet of this cretin. 

GRAB ‘EM BY THE PUSSY, YOU PUSSY

Reports of Trump irrationally trying to strongarm Pence to overturning the election through his entirely ceremonial role in counting the Electoral College ballots were astonishing, even by the sewer-deep standards of Donald Trump. Trump not only attacked Pence on Twitter, but apparently berated him to his face and on the phone. Repeatedly.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Alex Witt, former Trump aide Sam Nunberg reported that Trump and Pence had a lunch that turned into a seven hour meeting in which Pence explained that he could not legally overturn the election (did he need to explain that?), prompting Trump to scream at him, in Nunberg’s paraphrasing: “I saved you. I made you! How dare you do this to me!” (Which sounds like what the lead singer of every disintegrating rock group says to his bandmates two-thirds of the way through every episode of VH-1’s “Behind the Music.”)

Unlike past media appearances, Nunberg did not appear to be drunk when he recounted this. 

According to the Washington Post, on the morning of January 6, before the joint session of Congress convened, Trump made one last effort to sway Pence in a phone call: 

“You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Mr. Trump told him, according to two people briefed on the conversation, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”

To be clear, Mike Pence is anything but a patriot. He is a pussy, but not in the way Trump thinks. 

(Sorry for the sexist slang. It’s gonna take a long time before patriarchal but deeply ingrained and very useful shorthand like “pussy” and “balls” are eradicated. And it won’t be by Donald Trump, whom his spokesman recently called “the most masculine person to ever hold the White House.” )

In any event, Donald seemed rather displeased when Mike chose the “non-patriot” route. We know now that Trump didn’t even bother to call his own Vice President while he was in lockdown from assailants who wanted to hang him. Instead, while people with nooses were hunting Pence like a dog, Trump tweeted: 

Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!

Nor did Trump call Pence or his family afterward to see if they were OK, let alone to talk to him about such mundane matters as how to quell the riot. (Because he didn’t want to quell it. Because he started it, and reportedly enjoyed watching it.)

Trump never did call Pence. Some six days went by before the two men met in person, in what was said to be a cordial encounter where the matter of one of them having ordered a rabid mob to murder the other never came up. Even now Pence has declined to invoke the 25^th Amendment against this man who has baldly demonstrated the tremendous threat he poses to the republic, not to mention to Pence’s own mortal well-being. 

And thus Pence’s self-abnegation continues. 

Here’s longtime GOP consultant turned Never Trumper Stuart Stevens, quoted in the WaPo:

Mike Pence threw aside everything he said he believed in—everything—I mean, here is a guy who railed against adultery on his radio show, and then teams up with Donald Trump and of course it was going to end this way. He has no future in the Republican Party. When the base of the party is not booing you, but chanting hang you, that’s a bad sign.

I would add only that Pence has no future outside the Republican Party either, as one moment of doing the right thing is not going to make us forget about the rest of Mike’s political career. You don’t get kudos just for doing your job and not participating in the overthrow of the US government. Nor does that erase his vile legacy not only in the Trump administration but throughout his public life.

In Jacobin, Liza Featherstone writes:

Wednesday was a fitting coda to Mike Pence’s disgraceful career: hiding from armed fascists and feigning shock at the authoritarian antics of the clown he’s been faithfully serving for four years like a well-trained dog…. 

Mike Pence has spent his life enabling the rise of the far right and these remarkably unappealing chickens have now come home to roost, as Malcolm X would have noted. 

Pence may have tried to look like the adult in the room Wednesday, but the debacle was entirely his own fault. He may find these rioting chuds distasteful, but he’s not much better than they are and has been helping out their cause for years. Even if he does end up using the 25th Amendment to prevent Trump from serving the remaining days of his term, it will be too little, too late, and won’t make him any less complicit in Trump’s latest assault on democracy.

So Pence’s cowardice and ambition have delivered him not to the cusp of the presidency but to pariahhood. He is a man without a constituency, destined to be permanently loathed by both left and right alike—by the former for his long subservience to Trump and abetting of his crimes, and by the latter for not taking that subservience even further. 

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

So farewell Mike Pence. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass. 

BAD BAD BOY

When Donald Trump first ascended to the presidency, sneering Republicans assured us—assured us!—that he was going to be oh-so presidential, and that fears of proto-fascism were “liberal hysteria. The idea that Trump would mount a violent coup to try to stay in power if defeated in 2020? Pshaw! He would never do such a thing!

There were jawdropping reports of Trump’s vile behavior surrounding the Capitol riot, above and beyond his guilt for starting it in the first place. His delight at the images he saw on TV. His refusal to listen to aides pleading with him to call for calm. His continuing attempts to pressure lawmakers into overturning the election results even as the insurrection was unfolding, calling Alabama’s newly elected Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, among others, to slow down the EC vote count. 

We also learned the “we love you…you’re very special” video was the LEAST incendiary of three takes that were filmed, with Trump ad-libbing in all three. Trump reportedly also thought his second videotaped speech—the one on Wednesday night, furiously backpedaling and disavowing violence once the scope of the disaster was clear—made him look “weak.” Goddam, what is wrong with this guy?

When he finally did speak to the press in person, Trump was fully on brand. The New York Times reports:

President Trump on Tuesday showed no contrition or regret for instigating the mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened the lives of members of Congress and his vice president, saying that his remarks to a rally beforehand were “totally appropriate” and that the effort by Congress to impeach and convict him was “causing tremendous anger.”

That’s right—another Zelinskyy-style “perfect call.”

“People thought what I said was totally appropriate,” Mr. Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, en route to Alamo, Texas, where he was set to visit the border wall. Instead, Mr. Trump claimed that racial justice protests over the summer were “the real problem.”

I’ll say one thing for the man: he’s consistent.

But Trump is in trouble. After weeks of breathless reports of how he was going to rule the Republican Party for all eternity despite losing the election, in the space of a few days he has become close to radioactive—and “Margaritaville”-style, it’s his own damn fault. 

His red wall is breaking in Congress, if only a little, but that’s significant in La Cosa Nostra. Even Bill Belichik turned on him (insert “Patriot” joke here), which is almost enough to make me forgive him for the fawning letter he wrote Trump on the eve of the 2016 election. 

Word of major corporations cutting off the cash to GOP members who fomented the insurrection is also cheering. Surely that was a prime mover behind Mitch McConnell’s decision to cut Trump off at the knees, especially after Don pretty much singlehandedly cost him his job as Majority Leader. 

Mitch McConnell has no principles whatsoever, but he is the savviest operator out there, and he don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. So if he is truly turning on Trump, it must be because he thinks Trump is toast—a good sign. But a again, as with Pence, let’s not praise the man for what is not at all a matter of integrity but—as always—of cynical opportunism. It’s just that it accidentally is helping the side of goodness and light for once. 

When corporate America turned off the money tap, Mitch and the GOP suddenly saw the light. Will wonders never cease?

BLAME IT ON THE REIGN

Make no mistake: Donald Trump’s weeks of spewing the noxious lie that the election had been “stolen” from him—months in fact, as he laid the groundwork for that claim—were the fuel that fed this fire. 

I hadn’t listened to Trump’s actual speech at the Ellipse until last night. If you haven’t done so, do yourself a favor and check out some excerpts at least: it’s like something out of a dystopian popcorn thriller (or A Face in the Crowd), and it makes undeniably clear how firmly Trump bears the blame for inciting that siege of the Capitol and subsequent invasion. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Rudy Giuliani, Don Jr. and others also spoke at the “Stop the Steal,” rally all of them in fiery, militaristic terms about the need for the crowd to “fight for Trump.” In fact, Gosar, a dentist by trade, might give Rudy a run for his money as the movement’s bull goose loony, a COVID-denying birther whose own brother told Lawrence O’Donnell that he is mentally unhinged and ought to be expelled from Congress.

“What’s the downside for humoring him?” one anonymous Republican lawmaker famously in the early days after November 3^rd, referring to Trump’s baseless, futile-from-the-start attempt to challenge the results of the election.

I guess we got our answer 64 days later. 

Of course, many of those Republicans did a lot more than just humor Trump. They amplified that incendiary lie of a stolen election, over and over, until they had a critical mass of deluded and self-deluding right wing citizens prepared to mount a putsch.

The 139 House Republicans and eight GOP Senators who cynically voted to challenge Joe Biden’s victory actively helped incite this riot almost as much as Gosar & Company. This was no symbolic protest; it was a cynical ploy to play to the fanatic MAGA base. Except that that MAGA base went full Frankenstein and rampaged murderously out of control, and the ensuing tragedy—and disgrace—is on the heads of those Republicans. 

To state the obvious: actions have consequences, and an action like ginning up a mob to kill people and try to overthrow the US government ought to have pretty serious consequences indeed, doncha think? Can we stop to remember that Al Franken was forced to resign from the Senate over some sexually risqué photos, for which he apologized, while Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley helped foment a violent rebellion and we’re having a debate over whether they deserve any punishment at all?

SPIES LIKE US

Just yelling “fraud” in a crowded democracy is criminal enough, but there is reason to believe that the culpability is even deeper and more concrete. If Trump and his deadenders are in freefall now, it only promises to get worse as more and more details of the attempted self-coup come out. 

The extent to which Republican members of Congress actively helped the insurrectionists remains to be investigated, but there are credible reports that on January 5 some led unauthorized “tours” of the Capitol, currently closed to the public due to COVID, that functioned as reconnaissance missions for the invaders, many of whom had suspiciously good grasp of the geography  of that notoriously confusing building when they breached it the following day.

As I wrote in a recent post, we also have to operate under the assumption that hostile foreign intelligence agents were mixed in with the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol. It’s impossible that there were not. What they were after, what they did while inside, and what they left behind, will require rigorous investigation and countermeasures. 

Now let’s go into Cloud Cuckooland for a thought experiment. 

What if there was not only foreign penetration of the Capitol, but actual, pre-arranged coordination between that foreign power and the Trump administration to their mutual benefit? (Which country is immaterial to this exercise, but let’s just say, for the sake of imagination, that it was a cold weather Eurasian country prone to furry hats, ice hockey players, and mail order brides.) That would be a crime of treason and a scandal to dwarf even the atrocities we’ve seen this far in this monstrous administration.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that there is any evidence that this happened. As I say, this is but a thought experiment. But does anyone doubt for a second that if a foreign power—even a hostile one—reached out to Trump offering help in overturning the election—even a violent assault on Congress—he would turn it down?

Be honest. 

Of course he would not turn it down. 

Objection! Calls for speculation. 

Does it though?

During the Mueller probe Trump said very plainly to ABC’s George Stephanpoulous that if a foreign power called him offering help defeating his presidential opponent, “There isn’t anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, (and said) ‘we have information on your opponent,’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

In fact, the Russians did exactly that—to Don Jr., Manafort, and Kushner in June 2016, and Team Trump did in fact eagerly take that meeting, in Trump Tower no less.

Is it much of a leap from accepting that kind of help—which is to say, intelligence sharing—to accepting physical, paramilitary help in storming the Capitol? Or are we saying that Trump has so much integrity that that’s where he’d draw the line?

(Pause for squirming and Rodney Dangerfield collar tug.)

And notwithstanding the current low-level mutiny against the Donald, how would Republicans react to that, should such revelations emerge? The way they’ve reacted to all of Trump’s outrages, I presume:

1. Claim it never happened, and that it could never happen. Don’t be ridiculous!
2. Assert that if it were to happen, they’d be outraged and take swift action to have Trump removed from office. 
3. Suddenly decide, when presented with irrefutable evidence that it did happen,  that it’s not so bad.
4. Quickly pivot to passionately defend the idea that whatever Trump did was actually the right thing, and great and honorable, and he should be praised for it, and PS Democrats are the evil ones destroying our country.
5. Accept doggie treat from Donald.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, FOLKS

We see that very dynamic at play in the reaction to last week’s news. For those of you who don’t want to subject yourselves to the Fox Nation spin on it (and I don’t blame you), I’ll do it for you. 

Prominent right wing pundits like the odious Victor Davis Hanson are snidely dismissing the severity of the Capitol insurrection, comparing it to the protests over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, along with the usual specious analogy to BLM marches. 

You remember the Kavanaugh hearings, right? When 10,000 violent insurrectionists screaming for blood broke into the Supreme Court attempting to lynch federal officials, smashing windows, shitting on the floors, beating journalists, and murdering at least two police officers in the process? What—you don’t remember that?  Snowflake.

Less noxious but still disturbing, Caitlin Flanagan recently had a piece in The Atlantic devoted to snickering about how comedic these insurrectionists were. 

I get it. There was plenty of Iannucci-grade absurdity to behold. Even the nicknames for the mob are funny: Y’all Qaeda. Vanilla ISIS. The Coup Clutz Clan. It’s shooting fish in a barrel to make fun of these mouthbreathing bozos

It’s also true that amid fears of hardcore Blackwater types mixed in with the yahoos, it now turns out that “Zip Tie Guy”—the professional-looking insurrectionist in the balaclava and body armor, carrying zipties, whose photo graced my blog last week— isn’t some ex-Delta doorkicker, let alone a Russian GRU infiltrator. He’s a cosplaying wannabe who came to the revolution with his mommy.

But wannabes can still be dangerous. 

In focusing only on the pathetic aspect of the would-be insurrection and not on the terrifying sight of a homicidal mob that wanted to install a despot, Flanagan’s was incredibly irresponsible journalism. Yeah, Viking Guy is a joke, but five people DIED…and it could have been a lot worse. Check the video of the mob that captured and brutally beat to death a member of the DC Metropolitan Police, with flagpoles flying the Stars & Stripes among the murder weapons. (A bit on the nose, don’t you think?)

And what correction did The Atlantic subsequently append to her piece? Only that “This article previously mischaracterized the plot of Back to the Future.”

The ghastliness of the right wing media machine is bad enough. It doesn’t help when the legitimate media continues to engage in the same kind of dismissiveness of the threat that helped Trump beat Hillary in 2016. 

CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

Thankfully, the Democratic leadership takes things a little more seriously than some of the press. 

If I’d told you at the beginning of last week that in the last eight days of his presidency Donald Trump would be impeached for an unprecedented second time, you would have laughed. But it is a fitting and proper response to a sitting US president who incites a violent insurrection to try to hold onto power. If that’s not impeachable conduct, what is?

Might this second impeachment backfire and help Trump a little bit, in stoking his followers’ resentment, letting him play the victim, and feeding the canard that this is all just left-wing Trump Derangement Syndrome? It might, a little, given how gullible a third of the country is. The same was true of the first impeachment. But principle demands it be carried out regardless, just like the first time around. Then as now, the long term effects of failing to do so would be far far worse.  

In arguing against impeachment, Republicans have the gall to claim that it would “divide the country.” Yeah, like that time I told a federal judge that convicting me of that armed robbery I committed would only divide America further at a time when it desperately needs unity.

It’s rich to be preached to about unity by the party that slavishly enabled the most divisive, hatemongering American president in history, and also tried to shitcan the votes of 150 million citizens last week. 

But we all know by now that the Republican Party has no shame. At one point during yesterday’s impeachment hearings in the House, the Washington Post ran a headline reading, “Trump allies argue that Congress should focus on combatting the coronavirus.”

I’ll just let that one sit there. 

Given that this was the counterattack being mounted on his behalf, it’s easy to believe the report that Trump himself wanted to go down to the House floor and act as his own defense counsel, and had to be dissuaded from so doing by means of a tranquilizer dart fired from a blow gun wielded by Pat Cipollone.

Even now the GOP is clinging to its oh-so-last-year mantra that this impeachment is nothing but partisan rage from the Democratic side, and that fears of the damage Trump has wreaked—and continues to wreak—are wildly overstated. On the floor of the House yesterday Jim Jordan even talked condescendingly about how of course “there will be a peaceful transfer of power next week,” as if scolding Chicken Little. 

That’s kind of like Giuliani’s claim that there were no terrorist attacks on Bush’s watch. 

News flash, Jimbo: the peaceful transfer of power has already been disrupted. Maybe you missed it while pulling your lookout shift at the showers at the Ohio State wrestling gym. 

BENEATH AND BEQUEATH

So here we are, facing the end of this atrocious presidency in the most fitting way possible.

When Trump was elected, one of the great fears—along with the risk of his designs on a presidency-for-life—was that he would drag the United States into a catastrophic war. Given his bellicosity, his stupidity, and his impulsivity, and notwithstanding the neo-isolationist bullshit, it seemed almost inevitable. It was perhaps the only pleasant surprise of the Trump era—amid endless terrible surprises—that he did not do so.

Until now.

With his actions of last Wednesday, Donald Trump has at last dragged us into a war after all—a civil one. I guess it was the very last item on his to-do list. Thanks, Don!

We all knew that part of Trump’s legacy would be that a third of the country would believe that the Biden administration was illegitimate. Many even discussed the possibility of a pro-Trump, right wing domestic insurgency. But until it hit us last Wednesday, it was all very abstract and academic. No more. As I wrote last week, it remains to be seen if January 6^th was an aberration or the cannonshots at Ft. Sumter of the 21^st century. In the mean time, impeachment is the one of the first steps in a right and proper response.  

****************

Photo: Worst duo since Leopold and Loeb. (With apologies to England Dan and John Ford Coley.)

This blog also available on Substack and Medium.

With each passing day, the pro-Trump insurrection that resulted in the occupation of the US Capitol on January 6 is looking less and less like a MAGA rally that got out of control and more and more like a assassination attempt against Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and others as part of a violent, deliberate coup d’etat. 

Spare me the semantics of a coup requiring the participation of the uniformed military. Like art or pornography, a coup may be hard to define, but its easy to spot when you see it. At a minimum, we watched an attempted autogolpe, or self-coup, defined by Wikipedia—font of all knowledge—as “a form of putsch or coup d’état in which a nation’s leader, despite having come to power through legal means, dissolves or renders powerless the national legislature and unlawfully assumes extraordinary powers not granted under normal circumstances.”

If that’s not exactly what happened when Donald Trump whipped his supporters into a frenzy with his speech on the Ellipse and told them to march on the parliament and stop its certification of electoral victory by his opponent, I don’t know what is. 

(Note to historians and dramatists: the ultimate touch of Trumpian con man cowardice was his promise to join the march, which he quickly broke, instead scurrying back to the West Wing to watch it on TV.)

Early reports from still-tactful White House aides were that Trump was “bemused” as he watched the violence unfold on television, including his goons viciously beating reporters and even police officers. (#BlueLivesMatter, amirite?) Later descriptions went further, calling him delighted and “excited by the action.” 

I’ll pause now for everyone to take a Pepto-Bismol break, because I can’t think of any behavior more stomach-turning from a US President ever, and that includes Watergate, the bombing of Cambodia, and Clinton’s cigars. 

Every time I click on my browser more video comes out revealing how bloodthirsty this mob was, attempting to steal and/or destroy the Electoral College ballots, and bent on murdering the Vice President and Congressmembers, who were huddling behind hastily barricaded doors, as Trump’s thugs banged furiously on the other side. Trump, for his part, never even bothered to call his own VP to see if he was OK…..which kind of figures, when you understand that he had called him everything short of a Judas and encouraged the mob that went and attacked him. 

Yeah, there were plenty of QAnon clowns and larping “Call of Duty” dipshits and Walter Mitty fantasists in the crowd. Likely the majority. But there were also a disturbing number of professional-looking saboteurs, militia members, and even amateur insurrectionists who might not have been to BUD/S but were still deadly serious.

The question now is what this failed insurrection represents in terms of the future threat. The big fear of course is that this is not going to stop, that Trump’s ginned up minions—convinced that the election was stolen, that the left is evil, that the right to own RPGs is enshrined in the Constitution, that White people and White people alone are “real Americans,” etc etc—will carry on and even escalate this sort of violence. 

I think that “fear” has now graduated to a “certainty.” 

To echo SNL’s Dr. Wenowdis, everyone understands that the fanatical faction of the MAGA community that is willing to murder people and overthrow the government for the greater glory of Donald Trump is not going away any time soon. We know dis. But precisely what happens from here? How big is the threat, how dangerous is it, what is its nature, and how do we best fight it? Did January 6^th mark the nadir of Trump-brand terrorism, or only the beginning of broader and even more violent unrest—in other words, a proper domestic insurgency?  

This we do not know. But it might be prudent to start preparing for the worst case scenario.

WILL THERE WILL BE BLOOD? YES, THERE WILL BE BLOOD

It is very reasonable to assume that the Capitol riot will just embolden these fuckers. As Tom Hall writes at The Back Row Manifesto, “an emergent fascist movement does not end after finding relative success using a violent attack to hold the nation in the thrall of its imagined grievances.”

So do you want the good news first, or the bad? 

The good news is that the pro-Trump insurgents are probably overestimating the scope of their recent victory. As I wrote last week, the kid gloves treatment they have consistently received from law enforcement, from Lansing to Kenosha to the Capitol, has surely given them a false sense of their own power. 

The bad news is, that false sense probably won’t be punctured until a great deal of blood is shed, some of it their victims’, but some of it theirs. 

How far are the worst of these people willing go? All the way, apparently. Trump’s most devoted cultists and other associated radicals have made it clear that they are very much prepared to commit murder, kidnap and “execute” government officials, and employ IEDs, not to mention engage in riots, beat people to death, and commit wanton property damage of our most sacred national symbols. So in that sense the “threat” is very lethal indeed. 

So the next big question becomes, how big is this faction? 

Since November we have been repeatedly reminded how astonishing it is that 74 million Americans voted for Trump even after witnessing the horrors of the last four years. It is indeed chilling. But when it comes to calculating the force ratios for a potential second civil war, those numbers are deceiving. Not every one of those voters is a hardcore seditionist—a great many are conventional (if willfully blind) Republican lever-pullers who simply voted the party line and will not be onboard with a Trumpian insurgency. 

We saw as much in the Congressional microcosm after the hideous spectacle of last Wednesday, when even such cowardly enablers as Graham, Loeffler, Lankford, et al finally drew the line. In the days since, there are already reports of internecine warfare within MAGA World, of right wingers turning on Trump, and of a battle between those who want to brag about trying to overthrow the government and those now beating a hasty retreat, covering their collective ass by promoting the predictable lie that it was a false flag operation by antifa-in-disguise.

In short, the MAGA community appears to be splintering. But even if its lunatic fringe is reduced to only a few million, that is still a scary number of potential terrorists and the network to support them. 

There is also the possibility that a right wing insurgency could carry on even if it repudiates Trump. After all, he didn’t invent violent racism, nativism, or domestic terrorism—give Nathan Bedford Forrest, J.B. Stoner, and Timothy McVeigh their vile due. Notably, the January 6^th mob included a pre-existing menagerie of radicals who have been at war with the US government long predating Trump: Second Amendment nuts, sovereign citizen adherents, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen among them. When he launched his political career Donald Trump latched onto that toxic strain in American culture and it embraced him in return; it could just as easily sour on him, and jettison him, and carry on without him. 

If the number of committed traitors who are willing to go to war against their own country is reduced to a very small number, that can be handled at the law enforcement level with ordinary policing and detective work, even if the legal consequences the perpetrators face rise above ordinary street crime and into the realm of national security matters. Hey, we even have a prison in Cuba and a whole military tribunal system all set up for them. (Yes, it’s still open.)

However, if that insurrectionist faction proves to be larger, or metastasizes, we will have a much bigger problem. Then we begin to drift into the realm of what the US Army calls “low intensity conflict,” or LIC.

WEST POINT FOR BEGINNERS

The best and most famous definition of war has always belonged to the Prussian general and strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who called it “the continuation of politics by other means,” a formulation every military officer in the Western world has had drummed into his or her head.

To that end, drawing on the notion that active combat is only the most extreme form of conflict between ideological entities, “Low Intensity Conflict” refers to political struggle at the light end of the spectrum, from simple agitation and propaganda through terrorism and insurgency. At its essence, LIC is just a new suit of clothes for what during Vietnam had been called counterguerrilla warfare, and in the early 21st century was rebranded yet again as COIN—counterinsurgency. A rose by any other name. 

LIC is precisely what we will be engaged in if we have to fight a violent pro-Trump White nationalist insurgency. 

Luckily, we have shitloads of practice at this sort of thing, because it’s a version of what we’ve been doing in the so-called “Global War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. But now, with a homegrown threat, should it prove sufficiently large and serious, the war will be fought on our own soil, primarily against our fellow Americans. And some of the American veterans of those foreign wars will be fighting on the other side. 

Indeed, we were in a low intensity conflict with radical Islamist (NB: not Islamic) extremism even before September 11, 2001—arguably, beginning with the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. But it was only with the shocking events of 9/11 that most Americans began to realize it, and only then that the US government truly shifted into wartime mode. 

We may soon look back on January 6, 2021 as a similar watershed. But it will be far more fraught when the United States is the primary battlespace, and US citizens the enemy.

LIC is an intelligence-intensive form of combat, some of which crosses the fine line into police work…..or conversely, a form of a police work that sometimes crosses the line into military operations. Either way you slice it, it inevitably entails at least some deployment of direct action units, whether from law enforcement (SWAT or special operations in particular), the Intelligence Community, active duty military, National Guard, or other paramilitary organizations from the Homeland Security realm. 

Here we enter into fraught terrain for a democracy with the risk of draconian overreaction and the militarization of ordinary life, even if it is in the interest of preserving democracy. That is very much what the pro-Trump terrorists—like all terrorists—want, because it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which they are the victims. Their own violent behavior prompts a violent reaction from the state, which they then point to as evidence of the monstrousness of the state, which justifies their violence toward it in the first place. 

IT’S JUST A SHOT AWAY

If pro-Trump terrorists are going to carry out further assaults on government buildings, truck bombings, assassinations, airplane hijackings, jailbreaks, and other acts of political violence, it will require a multi-pronged intelligence, law enforcement, and military effort to defeat them. That means rooting out these violent insurgents; it means infiltrating their organizations and cultivating networks of informants to provide us advance warning of their operations; it means increased electronic and other technological surveillance within US borders; it means forensic accounting to track and disrupt their funding; it means a public awareness campaign; it means an increased security presence to include a much more prominent police and military profile in our streets, airports, sports arenas, and other common areas; and yes it means kicking in doors, making arrests, and carrying out infantry-style raids when necessary. 

Who here saw Battle of Algiers?

Do the American people have the stomach for that? Can we carry it out without further damage to what’s left of our national unity? That too is a goal of our terrorist foe. Will a campaign of this sort drag us into full-blown civil war? It’s beyond ironic that radical Islamist extremism may ultimately prove to be far less of a threat to the United States than far-right White nationalist terrorism made in the USA. In fact, statistically, that is already true. Oklahoma City should have taught us that.

The US would not be the first Western democracy to wrestle with counterinsurgency operations against a homegrown terrorist movement. The majority of major European countries have dealt with it, going back to the 1970s, whether it was Germany grappling with the Baader-Meinhof gang/Rote Armee Fraktion, or France fighting Action Directe, or Italy facing Brigata Rosse. Most famously perhaps was the UK fighting the Provisional Irish Republican Army. (Let’s confine that struggle to Britain’s efforts to combat PIRA attacks in England and leave its COIN operations in Northern Ireland in a different realm, that of an empire trying to subjugate the indigenous residents of an occupied territory seeking self-determination. That is definitely the preferred interpretation if you want to order a Guinness at Ireland’s 32 on Geary Street in San Francisco, where a giant oil painting of Bobby Sands hangs over the bar.) 

But in this fight, we will face an additional complication—one that many of our European allies also faced, but that is new to us. To wit: 

Al Qaeda was plenty dangerous, but one thing it never had was the support of one of the two major American political parties. 

A BEACHFRONT CONDO ON THE REPUBLICAN SEA

Mao’s famous dictum was that the people are the sea in which the guerrilla fish swim. In this case, 74 million Trump voters and some 31% of the American electorate that identifies as Republican (pronouns: sie/ihr/ihnen) are a vast Atlantic Ocean in which these flesh-eating garra rufa are doing the backstroke.

Combatting pro-Trump terrorism will be made more difficult by the fact that there are sympathizers, overt supporters, and even active participants in that cause embedded within the US military, law enforcement, fire and paramedic units, and so forth, not to mention the government itself at the federal, state, and local levels. Indeed, as it stands right now, the mainstream Republican Party remains committed to Trumpian extremism insofar as it has not definitively rejected it…..and it’s not clear that it’s going to. 

A quick survey:

Over the weekend MSNBC ran a jawdropping chyron that read “Poll: Republicans split on whether Capitol breach was legitimate.” 

Really?

As I reported last week, one poll had 52% of Republican respondents blaming Joe Biden for the attack.

Trump himself was greeted like a hero at a party retreat in Florida just two days after the Capitol riot, where no mention was made of it, and the attendees re-elected as chairperson his chosen handmaiden Ronna McDaniel, a cheerleader for the insurrection movement, who ran unopposed. Meanwhile, per Heather Cox Richardson, last Friday “Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who led the Senate effort to challenge Biden’s election…tweeted that Biden was not working hard enough to ‘bring us together or promote healing’ and that ‘vicious partisan rhetoric only tears our country apart.’” 

Good to know.

So no sign of a come-to-Jesus moment for the GOP at large, at least not so far.

It remains to be seen how this plays out in the long term. Many are the column inches being devoted to that debate, and whether the Republican Party will eventually break with Trump  and reform itself, or if it will split in two, or if it will stick with Cheeto Benito and go down in ignominy. Non-spoiler alert: I don’t know the answer. 

But I also don’t know how we can we fight a potential insurgency like this one when one of our two major parties kinda sorta supports it. How we can beat these terrorists when the GOP downplays their violence and pursues policies that abet it, when millions of fascist-friendly Americans are sympathetic to them, when we don’t know how many members of our armed forces, and our police departments, and even the CIA and FBI and Secret Service are actually working for the other side?

THE LONG WAR, PART II

This kind of right wing uprising in the wake of a Trump defeat was always on the table, but until now it has still felt remote and theoretical. No more. And with what we saw on January 6, it seems tipped to get even worse. 

Yeah, maybe the violent strain of pro-Trump domestic terrorism will peter out in favor of mere grumbling and low-boiling White grievance at Kid Rock shows. But I’m not betting on it. If not, we will have to face the fact of an enduring right wing guerrilla war within the US, waged by a committed, well-armed American terrorists happy to kill their fellow citizens. Inauguration Day in particular brings the risk of violent, Tet-style simultaneous attacks on state capitols all over the country, as well as at the big show in DC. That really has the stink of proto-civil war about it.

Immediately after Biden’s win in November, I posted an essay called “How We (Narrowly) Avoided a Coup.” I took some grief for being premature, and although I stand by my assertion, I’ll admit it would be fair to view the Democratic victory on Election Day as merely one battle in a slower-burning coup attempt that continued to unfold in the weeks that followed, finally coming to a head on January 6^th. And we’re not entirely home free yet. Even once we are, and Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46^th President of the United States, it may mean only a new phase in the fight. 

Within the Pentagon and defense community, there is another more clinical and more clear-eyed name for what the Bush administration’s marketing and branding whizzes dubbed the Global War on Terror. 

They call it The Long War.

What we are entering now might be a whole new chapter in it. 

We better get ready.  

*********

Photo: Pro-Trump terrorists in balaclavas and tactical gear, carrying zip ties for hostage-taking, during the invasion of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Credit: Getty Images

This blog also available on Substack and Medium.

This may get a little stream-of-consciousness. When you’re in the middle of a dystopian nightmare, disciplined E.B. White style prose becomes challenging. 

Also, I’ve been microdosing. 

(1000 mikes washed down with Henry McKenna straight from the bottle is still a microdose, right?)

So where to begin? How about with the emerging details of what the hell went on during four of the most appalling and surreal hours in American history. 

THERE’S A RIOT GOIN’ ON

The videos that have begun to emerge from inside the Trumpist mob that stormed the US Capitol paint a far more terrifying portrait than first appeared. Live TV footage on the day seemed weirdly casual, like a tailgate party, as many commentators remarked. But these new images—from freelance camerapeople and some even from the rioters themselves—show thousands of angry thugs bum-rushing the building, smashing windows and vandalizing property, screaming obscenities and threatening murder, physically attacking journalists and bizarrely placid Capitol Police officers (“Fuck the blue!”—so much for Blue Lives Matter), and even attempting to chase down fleeing members of Congress. Whom they were apparently bent on kidnapping and executing.

Overweight armchair revolutionaries engaged in cosplay suitable for a Raiders game dominated the early press coverage—“Vanilla Isis,” as BLM founder Alicia Garza dubbed it. But mixed amid these clowns were at least a handful of hardcore alt-right saboteurs in body armor and balaclavas, carrying zipties for hostage taking, as well as firearms and Molotov cocktails. 

Ironic that, amid the anti-mask crowd, the most dangerous people may have been the ones keen to cover their faces. 

These American brownshirts were proper terrorists, and they weren’t playing. We now know that they intended to take Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and perhaps other Congressional leaders hostage, and to lynch Pence (at a minimum) from a tree on the Capitol grounds, or on the homemade gallows that many saw on TV. That would have been a horrific image worthy of the worst Fourth World banana republic or Islamist hellscape, and we’re only now realizing how close we came. 

(I guess even being the most reliable Trump lickspittle is not enough for these folks, is it Mike? Geez, you dutifully polish Trump’s nob daily for four years, but when you say “no” one time…..)

We also have to assume that there were undercover foreign intelligence agents co-mingled within the mob—it would be professional malpractice by our enemies if there were not. That means that the entire US Capitol building and its environs are compromised, and every square inch, every light fixture and computer and piece of electronic equipment has to be disinfected if not replaced, and the whole place swept for bugs (not to mention bombs). So that happened.

More stories and images are sure to come out in the ensuing days, and I doubt they’ll be any more heartwarming. One anonymous federal law enforcement official called it “the darkest day for the United States since 9/11.” But there have been many such days under Trump. This one, I fear, marks not a finale but an appetizer.

LET ‘EM IN

The shocking inability—or unwillingness, or at the very least ill-preparedness—of law enforcement to deal with this incursion remains a topic of heated debate, and will for some time I am sure. It’s clear that the Capitol Police were out of their depth; what’s less clear is who failed to anticipate the kind of security forces that would be needed, and why. The post-mortem (literal, in some ways) will go on for months and even years as we try to untangle this colossal failure.

As I wrote earlier this week, prudence in deploying the US military domestically is not the worst thing. (Nor abroad either, for that matter.) In fact, the mood within the Pentagon right now is pretty angry and resentful, I’m told. You didn’t want troops in the streets after criticism of last summer’s reaction to BLM protests? Well, you got your wish. 

I am very sympathetic to that view. Troops in the streets adjudicating an election is a bad look for a democracy. 

Unfortunately, the unintended result of that abundance of caution was the demonstration of a blatant double standard— even if it was only accidental—in which peaceful Black and progressive protestors are tear gassed, beaten, and brutalized by National Guard MP battalions, militarized riot cops up-armored for the streets of Fallujah, and Putin-style little green men in unmarked uniforms, while truly violent White right wing insurrectionists get handled with kid gloves and damn near shown a red carpet.

Not a great look for a democracy either. And what’s worse, it’s not at all clear that the double standard was accidental. 

It’s true that, as ugly as Wednesday was, another Kent State or Tiananmen would have been worse, not only in terms of bloodshed but in that it would have allowed the radical right to take the moral high ground (much better than taking the Rotunda) and portray itself as valiant martyrs, painting law enforcement and the legitimate authorities as the villains. Even as it is, over in Fox Nation there’s risible bullshit about how this was really the work of antifa in disguise, irrationally sitting cheek by jowl with pride at what the alt-right did. That claim, of course, belongs with OJ’s hunt for the real killers, the Utah moon landing, and Mel Gibson’s views on the Holocaust. 

But prudence in avoiding a bloodbath and debunking the deceitful right-wing narrative are not excuses for wanton dereliction of duty. Even taking into account the Pentagon’s understandable desire to stay out of domestic unrest, every knowledgeable professional in the security, law enforcement, and military communities surely understood the threat that this rally posed, or should have. Its organizers didn’t exactly practice airtight opsec: for weeks they had heavily advertised their intent to engage in mayhem. Hell, the alt-right has regularly demonstrated its eagerness to do so, from Charlottesville to Kenosha to Lansing. Radical right wing message boards and other forums were chockablock with details and plans for a violent uprising. As Prof. Jason Johnson noted on MSNBC, if there was this much chatter about fomenting violence on the Black Internet, the whole country would have been on lockdown. 

Doubt it? We all saw the photos of National Guardsmen in full Darth Vader kit standing three deep on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last summer, as opposed to the kind and gentle boys in blue that the Trump goons were met by. (Not to malign the Capitol Police, one of whose brave members gave his life, killed after being smashed in the head with a fire extinguisher. But the disparity was stark.) 

Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) rightly asked why there were no undercover cops infiltrated into the mob, COINTELPRO style. There may have been, but if so, they didn’t seem to do much. It’s far more likely that members of the alt-right have infiltrated various police departments, as well as fire departments, first responders, and the military. (Rep. Bass also had a priceless tweet about the FBI’s after-the-fact hunt for the instigators.)

Compounding the injustice, Tom Hall of The Back Row Manifesto points out that it is a false equivalence from top to bottom to compare Trump’s goons to Black Lives Matter or its related movements. First off, BLM arises from a legitimate grievance, as George Floyd’s crushed windpipe attests. (See also: Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys, and the whole history of the USA.) Trump’s mob stems from a vile lie spread by a demagogue.

Moreover, the BLM demonstrations that arose in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s state-sponsored murder were largely peaceful (sorry, Fox, but it’s true) and were met with disproportionate force by law enforcement. This week’s obscenity in the Capitol was a full-blown riot met with lollipops and candy canes. Brutal suppression of these right wing aggressors would have been WHOLLY appropriate, even if it still would have given up lots of ground on the propaganda front. 

But there’s another fallacy at play in the idea that restraint was the driver of the limp response to this attack. There’s a huge gap between tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue in support of a coup d’état (or even suppressing one) and the prudent and proper protection of the United States Capitol and the members of the US Congress during the discharge of their fundamental  duties. At a minimum, there was an unforgivable cockup in communication and coordination. (The sheer complexity and confusion of overlapping—or non-overlappping—security agencies in the District of Columbia, with its weirdly unique status, was also part of the problem. Maybe look into fixing that, guys—with statehood, perhaps.) But it goes deeper than that still.

The argument I’ve heard from credible sources I know within the homeland security community is that the relevant authorities truly did not anticipate how serious the threat would be. 

Per Prof. Johnson, that is a cruel joke, but it speaks to the systemic, subconscious, deeply ingrained racism in law enforcement across America. As Masha Gessen has written, it may well be true that the authorities genuinely did not see these Trump supporters—mostly conservative White dudes, like the mandarins of the law enforcement and community themselves—as a pressing danger. A bunch of Black protestors and left-leaning allies on the other hand? Call out the cavalry!

That they sincerely didn’t see these furious, armed, openly-violence-promoting White men as a threat is the very problem. 

BRING IT ON

Over the past two days I’ve also spent some time reading interviews with some of these pro-Trump insurrectionists. Mostly they are incoherent and insane. But apropos of the law enforcement response, one thread stands out and strikes me, and that is their jeering, inflated sense of their own physical power as they brag about what they will do “next time.”

Now to be fair, they have reason to be arrogant after being treated so gently by law enforcement this week….and in Michigan when they tried to kidnap and murder the governor, and in Kenosha after Kyle Rittenhouse shot two people dead with an AR-15 and walked right past the cops who let him go, having earlier given him water and told him they appreciated what he and his pals were doing. And of course there have only a relative handful of arrests, ongoing investigations notwithstanding.

But the delusion of these racist fuckwads that they can scare us with what they might do “next time” is wildly misplaced. 

So if any pro-Trump would-be rebels are reading this (if, in fact, you can read at all), let me offer you some friendly advice.

One of the main reasons the good and decent citizens of this nation are appalled by your behavior this past week, apart from its inherent criminality, is that you were treated with such unjustified gentleness. I can assure you, as a professional infantry soldier myself once upon a time, you will not fare well against proper law enforcement and security forces operating the way they are supposed to, let alone the US military, should you have any delusions of actual insurgency or civil war. 

Consider yourself duly counseled.

THE END OF TRUMP

So there is a lot to sort through in the fallout of this epic national security failure and bald demonstration of inherent racial bias. (But speaking of which, didn’t we just suffer “the worst intelligence failure since 9/11” with the Russian cyberattack that was revealed right before Christmastime? Jesus, we’re having a bad run. But this one was worse, because we did it to ourselves.)  

Sadly, a 9/11-style commission playing who-shot-John will be the easy part. The hard part will be isolating and cutting out the cancer that engendered that failure in the first place, beginning with holding accountable those responsible. 

Lacking a time machine, we can’t go back to the origin of the “paranoid style” and hatemongering racist demagoguery that is so baked into the American experiment. Instead, we will have to constrain ourselves to the current leaders of that movement. 

Trump of course is the alpha monster in that category, and he must be dealt with like a Hell’s Angel on PCP armed with a flamethrower loose in a nursery school. 

Trump’s lie about the theft of the election was the match that lit this fire, but his entire despicable political career is what built the pyre. Even though the effort is predestined to fail in the Senate, he richly deserves to be the first US president ever to be impeached twice. (For Trump, though, getting kicked off Twitter is worse.) “Some people ask: Why would you impeach and convict a president who has only a few days left in office?” wrote Bernie Sanders. “The answer: Precedent. It must be made clear that no president, now or in the future, can lead an insurrection against the U.S. government.” 

Failing that, there is the 25^th Amendment, though that seems just as unlikely, given Pence’s cowardice. (Hey, turns out I do agree with Trump’s goons on that point, though for diametrically opposed reasons.) Jonathan Swan of Axios has reported that a de facto 25^th Amendment is already in effect, in that senior members of the Trump administration are simply acting as if he is not the president for the remaining eleven days of his term. I suppose that’s a good thing, safety of the planet-wise, although it’s not how the US government is supposed to work. But the US government has not remotely been working the way it’s supposed to for the past four years. 

In light of this leadership vacuum, former FBI counterintelligence expert Frank Figliuzzi suggests that our enemies are right now calculating how to take advantage of this unique moment of American chaos, to include whether this is a rare opportunity to make aggressive moves that they otherwise could never make. Invasion of South Korea anyone? Crushing of dissent in Hong Kong? Annexation of the rest of Ukraine?

And what of Trump’s behavior during all this? 

For an odious bully who has undeservedly gotten every possible privilege in life and escaped repercussions for even his most despicable acts, Donald has always been a remarkably unhappy motherfucker. I’ve never seen a genuine laugh come out of his mouth, and only forced grins, even when he ought to be on top of the world. Wednesday was in some ways the best day he’s had in years, and yet reports are that he couldn’t even enjoy that, spending most of the day in a rage, fuming at Mike Pence’s so-called betrayal and other perceived injustices he believes he has suffered.

The Washington Post reports that he was completely out of contact with his own VP—as well as Schumer, McConnell, and Pelosi—while the mayhem raged and they were locked down in a secure location, displaying no interest in trying to coordinate a response to the riot he started. Instead he sat in the White House and watched it on TV, “bemused” (that’s a direct quote) at what was happening and pleased that the mob was “literally fighting for him.” “But at the same time,” the Post reports, “he was turned off by what he considered the ‘low-class’ spectacle of people in ragtag costumes rummaging through the Capitol.”

Incredible. A psychopath who doesn’t even understand his own responsibility for unleashing that violence, not to mention an asshole who looks down on his own supporters. It’s no wonder that some of them have, at long last, begun turning on him.

Trump apparently could not be persuaded to call for calm, rebuking his advisors for even asking, and prefiguring Fox talking points by making specious comparisons to the BLM protests. Pathetically, aides were forced to try to sway him by posting messages on Twitter. (Now that won’t even work.) Speaking on condition of anonymity, one described him as “a total monster,” and compared him to mad King George III.

Worst movie of the year? Relax, Hillbilly Elegy—it might be the nauseating video of Don Jr. and Kim “The Best Is Yet To Come” Guilfoyle partying before Don Sr. spoke to the mob and kicked off this whole obscenity. Then there was Trump’s own hostage-style video in which he tried to do some damage control, released only after it became clear that he was in deep doo-doo, as George Bush would say. (And there was at least one weird cut in it. Paging Rose Mary Woods.) Reportedly he had to be bludgeoned into doing even that, and has since expressed regret about making the video at all.  

INSTANT KARMA’S GONNA GET YOU

In addition to prompting calls for his impeachment, resignation, or removal, Trump’s actions had some other immediate And self-destructive implications.

The odds that Pence will pardon him have now plummeted….but the odds that Trump will self-pardon—already high—have skyrocketed. If he even suspects that there is any risk he might be removed, he will move to pardon himself sooner rather than later, perhaps in the next few days. Ironically, for him to try this now, in the wake of his clear culpability for the events of this past week, will surely prompt a tremendous outcry. Not that that would ever deter him, nor affect the courts’ verdict on the attempt, but it will put this shameless ploy in an even more glaring context.

The talk of Trump’s chokehold on the GOP forever and ever amen, a near article of faith as recently as this past Tuesday, has also taken a severe hit. 

Until this week, there was also debate about what kind of legal consequences Trump ought to face for his various sins, balancing the good of the country with the demands of justice, Nixon-like. Now that debate is over. The two are one and the same. A consensus has quickly emerged that Trump must be held accountable to the full extent of the law, and so must his followers, from Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows to the guy with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. More on that it a moment.

As my friend Bob Mastronardi quipped, “Am I alone finding irony that the aftermath of a Trump rally could be the final nail in his political coffin?”

That said, I remain wary of predictions that this is the GOP’s final break with Trump. We have all been Lucy-and-Charlie-Brown-with-the-football’ed too many times. But with this latest atrocity, Trump may have really done lethal damage to once-solid predictions of his post-presidential power. Once again he is his own worst enemy….which is no mean feat, given how much the rest of us hate him.

THE SENATOR FROM MISERY

So let’s talk about the culpability of the rest of the fellow travelers on the Trump Train to hell.

As we’ve observed over and over, Trump did not hijack the Republican Party or the conservative movement, as some would have us believe: he is the natural result of the toxic politics in which it has been trafficking for decades. In that regard, Trump has many enablers who are also to blame, both for this specific crime and for the broader pattern that led up to it. 

The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser writes:

For four years, Trump has made war on the constitutional order, on the institutions of American democracy, and on anyone who stood in his way. Almost all of the Republicans on Capitol Hill let him do it. They aided and abetted him. They voted to acquit him of impeachment charges. They endorsed him for reëlection and even acceded to his request not to bother with a Republican Party platform. The Party’s ideology, henceforth, would be whatever Trump wanted it to be. 

Republicans had accepted the “perfect” phone call with Ukraine, the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, the “love” letters with Kim Jong Un, the monetizing of the Presidency for Trump’s personal gain, the unseemly firings and policy diktats by tweet, the politicization of the Justice Department, and the menacing war against the journalistic “enemies of the people.” 

Even after Trump decisively lost the election, Republicans across Washington went along with him as he spread lies and conspiracy theories, filed baseless lawsuits, and raged when judges threw them out, as they did again and again. When Trump called for a final reckless coup against the constitutional order, many were willing to follow him even to this legal, political, and moral dead end—cynical opportunists like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, in the Senate, and a majority of House Republicans, including their leader, Kevin McCarthy, of California. 

When it comes to this latest offense, no one bears more blame than Hawley. 

The January 6 rally was long planned for the day that Congress, by law, was set to certify the results of the Electoral College, Trump’s last procedural chance to overturn the election before he is left with only martial law and other extremes. But that otherwise routine ceremony turned into something much more fraught when the callow and uber-ambitious Sen. Hawley announced that he was going to object to that certification for no good reason other than his desire to kick off his 2024 presidential campaign. 

Even after witnessing the unspeakable events that unfolded earlier that day, Hawley pressed on with his pointless and reckless kabuki, and did not exactly cover himself with glory in his late night speech on the floor of the Senate. As former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tweeted: “So Hawley helped to spark this incredible awful day in American democracy because he disagreed with mail-in voting in Pennsylvania? Really? Did I miss something or was that it?” 

Hawley’s jawdroppingly dishonest and opportunistic behavior will live in infamy. So it’s fitting that a man so ambitious and pathologically willing to commit an act of such wanton immorality should experience such a steep fall. 

Overnight Hawley became one of the most hated figures in American life. He lost his sweetheart book deal, his mentor (retired Missouri Senator John C. Danforth called championing him “the worst mistake I ever made in my life,”), and his future as a rising Republican star. His Senatorial career is in tatters and his presidential ambitions are dead as disco.

Josh-o predictably whinged about censorship, which is REALLY beginning to make me question the value of a fancy Ivy League education. To state the fucking obvious, Josh, as a free marketer, you might recall that censorship is a matter of governmental action, while Simon & Schuster is a private business, and free speech under the First Amendment does not entitle you to a fat book deal from a prestigious publisher. 

But Hawley should face a lot harsher consequences than just that.

He should be censured, if not outright expelled from the Senate. If he had an ounce of decency, he would resign. (If he were a Japanese politician, someone would hand him a tanto.) His career in public life should be over, of course, consigning him to the dark corners of the right wing mediasphere, where he can always earn a well-feathered living and be celebrated by the other cretins. I’m not worried about Josh being able to feed his family.

But it’s not at all clear that any of that will happen. Josh Hawley may yet be a viable presidential candidate in 2024, even if it’s under the banner of a new far-right party, or the current Trump—er, Republican—Party, should it not conduct a thorough cleansing. 

The real question is, can America heal sufficiently such that Josh Hawley for practical reasons can’t muster any significant support as a viable national politician?

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

As Glasser notes, Hawley is far from alone in his responsibility for this dog’s breakfast.

After Josh first announced his spotlight grabbing stunt, the reliably reptilian Ted Cruz all but tripped over himself trying to out-monster him, no doubt kicking himself that the junior douchebag from Missouri got there first. So another silver lining this week was that it might have been the end of Ted Cruz’s political career as well, or at least his already shaky presidential ambitions. Let’s hope so. These guys can never be allowed to go back to pretending that they are acceptable, garden variety pols who didn’t foment this atrocity and the damage it did to America, and America’s standing in the world, not to mention the loss of human life.  

And there are many others. Watching DeVos, Chao, Mulvaney, Barr, Peggy Noonan, John Kelly, et al suddenly discover their consciences in the final twelve days of this hell voyage is a bitter joke. With the Cabinet officers in particular, it is more likely sheer cowardice in order to avoid a vote on the 25^th Amendment. But they shouldn’t be mortified, Bonnie Kristian of The Week, they should be repentant. 

“I’ve tried to be helpful,” a smug and grinning Lindsey Graham told his colleagues on the floor of the Senate, hoping to cover his ass as he attempts to extricate himself from Trumpworld now that it’s gone to shit. Thanks, Lindsey—I think we’ve had about all the “help” from you we can take.

Asked about a second impeachment, Graham waffled, saying he hoped the worst of Trump’s reign was now behind us, then offered that if Trump did something else really bad in the next twelve days, “all options would be on the table.”

Hear that, Donald? We’re serious this time. We’re giving you ONE MORE CHANCE.

(*Susan Collins nods somberly.)

Craven as these all-but-meaningless eleventh hour defections are, they may at least mark the long overdue beginning of the end of Trump’s reign of terror and this Salem-like period of mass hysteria. Maybe. But then I look up and see Lucy Van Pelt holding that football again.

All these people and many many others have a lot to answer for (looking at you, Hugh Hewitt), and we should demand that they do so. There can be no mass amnesia, no clemency, no forgive-and-forget. It would not be merciful to do so—it would be suicidal. We’ll be lucky to have survived the Trump era at all, with only the damage we’ve already suffered. If we don’t begin repairs, including holding the guilty to account, it will happen again. 

Thus far, Trump’s enablers have mostly beaten the rap, which is infuriating in itself. The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells, a better gentleman than me, has the courtesy to call Trump’s rallygoers by their preferred name when he writes:

The Save America March featured Roger Stone, who had been convicted in federal court of witness tampering and lying to Congress in connection with the Mueller investigation; President Trump later pardoned him. The march also featured Rudy Giuliani, who had spent years directing Trump’s effort to bully the Ukrainian government into producing damaging information about Joe Biden’s son Hunter—the same effort that resulted in the President’s impeachment. Shortly before the invasion of the Capitol, Giuliani told a crowd near the White House that it was time for a “trial by combat.” He spent several years working to subvert the regular process of elections, got away with it, and now was at it again.

This is yet another aspect of the hypocrisy of which Tom Hall writes:

There is a double system in America now, one for you and me, and one for white nationalists. One for people of color and their allies, and one for Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn. Trumpists are cleared for criminal service of the fascist President’s will, and the rest of us get to eat shit as justice is leveraged as a political weapon.

All true. But the difference is, beginning January 20, a new set of folks are going to be meting out the punishment.

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

Can the GOP undergo the painful process of reforming itself? Does it have the moral courage to do so, or even the simple desire? The same questions apply to our nation as a whole. 

It won’t be a easy task, and no one thinks it will. How deep and dark is the Trumpian death cult of personality? This dark: A recent poll shows that a majority of Republicans blame Joe Biden for the mob that stormed the Capitol.

The notion that MAGA Nation is just a bunch of harmless dumbasses now ought to be thoroughly discredited. Those pickup trucks flying oversized Trump flags blasting past on the LIE—already disgusting—suddenly seem a lot more menacing. And neither the hateful throng that desecrated the Capitol nor the poison that fed it will fade away without pushback from the rest of us. As Paul Krugman writes, “If you imagine that the people who stormed the Capitol will just go away once Biden is installed in the White House, you’re delusional.”

It’s time to stop appeasing the fascists among us…..there needs to be an accounting for whatever crimes took place during the past four years—and does anyone doubt that Trump allies and associates engaged in criminal acts? Don’t say that we should look forward, not back; accountability for past actions will be crucial if we want the future to be better.

Appeasement is what got us to where we are. It has to stop, now.

If there is no such reckoning, the events of this past Wednesday won’t be a low watermark. They will only be a prelude. 

In fact, even with a reckoning, so much damage has been done to the soul of this country that we will surely have to deal with a violent White nationalist, radical right wing insurgency for some time to come. If we don’t face its toxic wellspring, January 6th may one day look like a walk in the park. 

***********

Photo: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who once clerked for John Roberts, greeting pro-Trump insurrectionists outside the Capitol before they stormed the building. History will record that this raised fist salute also functioned as his farewell wave to his presidential ambitions.

Credit: Francis Chung E&E News and Politico via AP Images.

We’ve known for some time now that there is nothing that is beneath Donald Trump. Not kidnapping and caging children, not kowtowing to dictators, not stealing money from a children’s cancer charity, not bragging about sexually assaulting women, not looking away while bounties are levied on US soldiers, not golfing while a pandemic kills 370,000 Americans on his watch and counting.

But did you think his depths extended to inciting a violent mob to storm the US Capitol in an effort to overthrow the government and keep him in power?

No? Well, in that case, let me welcome you back to consciousness after your coma. 

A SHITSHOW BY ANY OTHER NAME (WOULD STILL STINK)

Let’s be clear about what we just witnessed. In The Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum writes:

The president of the United States summoned his supporters to Washington, DC, today, and then stood in front of the White House and lied to them, insisting that he had won the election and that extraordinary measures were necessary to vindicate his win. They took his message to heart, marching up the National Mall toward Capitol Hill. Breaking through barricades and police lines, Confederate battle flags dotting the crowd, the insurrectionists seized control of the United States Capitol, putting Congress to flight. 

Hey sticklers, can we call this a coup now? When a defeated president speaks to an angry crowd and eggs them on and then they storm the parliament? You can get back to me.

While heating up his myrmidons, Trump said he would accompany them on that march, which would have been dramatic, but of course in the end he was far to cowardly to do so. But in the larger sense, Trump had already led a metaphorical march that has taken the United States to a place sniffing conservatives repeatedly assured us was never possible.

Here’s David Graham, also in The Atlantic:

For four years, Trump’s critics have been accused of hysteria and hyperbole for describing his movement as fascist, authoritarian, or lawless. Today, as Congress attempts to certify the election of a new president, the president has vindicated those critics. In attempting this coup, Trump has also vindicated the Americans who voted decisively in November to remove him from office.

While we’re on the subject of semantics, kudos to NPR and others for pointedly putting a stop to the practice of referring to these goons as “protestors.” Have we bandied about the word “terrorism” so much that we no longer even recognize the real thing when we see it?

The scene inside the Capitol put me in mind of the Viet Cong penetrating the US Embassy in Saigon during Tet ’68 (not to insult the Viet Cong), or the Iranian “students” occupying the US Embassy in Teheran eleven years later. But humiliation wise, this one was far worse, as we were doing it to ourselves. 

There was one stomach-turning scene after another, including federal law enforcement with guns drawn, and a grinning Trump supporter (a self-identified White nationalist and COVID conspiracy theorist from Arkansas) with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. With fitting symbolism, Trump’s followers also vandalized the camera equipment of the much-hated media. 

More than one invader from this incel-fest was seen carrying a Confederate battle flag, which was at least the proper, historically accurate banner for a bunch of treasonous insurrectionists; the ones carrying the Stars & Stripes offended me more. Some were also seen pulling down a US flag flying outside the building and attempting to replace it with a “Trump” flag. 

Republicans, “conservatives,” and other self-identifying patriots: please tell me more about how Trump hasn’t been so bad, and how his followers are loyal Americans.

POLICE ON MY BACK (NOT)

The tactical failures of the relevant authorities in failing to plan properly for this riot will be picked over elsewhere, I’m sure. Suffice it to say that they could not have been taken by surprise: the event was heavily advertised well in advance and its attendees’ predilection for violence is well-known. Last summer, those same authorities had no trouble turning out vast armies of paramilitary riot cops in full battle rattle to confront BLM protestors engaged in peaceful and legal demonstration. Which storming parliament, by way of contrast, is pointedly not.

Too bad Bill Barr’s not still around. He knows how to clear a crowd. 

In retrospect, last year’s “Liberate!” protests in Michigan and elsewhere, leading to the attempted kidnapping and murder of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, now look like an ominous harbinger…..and the much-praised restraint of the police in the face of screaming white vigilantes in body armor not so much prudence as dereliction of duty. 

Now as then, right wing respect for law enforcement seemed to have taken the day off. (As Tom Hall of The Back Row Manifesto says, “Enjoying the Blue Lives Matter crowd standing up for their beliefs.”)

It took a while, but even the mainstream media eventually got around to noting that this was the ultimate display of White privilege. To repeat the bleedingly obvious: If a mob of Black people stormed the US Capitol, some of them armed, the response from law enforcement would surely have been a bloodbath….and the reaction from Fox Nation would not have been equivocating op-eds about the right to protest and how we need to understand why these great Americans are so miffed.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid, in particular, was furiously eloquent in contrasting yesterday’s placid police response to the militarized reaction that met the protestors in Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder. Had this been a crowd of Black Americans, she noted, they would have wound up “shackled, arrested, or dead.” 

So why, as the sun set yesterday, wasn’t Washington DC packed with Metro Police buses full of Trump insurrectionists with their hands zip tied behind them? Good question, and one that ought to inform our reaction to law enforcement’s handling of future protests by other groups. As the filmmaker Jameka Autry put it: 

So one thing we all witnessed as a nation is that the police actually do know how to de-escalate without force and weapons. Noted.

We will learn more about the delay in deploying the National Guard, which tellingly, was eventually ordered by Pence, not Trump. But when we were told that the bottleneck was at the Pentagon, that was a sure sign that the brass were deliberately trying to stay out of the fray, having already signaled their unwillingness to get involved in any kind of coup-adjacent domestic unrest.  

I don’t think that was the worst thing in the world, in the same way that it was wise of the left not to have deployed counter-protestors that would have allowed Hugh Hewitt, Marc Thiessen & Co. to turn this into a “very fine people on both sides” moment. A Tiananmen-style massacre, on the other hand, or even a reasonably forceful police response, would have only given these fuckers what they wanted, which was martyrdom. 

On that front, there is an instructive clip of a news crew from DC’s WUSA Channel-9, interviewing one of the insurrectionists, an dead-eyed, self-righteous kid from New Jersey in a backward trump cap (and, ahem, a Giants hoodie) who spoke of their actions, and expressed outrage that, after storming the halls of Congress, the police would push back at all. (Defying the time-space continuum, he also suggested their attack on Congress was to protest the police reaction to their attack on Congress, which he deemed extreme.)

Pointing to the police outside the Capitol, he intoned with great gravity, “This cannot stand any more. This is wrong.”

Behold the twisted logic of White Punk-Ass Grievance, which the aforementioned right-leaning media insists we are all duty bound to understand and accommodate. But of course, the actions of this kid and his fellow goons were ultimately self-sabotaging, an inadvertent public service that put on vivid display the sewer that is the MAGA mentality. As appalling as the riot was, it surely did more harm to Trump and Trumpism than anything else. 

After this, anyone know what odds Vegas is giving on Trump’s prospects for 2024?

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

Trump himself took his sweet time in making a statement to stop the violence, which he apparently had to be forced into. (And why did we expect otherwise? He wanted the violence. Indeed, he cultivated it and egged it on. It may have be the first pleasant day he’d had since November 3^rd.) When he finally did speak—on video, from the eviscerated Rose Garden—he in no way tried to tamp down the temperature. On the contrary, he further stoked his seditious followers’ various grievances, repeating the baseless allegations that the election was “stolen,” vilifying their enemies—whom he called “evil”—telling them “we love you,” and essentially directing them to fall back until he needs them again. Even that is the kind of power in which he sadistically revels.

(Biden, by contrast, went on TV and gave precisely the kind of calm, somber, presidential speech that one wants from the erstwhile leader of the so-called free world.)

And I have no doubt that Trump will call on them again; in that regard, the Rose Garden video was as much a mob-style threat to the rest of America and dictator-style demonstration of his power as it was any kind of appeal for calm.

I guess now we know what he meant during the campaign when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” 

Elsewhere in the First Family of Crime, Ivanka issued a tweet appealing for calm, but also calling the insurrectionists “patriots.” (She quickly deleted it, but on the Internet, everything lives forever.) Her brother opined that “this is not who we are,” but of course it’s exactly who they are. 

The remarks of other Republicans were equally odious, both in their objections to certification of the Electoral College results and the riot that briefly stopped it. (And ironically, curtailed and undermined that purely symbolic but still despicable obstructionism.)

No surprise, leading the pack was Ted Cruz, who along with Trump and Josh Hawley bears significant responsibility for yesterday’s events, and who issued a statement decrying violence whether by “left or right.” 

Fuck you, Ted: stop insulting the American people. 

That also includes your skin-crawling speech on the floor of Congress shortly before the rioters broke in, citing widespread belief in “election fraud” as a danger to the republic that demands the abeyance of Biden’s certification as president-elect, when your team were the ones that made belief in that lie widespread in the first place. (And bonus demerits for holding up as a model of civic pride the Compromise of 1876, which sold out Reconstruction and led to Jim Crow. Unless you meant that deliberately.)

Meanwhile, over in the House, Matt Gaetz was openly promoting the inevitable conspiracy theory, already being spread in the right wing media, that this was a false flag operation by the omnipotent antifa. (Check your bingo cards, because we knew it was coming.) I was waiting with bated breath for someone to decry how Merrick Garland’s DOJ was failing to maintain law and order in our nation’s capital.

Meanwhile, the look on Mitt Romney’s face sitting behind Josh Hawley as he spoke was priceless. I don’t know where Hawley got the gall to stand up and speak at all with the blood—real and figurative—that was on his hands, but I do know this: Irregardless is not a word. (Yeah, I went to Stanford too.)

The image of the callow, uber-educated Hawley—a man who once clerked for John Roberts—giving the raised fist salute to pro-Trump insurrectionists on the east outside the Capitol is one that ought to haunt him forever, and if there were any justice, put an immediate end to his Olympian, stomach-turning political ambitions. (In a scathing editorial largely blaming him for the entire fiasco, his flagship hometown newspaper, the Kansas City Star, reported that Hawley sent out a fundraising appeal to his supporters WHILE the seditionists he inspired were storming the building.)

Speaking of smug, booksmart, clever trousers, Ben Sasse stood on the floor of the Senate and gave a grinning speech about shoveling snow and a lecture on the election of 1800. (“You cannot imagine how much I am not in the mood for a lecture about John Adams from Ben Sasse,” tweeted the intrepid Naval War College professor and Trump critic Tom Nichols.)

An apparently soused Lindsey Graham cracked jokes (while four people died) and began the process of trying to make us think he’s a reasonable politician again and forget that he fellated Donald Trump for the past four years. 

Even Mitch McConnell—or should I say, soon-to-be Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—had the planet-sized huevos to appeal to his Republican colleagues not to be hypocrites in contesting the election. (Cough, cough.) Later, Mitch offered the opinion Senate has faced far greater threats than this mob (yes, and you’re one of them), and that “Criminal behavior will never dominate the United States Congress.”

Let’s just let that sit there a moment.

BLAME ENOUGH TO GO AROUND, Y’ALL

So this is what the United States has descended to under Donald Trump. But not only Trump is to blame—far from it. As the aforementioned Tom Hall wrote, “(T)his day has been incubated by each mollifying word from every, single American who has downplayed the fascist, authoritarian movement that is Trumpism.”

Listen also to Trump’s own former Secretary of Defense, retired Marine General Jim Mattis:

“Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”

Even Unitary Executive Theory fanboy Bill Barr condemned Trump’s actions, and he’s an openly corrupt disgrace to the legal profession who makes Attorney Generals like John Mitchell and Alberto Gonzales look like Clarence Darrow. Let’s side aside for now his own culpability in bringing us to this pretty pass. 

One of many many sad aspects of the debacle was the way it overshadowed the historic victories of Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia senatorial runoffs, making them Georgia’s first Black and Jewish Senators, respectively. (Who here is old enough to remember the Georgia runoffs, which took place approximately 10,000 years ago?) The impact of those crucial victories, which gave the Democrats control of the Senate for at least the first two years of the Biden administration, may have more practical impact than the riots, even if the riots will surely leave a more lasting psychological scar. 

That is, if the US Senate remains standing by January 20. 

For even if the Republic survives the next two weeks, yesterday doesn’t bode well for a spirit of healing and Kum-ba-ya brand togetherness in the post-Trump era. As the comedian Josh Gondelman tweeted, “Wow, Trump supporters are so eager to help Biden reach across the aisle they’re violently storming the Capitol two weeks before his inauguration! They sure seem like reasonable people, ready to compromise!”

Hey guys, I dunno if this is the right time, but I’d love to talk some more about Hillary’s emails. What a crime against humanity those were, amirite people?

I DON’T HEAR THE FAT LADY, YET

So what comes next?

When it comes to thirteen-day clusters, the one we’re in now promises to be among the most fraught since October 1962. 

We now know, in case there was any doubt, and contrary to still more assurances from his apologists, that there is nothing Trump won’t try.

He might cite the very violence he fomented as reason to declare martial law. There would certainly be angry pushback, at this point even from his own party, but would that stop him? Of course not. If I’d told you yesterday morning that pro-Trump radicals  would breach the Capitol building and temporarily shut down the certification of Biden’s win, would you have believed that?

He has other frightening options too. He might start a war. He might spin up a Reichstag fire, declare a national emergency, and invoke the Insurrection Act, which could piggyback with a Ferdinand Marcos impression and declaration of martial law. And of course, he always has the nuclear codes. 

All these possibilities are why—on top of sheer principle—voices from across the ideological spectrum, from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to David Frum to General (Ret.) Barry McCaffrey, are calling for Trump’s immediate removal, NOW, as a clear and present danger to the republic, whether by impeachment, the 25^th Amendment (which Chuck Schumer called for), or a Goldwater-esque demand for resignation. 

Appelbaum again:

The seeds sown by Republican obeisance and congressional quiescence have now yielded their bitter harvest. With his incitement of a direct assault on the people’s house, the president has forfeited his claim to finish his term. The House must again impeach him, and the Senate must vote to remove him. And as it does so, it must bar him from ever again serving in public office.

All the aforementioned repercussions are unlikely, but if ordering thugs to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is not a high crime, what is? Nancy Pelosi should have articles of impeachment being drawn up right now and have a vote in the House today, and Schumer should convene a trial asap, which he has said he would do. Are there 17 Republican senators who would vote to convict? Probably not….though, secretly, the ones with presidential ambitions like Cruz and Hawley, for purely selfish reasons, would surely love to have Trump barred from running for office again.

In any case, make no mistake: this ain’t over. Does anyone really think that what happened yesterday—as horrifying and unthinkable as it was—will be the final or even the worst atrocity Trump has in store for us as the vise closes on him in his remaining two weeks in office? In the next two weeks and especially come January 20, he will likely call on his goons again, if not some even more destructive ploy. After yesterday, the prospect of a routine Inauguration Ceremony is all but unimaginable. (To begin with, the seditionists tore apart the stage that was being built.) The image of Trump physically refusing to leave the White House—with a phalanx of these troglodytes forming a human wall to protect him, and provoking a violent confrontation with law enforcement—is more likely than not.  

Like they say, watch this space. 

********

Photo: Film Daily