The Trump Party—oh, sorry, it’s still technically known as the Republican Party (the same way Kleenex is technically known as facial tissues, or Vaseline is petroleum jelly, or Dumpsters are mobile garbage bins)—has now made it very clear that it flat-out, indisputably, no-two-ways-about-it does not believe in democracy. 

There is a long chain of events attesting to that conclusion, but in the interest of keeping this blog below Dostoevesky length, let’s confine ourselves to just the most recent: the current crusade by some 140 House Republicans and a dozen Senate Republicans to have the fair and just results of the 2020 presidential election overturned on no grounds whatsoever, except that they’re mad that their party lost. 

Could there be a more blunt example of utter contempt for representative democracy, or the will of the people, or the most basic tenets of our system of government?

No there could not. It’s an unvarnished attempt at a coup d’etat.  

Yes, these cretins have predicated their demand on the claim of “election fraud,” but it’s risible. The GOP has been trying to promote that self-serving hoax for years by way of attempting to disenfranchise tens of millions of American voters, people of color in particular. CNN’s Gregory Kreig neatly captured the irrational, self-fulfilling prophecy of the Republican crusade, noting that their demand rests on the supposed “volume of ‘allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.’ Those charges, of course, are coming from the same cohort of lawmakers now trying to refashion them as evidence to support their actions.” 

Ironically, Trump’s bevy of almost sixty failed lawsuits trying to overturn the election has resulted in a sweeping and definitive rejection of his own party’s longstanding lie on that front, as the US court system has affirmed that no such fraud exists. (And, as Colin Kalmbacher notes in Law and Crime, “Not one of the Republican officeholders objecting to Biden’s victory have objected to their own wins on the same day on the same ballots using the same election systems.”)

Speaking of Kleenex, can we pause for a moment to note what a bunch of crybabies these punks are? This is the same crowd that cackled “fuck your feelings” at overwrought Democrats after the 2016 election, and drove around with bumper stickers reading “Trump Won, Get It Over It.”

Didn’t age well, that stuff. 

Speaking of Vaseline, can we pause to note how the GOP is once again trying to fuck us, and without benefit of lubrication? 

Speaking of Dumpsters, can we note that the one we’ve been living in for the last four years is still on fire? 

PRETENSE AND PRETEND

The recklessness of this Republican ploy, and the risks it poses to our democracy, can’t be overstated. But that is of a piece with Republican behavior throught the Trump presidency. 

It’s true that a handful of random Democrats raised purely symbolic objections to Electoral College certification in the past, but all in cases that was long after the concession of their candidate, who disavowed their efforts. What’s happening now is an active effort to overturn the result, involving a majority of Republican members of the House, with the endorsement of the Vice President who will preside over the proceedings, and the full-throated support of the defeated President, who PS has been musing about declaring martial law and already called for his armed supporters to take to the streets. 

Except for maybe newly elected Alabama Senator and former Auburn head football coach Tommy Tuberville, who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, the GOP politicians who intend to challenge the certification of Biden’s victory surely know that they have no grounds to do so, and that their effort cannot succeed. Their reasons for objecting, therefore, can only be performative. 

You can say that’s just empty grandstanding, but as Masha Gessen has written at length, performative authoritarianism is merely the test-driving of what aspiring authoritarians hope to get away with in the future. That crunching sound you hear is the Overton window moving. 

Despicable does not even begin to describe it. Michael Gerson of all people, the Bush 43 speechwriter who gave us “axis of evil” and the “smoking gun/mushroom cloud,” called for the names of these seditious Repubicans to be permanently inscribed in marble in a kind of reverse monument to cowardice, rather than the usual heroism that gets statues erected. 

Damn straight. I know they want to present it as an act of principle, but per above, there is no principle in play here except their communal attempt to pander to the MAGA base in the misguided interest of their own careers…. specifically, their own presidential aspirations in 2024. But let’s not for even a millisecond ever let any of these cretinous opportunists try to pretend that they are reasonable, law-abiding politicians (I won’t even use the term “public servant”) who have any business running for dog catcher, let alone president. 

The irony, of course, is that by they are cockblocking themselves by ensuring Trump’s continued chokehold on the GOP into 2024 and beyond. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy writes:

In giving credence to the President’s baseless claims that he is being cheated out of office, these prominent Republicans are just making it even more likely that, at least as far as the GOP is concerned, there won’t be a post-Trump future but, instead, another lengthy period in which he and his grievance continue to dominate all else.

You think you’re gonna be the Republican nominee four years from now, Ted Cruz? Not unless you do a Freaky Friday-style body swap with Donald J. Trump himself. Or maybe Don Jr., or Ivanka. 

PARTIES DIFFER ON SHAPE OF PLANET

The fact is, the reasons why Republicans are doing this make no difference; that they are doing it at all is the whole issue. If anything, the notion that they aren’t really trying to overturn the election, but rather pursuing some less ambitious but still opportunistic agenda, only makes it worse. 

As Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Naval War College, writes in The Atlantic, “Republicans in Congress are pretending to be seditionists—and so they have become, in fact, seditionists.”

No amount of playacting and rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat.

It is possible that they know their last insult to American democracy, on Wednesday, will go nowhere, as well. This is irrelevant: Engaging in sedition for insincere reasons does not make it less hideous. Arguing that you betrayed the Constitution only as theater is no defense.

Indeed, shredding the Constitution purely for personal gain is perhaps the worst of the sins of the sedition caucus. It would almost be a relief to know that these Republicans really believe what they’re trying to sell, that they are genuine fanatics and ideologues who have at least paid us the respect of pitting their sincere beliefs against our own.

So how is the media covering all this? Pretty much like you would expect. 

In the Understatement of the Year Department, The Atlantic’s Russell Berman, an otherwise fine writer, calls the effort to overturn the presidential election by 140 GOP members of the House of Representatives and a dozen GOP senators “a worrisome sign of a fraying commitment to democracy among a significant portion of the GOP.” And he’s not being ironic. Just in case you were wondering how pathetically ill-equipped the cream of the American press corps continues to be when it comes to addressing the rise of neo-fascism in our country. 

(As my friend Walter Sujansky quipped, “JAPAN BOMBS PEARL HARBOR: Worrisome sign of a fraying commitment to peace among a significant portion of Japanese leaders.”)

Berman’s not alone, of course. The Washington Post, continuing its tradition of headline-writing that abets Trump’s alternate reality, ran a story titled, “In extraordinary hour-long phone call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to re-calculate vote.”

“Re-calculate”? As if there is some math error that might be in question?

Sigh. Why did that headline not read “In extraordinary hour-long phone call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to OVERTURN vote”?

A clearer take comes from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who writes:

Day after day, Republicans—it’s not just Donald Trump—keep demonstrating that they’re worse than you could possibly have imagined, even when you tried to take into account the fact that they’re worse than you could possibly have imagined. One of our two major political parties no longer accepts the legitimacy of elections it loses, which bodes ill for the fate of the Republic.

As Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic, this is not a good sign for those pollyannas who believed that the post-Trump GOP would move on from its deposed despot….or even be “post-Trump” at all.

The problem with the Republican “establishment” and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are weak. 

The single most worrisome political fact in America right now is that a significant portion of the Republican Party lives in a fantasy world, a place where facts and truth don’t hold sway, where “owning the libs” is an end in itself, and where seceding from reality is a symbol of tribal loyalty, rather than a sign of mental illness. This is leading the party, and America itself, to places we’ve never been before, including the spectacle of a defeated president and his supporters engaging in a sustained effort to steal an election.

Nichols again:

The Republicans have gone from being a party that touted virtue to being the most squalid and grubby expression of institutionalized self-interest in the modern history of the American republic.

The members of the public and the institutions of American life should shroud these seditionists in silence and opprobrium in perpetuity: no television interviews, no sinecures at universities or think tanks, no rehabilitating book tours, no jokey late-night appearances, no self-serving op-eds.

The sedition caucus is worse than a treasonous conspiracy. At least real traitors believe in something. These people instead believe only in their own fortunes and thus will change flags and loyalties as circumstances require. They will always become what they pretend to be, and so they cannot—and must not—be trusted ever again with political power.

PEACHTREE 6-5000

What’s all the more galling about this overt Republican attempt at a coup d’etat is that it coincides with one of Trump’s most shameless and brazenly illegal acts as president, which is high praise considering the non-stop shitshow of the past four years. 

What is there left to say about Donald’s hour-long, mob-boss-style phone call attempting strongarm Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his general counsel Ryan Germany into illegally handing him their state’s electoral votes? A kissing cousin of the Access Hollywood tape (gulp), and a perfect bookend to the Zelinskyy call, the Georgia recording is the latest demonstration that Trump is nothing more than a common criminal whose venality knows no bottom. It’s the very definition of abuse of power, it’s a moral outrage, it’s stunningly contemptuous of democracy, the rule of law and the will of the people, and it’s fucking impeachable. 

But don’t worry, Susan Collins has personally assured me that Trump won’t do it again.

The call itself is almost unlistenable, so pathetic is the President of the United States in his bullying, irrational, unhinged pleading and threatening. (Apparently he called Raffensperger eighteen times before Brad grudgingly took the call. Memo to Donald: you look thirsty, brah.) 

Given the pressure he is under and the cowardice of the rest of his party, Raffensperger’s refusal to buckle is admirable—even though it’s also an inviolable requirement of his job—and that’s the first and last time I expect to say anything positive about a self-described Trump supporter. 

Notwithstanding his proper behavior in this instance, Stacey Abrams reminds us that Raffensperger has been a loyal ally of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in that state’s ugly history of voter suppression and disenfranchisement of people of color. So maybe hold off on his sainthood. But while we’re on the topic of disenfranchisement, let us not overlook the inherently racist component of Trump’s efforts, which involve disregarding the votes from predominantly African-American communities. Hence Never Trumper Stuart Stevens’ pithy and wholly accurate description of Cruz, Hawley, et al as the Jim Crow Caucus.

Of course, there’s little chance of impeachment with only fifteen days left in his term, but it’s heartening to hear state officials like Fulton County DA Fani Willis state publicly that she will not hesitate to prosecute Trump for this crime after he leaves office. (It’s also disturbing to see the US Attorney for North Georgia, Byung J. Pak mysteriously resignthe day after the recording came out. Hmmm—watch this space.)

Speaking of which, this would be a good time to revisit the eloquent and prescient words of Adam Schiff during last year’s impeachment:

He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.

Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election?…..The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t. You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.

What are the odds if left in office that he will continue trying to cheat? I will tell you: 100 percent. A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.

Schiff then called on Senate Republicans to do what almost all of them knew in what remained of their hearts was the right thing:

Every single vote, even a single vote by a single member can change the course of history. It is said that a single man or woman of courage makes a majority. Is there one among you who will say “enough!”?

Turns out, there was one: Mitt Romney, who not coincidentally has also spoken out forcefully in opposition to this latest stunt by his Senate colleagues. But there were 52 who had no such courage, nor integrity, nor shame. 

THIS AIN’T NO FOOLIN’ AROUND

The other highly germane thing about Trump’s batshit call with Raffensperger is that it gives the lie to the oft-heard claim that he knows he lost to BIden and is merely pursuing this lost cause as a kind of kabuki in order to squeeze money out of his base, or cement his control over the GOP post-presidency, or both. 

Although his actions are indeed having that net effect, it should now be clear that Trump is not fronting in the least in trying to overturn the election. He is not playing twelve-dimensional chess (boy, am I sick of hearing that for the past four years): he actively believes, even now, that he can reverse the outcome of November 3^rd and carry out a self-coup.

In that context, these Congressional Republicans willingness to play with fire is even more destructive of the very core of our democracy, given those not-facetious efforts by Trump to hold onto the White House. Sure, this time it will fail, but what about the next time?

How egregious is what they’re doing? So egregious that even some of the usual GOP weasels like Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey have spoken out forcefully against it. It’s the very first time in the Trump era that any appreciable number of prominent Republicans have given any indication that there is a line they won’t cross. I’ll confess that I am as surprised by that as I am appalled by the actions of Hawley, Cruz, et al. As with Mr. Raffensperger, it’s a measure of how debased the GOP has become that Republicans now get praised simply for using to overthrow the government. 

But not everybody deserves a merit badge. Lindsey Graham—who just a few months ago himself called Brad Raffensperger to pressure him to overturn Georgia’s vote—gets no credit for not joining in this travesty. travesty. (In fact, Graham’s call is what prompted Raffensperger to record the Trump call, in self-defense.) Nor does Tom Cotton, who last summer advocated the deployment of the 101^st Airborne Division to put down peaceful BLM protests by American civilians. You don’t get praised for hewing to the bare minimum or morally acceptable behavior. 

So what happens next? I dunno, but I don’t put anything past Donald Trump…..and after the recording that was released this weekend, neither should anyone else. (Not that we needed the tape to prove that.) Anything can happen in a world where cow-antagonist Devin Nunes and pederast-protector Jim Jordan get Presidential Medals of Freedom. (Carpet bombing enthusiast Henry Kissinger, I’ll remind you, has a Nobel Peace Prize.)

The Post’s Dan Balz writes:

Trump will never let this go, not between now and the day he is forced to give up the office and Biden is sworn in, not in the days and weeks and months after that. That he is on a mission is evident, but to what end, other than to avoid the ignominious label of “loser” after a single term in the White House? That, at least, is consistent with the behavior he has exhibited throughout the four years of his presidency. He cares nothing about collateral damage to democracy.

The president, however, is not on this mission alone. Instead, he continues to gather support from members of a party he has remade in his own image.

It is this last point that worries me most going forward, the complicity of his party, comprised as it is of people who may be amoral opportunists, but unlike Donald Trump, are not deranged sociopaths, and therefore ought to know better. But the cowardice they have made their trademark over the last four years shows no signs of abating, not even when the American people have clearly repudiated their Dear Leader.

The last card in Trump’s hand would seem to be a Hail Mary attempt to declare some sort of ginned-up national emergency and call out the US military to keep him in office. We have already discussed in these pages the very long odds of that succeeding. To hammer the point, all ten living former Secretaries of Defense, including two of Trump’s and even war criminals like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, recently issued a statement-cum-warning against the very idea, reading in part:

Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived….

We shall see. But even if we survive this brush with fascism, what the GOP is doing does not bode well for the future. As John Cassidy writes, “If the Republic gets through the next two weeks without a catastrophe, we must surely take steps to protect ourselves against the next would-be authoritarian, which could well be Trump himself in 2024.”

It can’t happen here? It’s happening here right now.

*******

Photos: AFP, Reuters, Wall Street Journal

This blog also available on Medium and Substack. 

For more essays see The King’s Necktie Archive. 

I’ve rarely been so happy to turn the page on a calendar.

I’m aware that our measurement of time is an artificial construct. I know that, in reality (or is it Reality?) the sun that sets on the evening of December 31, 2020 and rises on the morning of January 1, 2021 is the same star. I am also aware that even the idea of a sun “rising” and “setting” is an anti-Copernican illusion.

In other words, the line dividing 2020 from 2021 is a purely imaginary one.

But as long as we are maintaining arbitrary allegiance to Gregorian calendar, this New Year’s Day merits an assessment of the past 366 rotations of the planet.

They sucked.  

There have been some other very bad years, of course. Just confining ourselves to the United States in the 20th century, there was 1963, from Birmingham to Dallas. There was 1968, from Memphis to Chicago to Saigon to the Audubon Ballroom in New York to the Ambassador Hotel in LA. There was 1980, from the Iranian hostage crisis to the murder of John Lennon to the election of Ronald Reagan.

Reaching further back, needless to say, there was 1941, 1929, or—or as some have noted—any year of the Civil War that you care to name. And all those were years of specifically American tragedy. Other nations have their own dark memories. Ask your Armenian friends about 1915, or your Rwandan ones about 1994.

But 2020, by contrast, offered an ongoing catastrophe on a global scale, one that enveloped the entire planet in a rare communal crisis, and for that it is destined to stand out.

It’s not alone in that league either, of course. The obvious precursor was 1918, which featured the emergence of the last global pandemic, one that killed 50 million people worldwide, as well as the final year of the war to end all wars (spoiler alert: it didn’t), an event that did, however, succeed in profoundly shocking Western civilization with its first taste of industrialized slaughter on a mass scale. It’s proven to have remarkable staying power.

Here in America, our experience of this latest grim plague was made infinitely worse by the criminal malevolence of our monstrous rulers, bringing on wholly unnecessary attendant suffering—physical, psychological, and economic. That part of the catastrophe was anthropogenic, which is a fancy way of saying man-made, and not a boozhy retailer that sells pashminas and pre-distressed housewares….exactly the kind of business that COVID-19 killed.  

I HEARD TELEPHONES, OPERA HOUSE, FAVORITE MELODIES

2016 wasn’t a great year either. It began with Bowie dying, followed soon after by Prince, and it was just getting started.

For me, that year was terrible on a very personal level. In July 2016 my mother Nancy died at the age of 78 after battling ALS for almost two years.

When she was first diagnosed the doctors told us she had about five years to live, which we knew was only a guess, and we were naively optimistic that she would last much longer. But the opposite proved true, and her decline much swifter. My father and brother and I watched this kind, loving, beautiful, artistic woman suffer and degrade under the crushing force of this unbearably cruel disease until she was gone.

We buried her at Arlington, amid the acres of identical white tombstones dress right dress, the military compulsion for order even unto death, as some poet once said. My father put on his dress blues for only the second time in three decades, the previous one being my wedding fifteen years earlier.

There are two kind of people in the world, so they say: those whose mothers have died and those who have no idea what is coming. Even for an adult, the death of a parent leaves a gaping hole, and not only for the lucky ones like me who came from loving families. Those unfortunate souls who had absent or malignant parents merely suffered that loss sooner. In the familiar phenomenon, for months afterward I would catch myself—for instance, when my five-year-old daughter would do something wonderful and my first instinct would be that I must tell my mom, quickly followed by the cold slap of remembering. It still happens to me once in a while, even now.

I was still adjusting to this new, gray-toned world when we were all bludgeoned by a second tragedy a few months later, with the election of the most criminally unfit man ever to occupy the Oval Office. It is awkward to speak of these two events in the same breath, as each seems to dwarf the other in its own way: one so intimate that to measure it against something like politics feels insulting, the other so global and vast that it feels solipsistic to suggest that any personal tragedy compares. But that very contrast made it feel like a sadistic one-two punch.

Even then, I had no idea how bad the next four years were going to be; few of us did. And that was before the plague.

FROM THE BRIM TO THE DREGS

Inarguably, amid all the terribleness, there were two good things happened in 2020. Loyal readers of this blog, I bet you can guess what they were.

The first was the resounding defeat of Donald Trump, presaging his imminent eviction from the White House, a verdict delivered in no uncertain terms by a majority of the American people. Yes, he still poses a danger, and so do his bigoted, benighted followers, and yes there is much work left to do. But his defeat is cause for rejoicing, and for hope that repairs can now begin. Can you imagine how dark this New Year’s would be if November 3rd had gone otherwise? 

The other good thing was the beginning of what my friend the filmmaker Peter Nicks calls the Awakening: a watershed moment in America’s long, slow, often grudging reckoning with the inherent racism that is in our country’s DNA. Tragically, that belated awakening was triggered by the unconscionable torture and murder of one of our countrymen over a period of eight minutes and 46 seconds, by an officer of the law no less, a crime that was only the latest in a long horrific parade of such crimes. The anger and outrage and demands for justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd were wrenching, but long overdue, and therefore not something to lament. They are a battle cry that ought to stir our hearts. The challenge now is to keep that passion up and carry it forward, and not let it be a moment but a movement. 

Let me add another good thing that 2020 brought, amid all the shite. That was the consistent demonstration of human kindness and compassion at its very best, as displayed by people all over the globe—health care workers, first responders, essential workers, and ordinary people of all stripes who rose to the occasion during the calamity of the pandemic. In that regard 2020 was a crucible that revealed both the worst and the best of humankind, as adversity tends to do.

So good riddance, 2020. Your successor promises to bring pain and suffering of its own, but also the promise of rehabilitation, and therefore cause for optimism. Here in America, we will soon be under new management, with adult supervision for the first time in four years. The rollout of the vaccine brings the end of this ordeal within sight, and our return to competent leadership makes me believe that recovery is possible. But we will have to fight for it.

The one thing we’ll never say about this year is that it wasn’t memorable. Which isn’t a compliment when it’s something you’d rather forget.

It’s only a matter of time before we wake up one morning and open our newspapers—or web browsers, for you newfangled, tech-savvy youngsters—to read that Donald Trump has pardoned himself.

I’m not saying it will work. But I’m saying he will try.

Trump has been openly inquiring about pardoning himself as far back as 2017. Having apparently skipped high school civics, he infamously claimed that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” And in June of 2018, in the midst of the Russia probe, he addressed the issue in public, tweeting: “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.”

Yes, and numerous hockey experts have stated that I am the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer. After all, I’ve asserted it, so it must be true. (Most famous: my triple hat trick in a 9-0 shutout of Toe Blake and the Habs in 1942.)

So it’s not like this idea appeared out of nowhere this week. We’ve all known for sometime that Trump intends to use every lever at his disposal to insulate himself from legal reckoning for his crimes, even a lever that most legal scholars believe is unconstitutional.  

The much feared prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, one of Robert Mueller’s top lieutenants in the Russiagate probe, put it very simply in explaining why he is certain that Trump will try to pardon himself, to wit:

What does he have to lose? Even if the courts reject the attempt, as they are likely to do, Donald will only be back where he is now, and no worse off. Why not try?

True true. And with all due respect to Mr. Weissmann, the only reason I have not wholeheartedly agreed—until now—is that there is a far more foolproof alternative that will achieve the same result.

In lieu of a risky self-pardon, why wouldn’t Trump take the easy layup—switching to a basketball metaphor now—which is to say, resign, presumably at the eleventh hour, so that Pence can pardon him. A self-pardon, after all, would certainly be challenged and is likely to be overturned by the courts, even a Trump-heavy Supreme Court. A pardon by President-for-a-Day Pence, on the other hand, shameless and outrageous though it would be, would surely succeed.

So if Trump is really worried about his post-presidency criminal liability—and he should be—why not go for the sure thing?

I’ll tell you why: because he is an unhinged sociopathic narcissist. And if there was ever any doubt about that, his actions over the past few weeks have obliterated that doubt forever.

I BEG YOUR PARDON, I THINK I’LL DO IT IN THE ROSE GARDEN

It’s not a matter of chutzpah. We have long known there is no bottom to how low Donald Trump will go, on any matter you care to name. But until now I thought he might be more pragmatic Now I realize his sheer craziness vastly outweighs any sense of strategy.

First there were Trump’s attempts to get Congressional Republicans, state officials, and the courts to disregard the will of the voters and award him the election on no grounds whatsoever. This was a scenario that even the Transition Integrity Project did not contemplate, and it contemplated civil war.

Then there was his recent willingness to openly muse about declaring martial law.

Then there was his absolute silence on a Russian cyberattack/espionage operation that informed sources are calling the worse intelligence failure in American history. (Which is saying something. Move over Pearl Harbor and 9/11.)

And of course there has been his outrageous-even-for-him inaction as the pandemic rages, and worse, his willful attempts to creates obstacles for the incoming administration’s ability to deal with it.

In the remaining 24 days before he runs out of the White House with the Presidential silver stuffed into his pants, I am sure he will do even more things that will boggle the mind.

But when it comes to shielding himself from the long arm of the law, it was this latest round of pardons (46 over the course of just 48 hours between December 22nd and 23rd, or about a pardon an hour with two lunch breaks),that convinced me that Weissmann is right. From almost the beginning, the bitter irony of Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp“ of Washington corruption has been baldly apparent. But this raft of pardons is a new low, excusing some of the most corrupt public figures in contemporary American life,  almost all of them rewards for his toadies or allies (which with Trump, is the same thing).

After watching this display, I will be shocked if Trump doesn’t pardon himself.

Although publicly Trump has always been able to rationalize away even the worst defeats, I suspect that privately they eat him alive. Even as he maddeningly seems to get away with every fucking thing, note that he never casually shrugs these things off like a guy who is truly unbothered. Instead, he lashes out while simultaneously seeming to internalize the fake narrative. Witness his reaction to being defeated by Joe Biden.

That is why he clearly does not want to resign and have that stain as part of his legacy. Coupled with his aforementioned sky-high estimation of what he thinks he can get away with—in other words, what he thinks he deserves—it becomes clear that when it comes to shielding himself from legal accountability, he will go for the thing no sane person believes a president is entitled to do.

Recall also that Trump has repeatedly proven to be his own worst enemy, from the Comey firing to the release of the Zelinskyy letter to complaining to a campaign crowd in Erie, PA that he had to come to Erie, PA. Even now, when you think he’d be trying (unjustifiably) to take credit for the COVID-19 vaccine(s), he is unaccountably passing on that opportunity because he is so invested in his claim that the coronavirus is kinda of a hoax, or at least overblown.

In short, Trump is so arrogant, so entitled, so irrationally enamored of his own powers that I am sure he thinks he can get away with a self-pardon. You can understand why he feels that way, having gotten away scot free with the most incredible crimes thought his whole obscenely privileged life with almost no consequences except karmic ones.

He might be right, though I doubt it. But I no longer doubt that he will try.

I DIDN’T GET NOTHING; I HAD TO PAY $25 AND PICK UP THE GARBAGE

Warning: Mansplaining ahead.

Typically a pardon is meant to redress a miscarriage of justice in which an individual has been unfairly punished, or punished out of proportion to his or her crime, or so manifestly paid their debt to society or otherwise rehabilitated him or herself that they are deserving of clemency. By contrast, the people Trump has pardoned during his presidency are the exact opposite of that, a rogues gallery of unrepentant felons who are the very last people deserving of mercy.

This should not comes as a shock to any but the willfully naïve. In the words of Michael Allen Gillespie, professor of political science and philosophy at Duke, “The inevitable result of giving a criminal the power to pardon is that he pardons the members of his criminal conspiracy.”

So whom did Trump pardon in this latest one-two punch? A bunch of corrupt Republican politicians. A cop who needlessly sicced her police dog on defenseless immigrants. The odious duo of Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, the former for witness tampering, obstruction, and lying to federal prosecutors, the latter for tax and bank fraud, witness tampering, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. His son-in-law’s father, for making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. (Chris Christie was the US Attorney who put him behind bars. Hey Chris, how does that feel, on top of Trump giving you COVID?)

And there’s more. The four Blackwater contractors he pardoned were responsible for murdering 17 Iraqi civilians in cold blood, including a nine-year-old boy, in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. That particular pardon is obviously a favor to Blackwater founder Erik Prince, the billionaire Christian supremacist and war profiteer who has been at the center of several of Trump’s secret foreign policy crimes, and who may be in need of a pardon himself for lying to Congress. (PS Prince is also Betsy DeVos’s brother. And if you don’t know, now you know.)

Speaking to the Washington Post, Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, noted: “Nobody with a straight face can argue that this use of the pardon power is consistent with what the Framers envisioned when they conveyed it in Article II.”

This on top of previous pardons for the likes of Mike Flynn for lying to the FBI, US military personnel convicted and accused of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, right wing troll Dinesh D’Souza for a campaign finance felony, former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik for tax fraud, batshit anti-immigrant Maricopa County (Arizona) sheriff Joe Arpaio for everything under the sun.

(Meanwhile the United States has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world, disproportionately people of color, with millions of legitimate applications for pardon in which the Trump administration has no interest, unless Kim Kardashian calls.)

Accordingly, there have already been calls for Congress to constrain or even eliminate the presidential power to pardon. That may be a good idea, or not. But as with all the functions of government, it will be impossible to completely legislate our way to a foolproof system impervious to abuse by men of ill will who manage to gain power. Limitations on the awesome power of the presidency as designed by the Framers will always depend in some part on the goodwill of the person occupying that office. And history will record that no one has occupied it with more ill will and bad faith than Donald J. Trump.

MANSPLAINING, PART DEUX

It goes without saying that a “self-pardon” is a contradiction in terms. But the irrationality of the idea will be no deterrent whatsoever to Trump trying it.

Likewise, we all know that a presidential pardon would only inoculate Trump against federal charges. Meanwhile, Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General, and Cy Vance, the Manhattan DA, are waiting with a raft of state and local charges that could put Don behind bars for the rest of his natural life. (More on that in a future post.)   

But if he does in fact take a flyer on this insane idea, we will again see the hypocrisy of the so-called “originalists” among the ranks of American conservatives. In addition to mere common sense, a proper historical reading of the term “pardon” as used in the 18th century definitively rules out the idea that it’s something a president could confer upon himself. I think Roberts, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer will agree, and I think (THINK) Kavanaugh and Gorsuch will too. ACB is a tossup, I think. (THINK.) But if it comes down to this game of chicken, look for Alito, Thomas, and the rest of the Federalist Society to suddenly find a way to disavow their own judicial north star—at least when it comes to a Republican POTUS. (Democratic Presidents need not apply.)

Trump is clearly making hay while the sun shines, knowing that his power will drop precipitously at noon on January 20. He is rewarding toadies, protecting cronies, and trying to undo the legacy of the Russia probe……which he can try all the live long day, but ironically, will only have the bet effect of further cementing his place as the worst and most corrupt US president ever.

Though the pundits keep insisting that his influence over the GOP will endure, already we see the Trump mystique deflating, as his own party for the first time is about defy him by overriding a veto, in this case, his Confederacy-defending attack on the defense appropriations bill. (Admittedly, the mere circumstances for a veto, or overriding one, have rarely come up, given the way McConnell has blocked any and all legislation.) Meanwhile Trump continues to stick his thumb in the GOP’s eye by blowing up a hard-won COVID relief bill, while threatening that he’s keeping track of who’s been naughty and nice to him.

And we all know that this latest slate of pardons is really a warmup for the big ones to come.  Pardons for Ivanka and Jared and Don Jr and Eric all go without saying. Surely on that list too is Steve Bannon, who is already under indictment, and Rudy Giuliani, who soon will be. And as with Nixon there will be no requirement for an overt admission of guilt, even though the acceptance of a pardon by definition implies one. Trump and his family and his cronies will take the pardons while at the same time insisting they did nothing wrong….the polar opposite of a principled, innocent man sitting in prison who refuses a pardon because of that inherent admission of guilt.

Accordingly, you would think that a self-pardon is the sort of thing that might at long last make Trump’s Kool-Aid drunk supporters acknowledge his stunning criminality. But of course they won’t. We all know that MAGA Nation is completely impervious to reason, stuck in its Bizarro World alternate reality were day is night, good is bad, ignorance is wisdom, and freedom is slavery. Therefore they will nationalize it like they rationalize everything he’s ever done, crying that “He had to do it, to protect himself from the vindictive Democrats!”

This with a guy who claimed only the guilty have to take the Fifth Amendment. As an admission of irredeemable guilt, a self-pardon makes taking the Fifth look laughable.

It will be the perfect punctuation point at the end of this kakistocratic administration.

COSA NOSTRADAMUS

I am not really in the business of making predictions. It’s true that this past October I had a post called “The Impending Arrest of Joe Biden,” but that was not a serious prediction so much as an attempt to provoke discussion about just how far Trump would go to steal the election. (Though it wouldn’t have shocked me if Don had tried it.)

This forecast of a self-pardon, however, is a legitimate attempt at prophecy.

Of course, maybe a pardon won’t be necessary. Maybe Trump will yet again pull a rabbit out of the hat and manage to stay in office. We will soon learn more details of who was behind the Nashville Christmas bombing—nice callback to Nixon, btw—but let’s start an office pool: how long before Trump uses it as a Reichstag fire to invoke the Insurrection Act or even martial law, or at least advance his musings about it?

In the mean time, let us stop to ponder how we can to be the country we are, with domestic terrorism on the rise, a pandemic whose death total is approaching that of our casualties in World War II, and a president who occupies himself golfing, trying to subvert a fair election, and pardoning his cronies. And likely himself.

********

h/t Joe McGinty for the Rose Garden joke. Blame him, not me.

In the summer of 2016, when it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to annihilate Donald Trump, there were a lot of think-pieces about the bleak future of the Republican Party. Many of them asked if November would be the end of the GOP altogether, how it could possibly reinvent itself for an America whose demographics were evolving against it, or even asserted that it might never be able to put up a credible presidential contender again.

Also, that Hillbilly Elegy was going to be a great movie.

As we know, reports of the elephant’s death proved Mark Twain-esque in their exaggeration. Instead of getting obliterated, the Republican Party took the White House, both houses of Congress, and tightened its stranglehold on the federal judiciary (the Supreme Court above all), not to mention governorships and statehouses nationwide. It was the Democrats who were cast into the wilderness, left to wring their hands and gnash their teeth over what went wrong.

But as it turns out, that election may have destroyed the Republican Party after all….not because of Trump’s defeat, but because of his victory.

THE VERY SILLY PARTY

The damage Donald Trump has done to the GOP over the last four years—with its eager cooperation, I hasten to note—has been far worse than what would have been wrought by a simple electoral defeat in 2016.

First, of course, there is the record of what Trump has done to the country, which is akin to what a baby does to a diaper. We need not recount that here; you can get a sense just by listening to the wail of the ambulances, by observing the breadlines, and by drinking in the poison of right wing cable news, while waiting for historians to produce their withering, encyclopedia-length surveys on the subject.

But political parties routinely recover from periods of terrible leadership, even historically abysmal ones. What is likely to be more enduring is how he has transformed the GOP itself.

Since securing the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, Trump has vastly remade the party in his own image. It is now undeniably the Trump Party in all but name, one committed to no principles whatsoever except what Donald Trump wants. No kidding: that was literally its platform at the 2020 Republican National Convention. (“The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda.”) Its historical positions on deficits, on Russia, on trade, on the projection of military power? Shitcanned.

Don’t get me wrong: the Republican Party was not exactly the picture of health four years ago. No party that nominated Donald J. Trump in the first place could possibly claim to be. The GOP itself willingly sowed the seeds for the ascent of this cretin over many many years of increasing extremism, and I say that ruefully as a former registered Republican, circa 1984. (Not proud of that.) 

The Republican Party has promoted a regressive economic policy since the days of Coolidge and Hoover. It has an ugly history of nativism going back at least to the Twenties (the previous Twenties—and they’re back!). It has been the world leader in red-baiting since the days of the New Deal, reaching its apotheosis with McCarthy. It swooped into the vacuum created by LBJ with the Civil Rights and Voting Acts to craft the race-baiting “Southern Strategy” that turned Dixie bright red, a color scheme only now beginning to alter. It gave us the plutocratic cruelty of the Reagan Revolution and the hoax of supply side economics, and proudly led the way on an aggressive, neo-imperialist foreign policy with a special interest in bombing the shit out of yellow and brown people.

So Trump’s rise was not a hostile takeover, no matter how much “moderate” Republicans would like us to believe that it was. Rather, it was the logical destination of a path down which the party had been heading for quite some time, and I do mean down. (For my money it was the ascendance of Newt Gingrich in the ‘90s that really put the GOP on the road to Trump’s gilded door, but that’s a tale for another day.)

Still, Trump’s, er, leadership steeply accelerated that decline, delivering the GOP to a state of moral turpitude unseen in modern times. This is a party that has become fully committed to a openly racist, white nationalist, proto-authoritarian, kleptocratic far right agenda pursued through a scorched earth policy of lies, disinformation, and demagoguery.

Now, with Don’s imminent eviction from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Grand Old Party stands at a crossroads. Trumpism has been angrily, definitively repudiated by a majority of the American people. Even so, its followers—his followers, to be precise—remain a potent force in our politics, albeit a nihilistic one with a severely limited long term future. Surveying that landscape, will the GOP stick with its current configuration as a neo-fascist cult-of-personality, or will it change course?

In other words, as the post-Trump era begins, the Republican Party is going to have to decide whether that era is really going to be “post-Trump” or not.

A NEW KIND OF EX-PRESIDENT

Many observers believe it’s not even a question. The GOP doesn’t seem capable of quitting Trump, even if it wanted to, and it’s not at all clear that it does.

Leading the pessimists is the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last, and he’s pretty convincing:

Raise your hand if you think (Donald Trump) will retire to Mar-a-Lago and delete his Twitter account.

It seems much more likely—maybe inevitable—that once he leaves office, Trump will continue to tweet and call in to cable news shows. Perhaps he will even attend political rallies, which is the part of the job he seems to enjoy most.

There is no reason to think—none at all—that he will discontinue his penchant for weighing in on American politics on an hourly basis. There is every reason to think that he will vigorously attack any Republican who was disloyal to him during his administration. Or retroactively criticizes his tenure. Or runs in opposition to one of his preferred candidates. Or jeopardizes any of his many and varied interests.

Trump is not a caretaker of the Republican party. He is the owner.

Heather Cox Richardson tends to agree:

While a losing incumbent president usually loses influence in the party, Trump intends to continue to call the shots. He wants to run again in 2024, or at least to anoint a successor, rather than letting the Republican National Committee pick a presidential candidate. There is a struggle going on to control the RNC and, as well, to figure out who gets control of the lists of supporters Trump has compiled. Trump also controls a lot of the party’s money, since he has been out front as its fundraiser without a break since he decided to run for office. He was the first president ever to file for reelection on the day of his inauguration, permitting him to hold “rallies” and to raise money throughout his presidency.

So Republican lawmakers are willing to swear loyalty to him, either because they want to attract his voters in future elections, or because they want access to the cash he can raise, or both. They no longer defend traditional policy positions; they defend Trump.

This transformation of the Republican Party will long outlive Donald, with his cheeseburgers-and-Diet-Cokes diet. Even more than Trump himself, the Republican Party now seems committed to Trumpism. Even as he is kicked to the curb by the mass of the American people, his fellow Republicans are holding fast to that paradigm—for now—even when they have strong practical reasons not to.

Jonathan Last goes on, arguing against the view of “(h)ard-headed Trump-skeptical Republicans” who “like to talk about how it’s important to preserve some room to maneuver so that when Trump eventually leaves the stage, the hard work of rebuilding the Republican party can begin.”

But that view is predicated on the realities of politics as they existed in 2015.

Until Trump’s election, the working model for American politics was that parties were ideological organizations, not personality cults…..

The post-Trump future may be different: A world where the former president calls into cable shows while tweeting 150 times a day, settling scores, attacking members of his party who he deems insufficiently loyal and paving the way for his son to inherit the office.

(W)hat’s remarkable is that the old system lasted for as long as it did.

The Republican party is now a family-controlled syndicate which will run the business until either a rival gang takes them down or the feds catch up with them. Whichever view you choose, the arrangement will continue as long as Donald Trump has thumbs and a smartphone.

Last thinks the answer to the question posed by this essay is settled. “The election is over. Trump lost. But the battle for the soul of the Republican party is over, too. And Trump won.”

TIANANMEN ON THE POTOMAC?

Everything JVL says is true, though as I wrote two weeks ago (“The Ghost of Grover Cleveland”), it is far from a sure thing that Trump will be able to maintain and enforce that sort of fealty while in exile. Maybe, maybe not. We shall see.

But in a separate piece, Last has argued that this matter of fealty, and not the putative goal of retaining the White House, is the primary purpose of Trump’s ongoing attempts at a coup. (That and fleecing his suckers).

(F)or Trump, the lawsuits, the posturing, the couping—yes, it would be nice if he wound up as president on January 21. But that’s the secondary objective. The primary objective was to stop the Republican party from leaving him and, if possible, tighten his grasp on it.

Now, owning a major political party isn’t as useful as being president. But it’s not nothing, either. In a two-party system, you can exert a great deal of power by being the head of a party. You have businesses and foreign governments that will pay tribute to you. You have capos spread across the country, ready to do your bidding. You have an audience of something like 40 million partisans who can be mined for contributions and mobilized as a flash mob whenever you need them.

And while everyone laughs at how incompetent Trump’s Elite Strike Force has been as a matter of law, they miss how effective it’s been as a matter of politics.

Pragmatically speaking, it’s true that this has been the net effect of Trump’s appalling attempt to overturn the election. But in terms of intentionality, I dunno if everybody on Team MAGA got the memo, given that this past weekend, egged on by retired general and convicted felon Mike Flynn, Trump openly contemplated declaring martial law.

As is often the case, the media is giving Donald credit for playing twelve-dimensional chess when in reality, per Maya Angelou, he has told us what he’s doing and is just as simplistic as he appears. If only for reasons of sheer ego, he is apoplectic at the idea of losing the presidency, terrified of his criminal exposure on the practical front, and willing to entertain any ploy—even trying to put tanks in the streets— to avoid that fate. He may or may not consciously understand that even a failed coup d’etat will serve to cement his chokehold on the party, though I’m sure he understands that it is a license to print money. But I don’t think he’s winking when he says he intends to defy the will of the people and stay in power.

Even after his is driven from office, Trump will certainly try to hang onto control of the GOP, whether it wants him to or not. Whether he will succeed is another matter. Because by yoking itself to the flaming clown car that is Trumpism, the Republican Party would be willingly consigning itself to a disastrous long term fate…..and its top strategists and leaders know that (at least those without the surnames Trump or Kushner), despite the complications of a divorce.

Sure, in the short term this scorched earth kind of White Power politics is effective, as we’ve seen. That’s the whole problem. But it’s not sustainable in the long run. The GOP has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. Even though it has gamed the Electoral College in order remain competitive, it’s not a winning approach for the future.

Racism and fascism will always be with us, but do Republicans really want to be a fringe party of violence-ready White grievance, rather than a mainstream conservative party that can attract a majority of a changing electorate going forward? Just in practical terms, not even moral ones, which incarnation serve its ambition for power better?

(Let’s leave aside the possibility that they succeed in establishing their Gilead.)

This takes us back to the question, oft heard during the Trump years, of why Republicans didn’t ever stand up to this tyrant. As I’ve said ad nauseam, it’s the wrong question from top to bottom. They didn’t want to stand up, because Trump was delivering them a Santa’s sled full of Christmas goodies, from Supreme Court justices to tax cuts for the rich to massive deregulation and stripping of environmental protections. And all they had to do kneel down and fellate him and thank him for the privilege.

But now that bargain is off the table, and they are in a pickle as a result of that shameful service to Satan.

A REFORMATION THAT WOULD DAUNT MARTIN LUTHER

So how do Republicans reform, assuming they want to?

It’s a very tall order. Like, Manute Bol tall.

How will they—or can they—rehabilitate a party that has so thoroughly debased itself through its embrace of this despicable con man? It’s a process that would first require an overt repudiation of their defeated ruler, and the eviction—and head-shaving—of all his collaborators. It’s also a process that requires sober recognition that the party’s systemic problems pre-date Trump, and in fact gave rise to him, not the other way around. 

So far, very little signs from Party Central that either of those qualifiers are remotely being met. 

As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius writes, “The message is to move on, but it’s hard for Republicans to hear when they’re hunkered down—still intimidated by Trump and frightened by an angry base that seems to have lost the ability to separate election fact from fiction.”

Might they just be able to ghost their way out?

Equally unlikely.

Last says that there will be “no way for a Trump-skeptical Republican to simply wait out the Trump years. There will be no ‘life after Trump’ because Trump is going to be the head boss of Republican politics for the rest of his days.” Again: maybe, maybe not. But I’ll offer another reason why Republicans can’t just “wait out the Trump years.” Because their party cannot be taken seriously again as a potential steward of the public welfare until they renounce Trump, burn their organization down to the ground, and start anew. Just “waiting it out,” ain’t an option.

So the odds are not good that the GOP is gonna respond to Donald’s first post-presidency call with a text reading, “New phone—who dis?”

The GOP leadership is far more likely to try to incite mass amnesia among the American people, acting like they are reasonable politicians who didn’t just spend four years abetting and defending a openly racist, openly criminal, wannabe dictator…..while at the same time still kissing the ass of his openly racist, criminality-tolerating, dictatorship-curious base.

Speaking for progressive America (I’m authorized to do that, right?), we are not going to let them get away with that.

Already that effort has begun, with Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin opposing COVID relief on the risible grounds of concerns about the deficit, after supporting Trump’s deficit-busting 2017 tax cut for the rich, his border “wall,” and his lavish military spending. Then there was Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, collapsing on his fainting couch over Biden staffer Jen O’Malley Dillon using the word “fuckers,” after supporting the most publicly vulgar president in US history, not to mention standing by silently while his fellow Florida Republican Rep. Ted Yoho called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) “a fucking bitch” to her face in halls of Congress. IOKIYAR, right?

So to cop a phrase from Ms. O’Malley Dillon, we are not going to let these fuckers forget what they did and who they’ve been.

If the Republican Party wants to be anything other than the amoral gang of quasi-brownshirts that it currently is, it’s going to have to engage in the kind of soul-searching and commitment to reform that thus far it has shows zero signs of undertaking.

WE’RE ALL DEVO NOW

Though some have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, political parties do evolve (or devolve) over time. Or at least they can.

Most pertinently in the US of A, the Republican and Democratic parties have more or less reversed polarity since the 1850s. Republicans never tire of reminding us that they are the alleged “party of Lincoln,” of abolitionism, and of integration, while it was 19^th and early 20^th century Democrats who were the defenders of slavery, foes of Reconstruction, and the dominant party in the South violently in opposition to the Civil Rights movement, at least until the Kennedy administration.

Now, of course, the opposite is true.

Even as it wants to claim the moral high ground, the contemporary Republican Party stands proudly for the exact same retrograde ideals its forebear opposed. Is anybody fooled by this except the willfully dishonest? How the two reversed like that is a tome in itself. But how the members of the Grand Old Party of 2020 can simultaneously—proudly—fly the flag of racism and xenophobia while slanderously excoriating Democrats for their ancient history on that count says a lot about the Orwellian nature of the modern GOP.

It’s possible that, if a Republican reformation ever takes pace, it will require decades, and entail the eventual retirement (or mortal demise) of all those current members who sided with Trump. That will be a generational change. Only a handful of current GOP officeholders can lay plausible claim to any kind of integrity, and very few at the national level.

However it might emerge, the presence of a sane conservative party in American politics would be a healthy thing, if only in the interest of balance, especially if we continue with our current two-party system. Or perhaps now, at long last, it’s time for that system to break, with the creation of a party that genuinely represents reasonable right-of-center views, a Lincoln Project/Bulwark party—call them the capital C Conservatives—consigning the old GOP brand to the far right fringe where it has unaccountably taken up residence.

The former Republican congressman David Jolly of Florida, an eloquent critic of his erstwhile colleagues and a frequent presence on MSNBC, thinks there is indeed room for a true Conservative Party. “Mr X.,” the pseudonymous Democratic consultant whose interviews have appeared in these pages, believes that the two-party system is just too entrenched. I don’t know who’s right, but I do think that if ever there was an opening for a viable third party, this moment is a candidate.

In some ways I think the rise of a Conservative Party is more plausible than reform of the Republican Party.

PAGING MR. YEATS

Some might say that we already do have a sane conservative party—the Democratic Party.

Since the Clinton years, the Democrats have occupied a position more analogous to the centrist (or even center-right) parties in many Western democracies. We can feel that phenomenon in the intramural battles between the Democrats’ moderate and progressive wings, battles that shaped last year’s primaries and continue to roil the transition period as Biden picks his Cabinet and lays out his policies for the coming term.

AOC famously noted that, in most countries, she and Joe Biden would not even be in the same party.

For thirty years the moderates have controlled the Democratic Party. (Forever, really, if you don’t count McGovern and Carter.) But the demographic future, as well as the enthusiasm, and the best and boldest new ideas, are largely with the left-of-center faction….so much so that Biden has made significant shifts in that direction, fulfilling Naomi Klein’s exhortation to “move the center.” (Which the reliably McCarthyite GOP is keen to highlight, even amid continued grumbling from Bernie Bro Nation that Joe hasn’t done enough.)

So is it possible that the Democrats, rather than the Republicans, will be, or ought to be, the ones who should split?

It’s a bold idea. But there would really be no point, as the Democrats’ progressive and moderate wings would always need to form an alliance anyway in order to win elections and form a government, as party coalitions do in various parliamentary systems in Europe and elsewhere. In essence, the Democratic Party is already a standing coalition of discrete factions, permanently allied under one big blue umbrella.

Germany has long had the “traffic light coalition” of Social Democrats (in their signature red—confusingly, as they are solidly centrist, not Marxist), Free Democrats (yellow), and Greens. In the ‘90s, the country saw the emergence of the Jamaica coalition (also known as the Schwampel, or “black traffic light,” coalition), with the conservative Christian Democrats, in their trademark schwarz, replacing the SDP.

I don’t love the CDU/CSU but you gotta love a mainstream political party with the huevos to fly the black flag. But I guess reactionaries and anarchists do have some DNA in common, if only in their belief that government is useless.

Rather than splitting, it seems to me that the Democrats would be better served by never forgetting the monstrousness of their foe, and remembering that we have a common, urgent interest in keeping these cretins out of power.

BATTLE DAMAGE ASSESSMENT

In closing, by way of handicapping Republican prospects for reformation, let’s circle back to the issue of how much damage Trump has done.

Throughout the 2016 campaign, and especially after he won but before he took office, Republicans contemptuously assured us that Democrats were “hysterical” in their warnings about how bad he would be. Trump Derangement Syndrome, they howled! He’ll pivot! You won’t believe how presidential he’ll be!

Turns out, he was infinitely worse by almost any metric you care to choose.

Yet even now so-called “moderate” conservatives (there’s that word again) like the New York Times’ preternaturally smug Bret Stephens would have us believe that Trump didn’t do that much damage, that the “system worked” to thwart him, that COVID hasn’t been as bad as some say, Putin doesn’t call the shots, etc etc. In his defense, he does go on to record how Trump corroded trust and destroyed truth as a commonly accepted standard. But the downplaying of Trump’s sins is truly blinkered and will not age well. Don’t look for it in Bret’s Greatest Hits.

Per above, this is the template for how the GOP will likely move forward: not fully repudiating Trump and burning the party to the ground, but disingenuously trying to make us believe It Was All Just a Dream and that they are reasonable, trustworthy public servants after all.

Good luck with that, assholes.

As I write this, the United States has just suffered the worst intelligence failure since 9/11, an operation by the Russian Federation that penetrated the very heart of our most sensitive national security institutions. Whether it was “merely” a stunningly successful espionage operation or a proper cyberattack—that is, an outright act of war—or is still being debated. Either way, it doesn’t matter because Donald Trump isn’t doing anything about it, staying meekly silent on the topic even as the attack continues. It’s Putin’s sadistic parting shot as Donald leaves office, a victory lap reminding us how he made the President of the United States his poodle for the last four years.

(Wait—that can’t be! Right, Bret?)

At the same time, our country is suffering upward of 3000 deaths a day due to COVID-19—a 9/11 every 24 hours—with total casualties topping 300,000 and rising fast, even as the White House’s main focus in that arena seems to be sabotaging the vaccine rollout in order to hinder the incoming Biden administration. Meanwhile, reports have begun to leak over just how criminally homicidal the Trump presidency’s non-response to the pandemic has been over the past eighteen months. Look for even more of that to emerge, and to horrify us.

Also in the news, the Republican-controlled Senate continues to block desperately needed economic relief for suffering Americans citizens, we still can’t account for all the children kidnapped and caged at the border, and we’re now told that Jared Kushner siphoned off some $617 million dollars—more than half the GOP war chest for the presidential campaign—and funneled it straight into the Trump family pockets, with no semblance of accountability.

And what is Trump doing amid this avalanche of crises? Tweeting nonstop in an attempt to undermine the very foundations of American democracy, foment violence, and steal an election he soundly lost. Oh, and also: preparing to pardon himself, his family, and all his cronies on his way out the door.   

Gee, why wouldn’t the GOP want to sign up for twenty more years of that?

*********

Photo: The Milwaukee Independent

I’ve been privileged to know a lot of smart people in my time, including a few MacArthur Genius grant winners. (They’re always huddling together and doing something with their secret decoder rings.)

But Bill Pilon might well be the smartest person I’ve ever known.

Born in Martin Army Hospital at Ft. Benning, Bill is a lifelong Georgian. Formerly a senior marketing research analyst for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he is currently in that role for a media conglomerate that shall go unnamed, and as such has his finger on the pulse of the state’s politics, demographics, and zeitgeist in a way that not many folks can match. He’s like Steve Kornacki, if Steve Kornacki had a huge wad of Red Man leaf tobacco in his cheek.

That is of special note at the moment, as all eyes are on the Peach State for the next 22 days for a pair of twin runoffs that will determine control of the United States Senate for—at a minimum—the first two years of the Biden administration. Are the stakes high? You bet your sweet bippy. (Early in-person voting in that runoff opens today, Monday December 14.)

I lived in Georgia myself for about a third of my first 22 years, off and on, all told. We lived on the Alabama side, at and around Ft. Benning and Columbus, and on the East Coast, in Hinesville (pop. 32,872), near Ft. Stewart, where Bill and I went to high school. My parents continued to live in Columbus for another five years after my father retired. So what’s happening down there right now is especially close to the bone for us.

Of course, even beyond Georgia, there is a lot going on in American politics right now, including—sitting down?—a lawsuit from the Texas Attorney General joined by 17 red states and the White House asking the Supreme Court simply to throw out the whole vote and give Trump a second term. More than half of the Republican representatives in the House (126 out of 196) signed a letter endorsing that suit. I say again: MORE. THAN. HALF.

So much for the idea that they were just humoring Don while the clock ran out. When the wonks at the Transition Integrity Project ran their tabletop scenarios last year wargaming a contested election, even they did not foresee something so blatant and outrageous as the GOP calling outright for the election to be awarded to Trump on no grounds whatsoever.

It matters not that the SCOTUS, even with a 6-3 right wing majority including three Trump appointees, dismissed the suit almost before it dropped over the transom. The fact that the center of gravity in the Republican Party is totally onboard with full-blown fascism is in itself sufficiently blood-boiling—and terrifying.

So as Christian Vanderbrouk recently wrote in The Bulwark, “Remember. Their. Names.” Because it won’t be long before they want us to act like they’re reasonable politicians and not autocracy fanboys who would destroy American democracy for a few pieces of silver.

But I digress.

The Senate runoffs in Georgia belong to a different planet, one where some semblance of reason still reigns, but they still represent yet another front in the ongoing battle for the soul of our democracy. I can’t think of anybody who can give us the inside skinny on that like Pilon. We spoke by Zoom last week.

FIVE GEORGIAS

THE KING’S NECKTIE: OK Bill. Gimme the inside dope.

BILL PILON: The first thing you really need to know is that there are about five Georgias.

There’s Metro Atlanta, which is literally half the population of the state, concentrated in about eight of 159 counties. That half is extremely liberal by Georgia standards and a little left of center by national standards. Atlanta and its environs are probably as liberal as any other major metro area in the country, and that causes huge problems in the state legislature. Metro Atlanta does really well in the state House, but the state Senate is county-based, and the other 151 counties of Georgia dominate the Senate.

But Atlanta is the economic engine of the state, and its liberality goes way back. There’s a reason Henry Grady advertised the New South in Atlanta in the 1880s and 1890s; Atlanta kind of dragged Georgia kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

In the Fifties, when Atlanta decided to become the City Too Busy to Hate, it was because Bob Woodruff, the longtime president of Coca-Cola, decided it was going to be. When Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize, nobody in Atlanta was going to do anything, and Woodruff said, “I’m going to host a dinner, and if you ever want to see any philanthropy from Coca-Cola ever again, you will buy tickets and you will attend.”

So one half of Georgia is Atlanta. Very liberal, very rich, well off.

Next, there’s the Black Belt that runs all through central Georgia from just south of Macon to just north of say Reidsville or Glennville, and that’s a bunch of rural counties that are majority Black and very poor. They were all sharecroppers: they didn’t have any money then and they still don’t have any money now. But when the Civil Rights Act came in 1964, these counties began to dominate the state government because they were 60 or 70 or 80% of the electorate.

Then there’s north Georgia, which is pretty much everything north of Metro Atlanta. It’s the mountains and literally you can hear banjo music when you drive through there. They’re not in favor of Black people. Forsyth County, for example, used to be the border of it. Now it’s part of Metro Atlanta, but around the time I moved here in ‘86, there wasn’t a single Black family in Forsyth County according to the 1990 census. That changed during the ‘90s and the ‘00s; now it’s just a bedroom community of Atlanta, but that heritage is still there. But the population is so small and there’s so little industry, that today they don’t really have a big presence in the state government except for the state Senate.

Fourth is the coast, everything from Savannah to Brunswick, which is all tourist-driven, lots and lots of money, lots of cooperation between Blacks and Whites to get that money, and for political and governmental things that advance and exploit tourism.

The fifth Georgia is the Piedmont region, the area south of Atlanta to just south of Macon where cotton-growing—and hence slave population—didn’t dominate. Because of the racial demographics, which are majority White but not overwhelmingly so, it’s fairly moderate. Economically it’s not as rich as Atlanta, but not as poor as the rest of rural Georgia.

So the demographics of Georgia are changing, because of changes in those five sub-Georgias. The Black Belt is expanding. In 2010, non-Hispanic Whites made up 56% of the population. By 2019 that had fallen to 52%, according to the Census. Some counties are shifting even faster: Chatham, which is Savannah, and Clayton and Henry, which are Metro Atlanta, have all flipped. And as they do, the GOP prospects of maintaining control of the state legislature come under increasing pressure.

The whole state’s going to be majority-minority as early as 2028, although it’ll take a little bit longer for the electorate to reflect that.

To me, the thing Stacey Abrams has done that’s the most important is she’s really expanded the electorate, especially among minorities. She added about 1.5 million voters. That’s huge in a state where there’s 5 to 6 million votes cast in an election. She registered people who hadn’t registered and turned out people who hadn’t turned out. Probably two-thirds to three-quarters of that expansion was among Democrats and the rest of it was Republicans going, “Holy shit. If we let her do this, we’re going to get swamped.”

Georgia will be solidly blue in less than 10 years, and Trump has only accelerated that.

HANDICAPPING THE RACE

BP: So the senatorial runoff is going to be all about turnout. Who motivates their crowd to come out and vote.

TKN: And what’s your prediction?

BP: Could go either way, but if I HAVE to make a prediction, I think the Dems win both seats. Current polling from reliable pollsters has both Warnock and Ossoff in the lead, though both are inside the margin. Trafalgar, which has a C- at Fivethrityeight.com, even has Ossoff up by 1% over Perdue and SurveyUSA has Warnock at +7 over Loeffler. There’s a shitload of money being spent so there will be a lot more polling to come, and unlike other states and the national, the 2020 Georgia polls were fairly accurate. Also, the current COVID case/death trend will continue or worsen and the Democrats are prepared to use absentee ballots to maintain turnout. And some Trump supporters may boycott the election.

TKN: Let’s talk about the individual candidates. In November we were looking at South Carolina having possibly two Black senators, which would have been remarkable, even though it didn’t happen. Georgia has never had a Black senator, which isn’t surprising when you realize there have only ever been ten Black US Senators period….and five of those are since Obama represented Illinois.

So what is the general feeling in Georgia toward Rev. Warnock? Could he be the state’s first?

BP: For probably 70 or 80% of the voters, Reverend Warnock is very much seen in the cast of Dr. King. He’s like Andrew Young would have been 20 or 30 years ago. He’s probably the most qualified and “positive imaged” leader from the Black community that could have run for Senate from the perspective of the White electorate, but at the same time he’s still “Black enough” for the Black electorate. I mean, he runs Ebeneezer Baptist Church, right?

TKN: And Ossoff?

BP: Ossoff is less positive. In the first place, he’s Jewish, and there’s a small streak of anti-Semitism that’s hurting him. You saw Perdue play to it when he Photoshopped Ossoff’s picture to give him a bigger nose. You know, a hundred years ago we lynched Leo Frank for exactly the same reason, for just being Jewish. That’s not all gone, but it’s not as big as it used to be.

In the second place, Ossoff was a protégé of John Lewis, and that buys him a lot of credibility, but it also hurts him a little bit. Some view him as kind of John Lewis’s pet. He is not nearly as strong a candidate as Warnock, but he’s got a lot more money behind him than Warnock does. A huge amount of it is from out of state, though, and that’s really an issue. There’s still a vestige of the idea that “we don’t want Yankee carpetbaggers coming down here telling us what to do.” The Ossoff Facebook groups and strategy groups are saying, “Look, we gotta be really careful.” They do not want people coming from out of state to knock on doors.

TKN: Yeah. I even heard Stacey Abrams say that. She was like, “You want to help? There’s a lot you can do from where you are. Don’t come here.”

BP: Right. The last thing they need is somebody from Boston coming here to tell people to vote for Ossoff.

TKN: Loeffler?

BP: Kelly Loeffler was almost unknown before she was elevated to the Senate. The few people that were aware of her mainly knew her through her WNBA team.

TKN: And those players hate her. Sue Bird leading the way.

BP: That’s one of the reasons Kemp was able to “sell” her as Senator: she was a kind of blank page upon which people could project what they wanted. Since then she’s been steadily driven right—or perhaps pro-Trump is a better description—during the election and is probably as polarizing as Trump himself at this point.

TKN: Where do the Collins voters go?

BP: They are gonna go to Loeffler. They don’t have a choice.

TKN: That’s what I figured. When I saw the numbers on November 3rd, I said there’s no way that the Democrats can win because when you add Loeffler and Collins, that’s the majority.

BP: But it’s not actually. I’ve got a spreadsheet; let me pull it up….

If you look at Loeffler, she was 1.27 million, and then you add all the other Republican candidates and you have another 1.15, so total GOP was about 2.4 million. Warnock actually beat Loeffler, and at the end of the day when you add the other Dems, you’re at 2.38. So it’s close. Again, it’s going to be about turnout, and where do the four people who voted for the Liberals and the five people who voted for the Green Party and the Libertarians, where are they going to wind up?

With the Ossoff/Perdue thing, again, about the same. There were 115,000 Libertarian votes in that race. In my experience, a lot of those voters stay home in the runoffs,  ‘cause they’re voting Libertarian to make a point. It’s not like they think their guy is going to get elected, right? Some stay home and some are actually Republicans who were pretending to be Libertarians.

TKN: What do you think the odds are of a split decision?

BP: If there’s a split decision, I think Warnock wins and Ossoff loses. I can’t quite get a handle on the odds. Maybe 1 in 3?

HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING

BP: It’s really interesting to see the runoff ads. Loeffler and Perdue are extremely negative, especially Perdue. The GOP ads to date have done nothing but try to scare their base into voting against Warnock and Ossoff, rather than for their own candidates.

On the other side, Ossoff’s kind of fighting off the negativity and going a little negative himself, hammering Perdue on corruption and insider trading and his lies about the severity of COVID.

Warnock‘s ads are just really interesting. They’re very calm, very measured. Last night he had one with a tracking shot of him walking his dog, and telling us, “You know, Kelly Loeffler says this and that, but I think Georgia voters are smart enough to know what Kelly’s actually up to”……just as he drops a little bag of dog crap in the trashcan. (Laughs.)

TKN: Do Georgians think the vote will be fair? Or did the GOP self-sabotage by telling its own voters that the November election was rigged, so now they think “Why bother?”

BP: Kemp has inspired people that they’ll get a fair vote by virtue of the fact that he and Raffensperger are kind of hanging in there against Trump. The Republican stuff on Facebook is saying, “Hey, look, if we go vote, the votes are actually going to get counted.” Even my dad, who’s a rabidly dyed-in-the-wool Trump guy, doesn’t believe the election was fraudulent because of Kemp and Raffensperger.

TKN: Incredibly ironic that Brian Kemp of all people can make people believe in the integrity of an election. Particularly—and another irony—when you’ve got these two GOP shitheels, Perdue and Loeffler, doing Trump’s bidding and complaining about an unfair election, in a state run by Republicans, whose governor is one of the most infamous vote suppressors in America.

So why is Kemp standing up to Trump now? It can’t be principle.

BP: Kemp desperately wants a second term as governor and he realizes he won his election by only 50,000 votes. He can’t afford to alienate both the Black vote and the suburban liberals and still win next time. Trumpers simply won’t be enough. He’s a smart guy. He’s way too conservative for me, but he’s smart.

TKN: What do you think the impact was of Trump’s visit over the weekend?

BP: Honestly? Other than spreading COVID? Nothing.

TKN: (laughs) So you don’t think he hurt the Republicans?

BP: I don’t think he hurt Loeffler or Perdue because both of them are already so tied to him. Nobody who went to that rally was going to vote for Ossoff or Warnock anyway, and none of them were going to stay home if they’re convinced that these two people are Trump acolytes who are going to be in there pitching for him.

TKN: Speaking of COVID, you wrote me a little bit about the impact of the virus and absentee voting. Is that still in play?

BP: Yeah. By Thanksgiving we had 700,000 requests for absentee ballots for the runoff, and I saw a thing today in the AJC that there were about 70,000 ballot applications from people who didn’t vote in the general. (Ed.: Now up to to 1.2 million absentee applications.) So people are planning on voting absentee again, and they’re very, very wired into how to do it. They’ve already got the applications; people on Facebook are checking with each other; there’s a Georgia My Voter page that actually lets you keep up with your application and your ballot status and everything.

The impact of the pandemic has been huge. If it weren’t for COVID and his active suppression of absentee balloting, Trump would probably have won here.

TKN: Such a shame he shot himself in the foot like that. Whoda thunk it?

BP: I’m not sure that Perdue and Loeffler have done themselves a lot of good either. Yesterday they both endorsed the Texas suit in SCOTUS to throw out the vote from the four swing states, including their own. I expect the ads to break Monday, saying, “Here’s how much Loeffler and Perdue want to help Georgia: they’re saying the Supreme Court should ignore Georgia voters.”

TKN: To me it’s crazy that Perdue and Loeffler are even in this race, with the insider trading and everything else. It’s just mind-boggling.

BP: I spend a lot of time yelling at the television. And the mind-boggling thing to me is that Loeffler and Perdue can run ads that claim they were completely exonerated and found innocent of all wrongdoing based on a report that said, “Yeah, they insider traded, but the insider trading laws don’t apply to Congress, so it’s not technically illegal.”

(bitter laughter from Bill and Bob both)

So yeah, they didn’t do anything illegal. It was wrong and it’s exactly what they were accused of, but they don’t have to abide by those laws. And their position is, “See? I didn’t do it.”

TKN: It never ceases to amaze me what Republicans get away with. Michelle Goldberg had a column in the Times this morning about the double standard when it comes to civility. She was saying, remember four years ago when people were up in arms because some restaurant owner in Virginia very politely asked Sarah Sanders to leave? And now you’ve got an armed Republican mob outside of the home of the Michigan secretary of state and somehow that’s OK.

BP: Yeah. After he comped her cheese plate. I mean, it’s just ludicrous.

STACEY CRUSHES IT

TKN: What do you make of Gabriel Sterling and Brad Raffensperger standing up the way they did?

BP: I think, first of all, praise God. (laughs) I think Raffensperger wants to be the governor someday, and he knows that in ten years the electorate’s going to be a lot bluer than it is now, and he doesn’t want to be the guy that caved in to Trump.  

Second of all, I think Georgia is very pragmatic and open to compromise, as I’ve said, and Stacey Abrams is almost a poster child for that.

Stacey Abrams is very well thought of here. There are very few people who have negative things to say about her, statewide. The Hope Scholarship is a good example.

The first thing that Stacey did when she got into the state legislature as minority leader was compromise with the Republicans to save that scholarship, because even though the vast majority of the benefits go to middle class White kids who would go to college anyway, enough go to underclass Black kids who have no hope of college without it. So Stacey Abrams helped save that program.

There was another time when Republicans wanted to decrease the income tax and increase the cable television tax. It was supposed to be revenue neutral, because it was going to take in less money in taxes from Ted Turner and Kelly Loeffler and more money from every other person in the state that had a cable TV subscription. And Stacey literally did the numbers and put a copy of the analysis on every single desk in the state legislature one morning before the session started. All these dudes went, (affects bigtime cracker accent): “Well, wait a minute now. Ah’m gonna save $15 on my income tax but my cable bill’s gonna go up $35? Why in the hell would I do that?” It would have been the biggest tax increase in the history of Georgia and she nipped it in the bud. It got crushed.

Like I said, she is very well thought of. There was a little bit of dogwhistling during the gubernatorial election, but she really didn’t get hammered with the socialist thing. I honestly think if Kemp had not been secretary of state in the four years leading up to that election, she would have won.

TKN: Well, a lot of people think that.

BP: But it didn’t really have anything to do with him not recusing, because by the time that the election came, the frame had been set. If Kemp were smart, he would have recused himself and said, “I don’t want there to be any doubt,” and the machinery he’d set up would still have proceeded and he wouldn’t have to deal with the allegation of putting his thumb on the scale, to the extent that he is dealing with it, which is really not a lot.

TKN: Though that’s exactly it. Not recusing—even though he’d already pre-built the machinery to assure his win, as you say—makes people rightly suspicious that he was continuing to meddle even during the race itself.

SUPPRESSION BY ANY OTHER NAME

TKN: It’s fascinating that suddenly in the last two weeks, Kemp has become…..I wouldn’t say a hero, but it’s odd that a guy with his horrendous record of voter suppression in who being vilified by his own party and by this president* for not doing more. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

BP: Historically Georgia has always been less extreme in its suppression of the Black vote. It never made it illegal for people to register or to vote, like Mississippi or Alabama; instead it used White primaries, poll taxes, and the county unit system to reduce Black voting power, though it couldn’t eliminate it altogether. “Suppress by finesse” they called it.

Georgia said, “Oh yeah, yeah, you can vote. You just can’t vote in the primary because of the right to free association guaranteed in the Constitution—if the party doesn’t want you in their club, there’s nothing we can do about that. But you can vote in the general election.” Well, 99% of the time there was only one candidate in the general election and that was the Democrat. So the Georgia political season really was in the spring because that’s when the party nominee was chosen.

In fact, the run-off requirement is an artifact of that history.

The county unit system was used for statewide races. 159 counties, four of them around Metro Atlanta were labeled “city counties” and each of those had four votes. There were another 15 or 20 counties labeled “town counties,” like Muscogee, where Columbus is, and Chatham, where Savannah is, and Augusta, and Macon. They got three votes each. The other hundred and something counties got two votes each. So all of Metro Atlanta, with half the population of the state, got to cast less than 20 of the 410 votes available.

When the county unit system was struck down by SCOTUS, the White power structure became concerned that a day would come where three or four White guys were running and one Black guy, and that Black guy got enough votes to win because the others split the vote. So they decided that they would go to a system where if you have less than a majority, you have to go to a runoff. And that gave the White people a chance to get their act together and pick one candidate.

So Warnock would have won if we didn’t have the runoff.

THE PARTY’S OVER

Hinesville, GA, where Bill and I went to high school, is about forty miles southwest of Savannah, not far from the even smaller town of Brunswick, where Ahmaud Arbery was murdered last February. It’s the kind of town where, in our day, there wasn’t much to do besides hang out in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen and follow the local high school football team. (Go Tigers.)

Our circle of friends back then were, frankly, a bunch of rednecks……very very smart rednecks who went on to do things like become nuclear submariners, but pickup truck-driving, tobacco-chewing, Willie Nelson-listening rednecks nonetheless. As an interloper from the North (in my friends’ view), my nickname was Yankee.

TKN: I’d like to wanted to ask you a little bit about your own political evolution, Bill. When you and I were in high school, we were all very conservative.

BP: You know “The Newsroom” on HBO? Well, I’m a Will McAvoy Republican.

TKN:  I can’t believe you’re a Republican at all, based on the things I know you believe in and how hard you’ve fought against Trump.

BP: What can I tell you? I’m an Eisenhower/Rockefeller guy.

TKN: I hear you. That’s what I came out of too, even though I left it 20 years ago. That’s The Bulwark, that’s The Lincoln Project.

BP: I’ll tell you when my final break happened. It was in ’08 when McCain selected Palin. I couldn’t vote for that ticket.

TKN: For me it was Iraq war. I had begun to move away before that, but that was the thing that ended it for me, once and for all.

BP: Yeah. I was a first term Bush guy but a second term Kerry guy because of Iraq. I wanted to go back to the GOP in 2008 with McCain, because I just think John McCain was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but then he picked Palin. If Lieberman had been his running mate, I would have voted for that ticket.

TKN: And they were buddies. But as much as I admired McCain as a man, like you, not his policies per se, I would still have voted for Barack. But the economy collapsing was the end of it. So it didn’t matter.

So how did you get to where you are now?

BP: The Internet did it. A PDF. And I can tell you exactly when it happened.

In the early ‘90s I was a huge listener to Rush. I thought Rush Limbaugh was the oracle on the hill, and these Clinton people were scum and they were going to destroy the country. Then the Starr report came out and Rush started talking about what was in it. So I downloaded it. It might be the first PDF I ever downloaded from the Internet. And I read the whole damn thing. And then Rush would talk about the Starr report and say things about it, and I’d be like, “Well, that’s not true.” And then Rush would say something else, and I’d look it up in the report, and it didn’t say that either. And I’m like, “Well, if he’s lying about that, what else is he lying about?”

So then I got in the habit of downloading and reading Supreme Court decisions. And sure enough the Supreme Court didn’t say the things Rush was claiming it said either. And the more I read of the primary source documents, the more the conservative positions didn’t hold water. They just didn’t work.

I read an analysis of federal revenue after the 1980 tax cut. The whole supply side thing was that if we cut taxes that will increase revenue. But it didn’t increase revenue. All it did was lower the tax base.

So one part of it was that the Internet gave me access to information that I didn’t have that wasn’t filtered by the right wing blogosphere or bubble. That was huge. The Internet has this unique ability to freeze stuff and make it available forever. So you can hear somebody like Grover Norquist say something when they said the exactly opposite six months before. Before the Internet you would never have known. But now you can Google it, and sure enough, there it is.

TKN: Bill, you must be the first human being ever who actually learned something accurate from the Internet. It’s really unfair of you to look for the facts. That destroys the whole right wing paradigm.

BP: (laughs) Well, it was Krugman who said that facts have a liberal bias.

The second part was that I kind of ran into this philosophical thing about positive freedom and negative freedom. And then the third thing, in a lot of cases, was media. “The West Wing“ had a huge part in it. “The Newsroom” had a huge part in it.

TKN: That Aaron Sorkin is good.

BP: Yeah he is.

TKN: I realize it’s kind of an unfair question to ask about “your” change, because if we characterize ourselves as Eisenhower Republicans, it wasn’t that we changed: the Republican Party changed around us.

BP: Yeah. I mean, look at Eisenhower’s platform from ’56. It’s almost the same as Biden’s platform now.

TKN: As many people have pointed out, Eisenhower could not be a Republican today. Nixon could not. Reagan could not. None of these icons could be; they’re all way too far left for the contemporary GOP….and they were not left wing at all! It’s tragic.

This is a whole ‘nother topic that we can talk about another day, but I wonder about the future of the Republican Party. David Jolly thinks there’s room for a third party, a truly conservative party, which would be healthy for the republic just in terms of variety. I dunno if he’s right about the practicality of it, but it’d be a good thing.

BP: I still consider myself as a Republican in philosophy, but can have no association with the party as its currently configured.

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

If you’re a resident of Georgia, please vote. Early in-person voting is open now. Remember to bring your ID, as Georgia is one of 36 states that require identification to vote.

Requests for a ballot by mail must be received by Friday January 1, 2021. If mailed in, ballots must be received by 7pm ET on Tuesday January 5, 2021 (Election Day). Ballots can also be submitted in person until that time.

For more on how to vote in the runoff, go to How to Vote.

Illustration: from the Allman Brothers’ album Eat a Peach (1972). Do you dare?

During Trump’s impeachment last year—can you believe that was less than a year ago?—I never seriously thought he’d be convicted. The GOP’s venality and cowardice  are far too strong. But it did occur to me that if he were, he might become the first US president ever removed who went on to run again…..in that case, just months later. (Trump was already the first POTUS to be impeached in his first term. Barring an impeached president from holding future office is a separate Congressional vote.)

That didn’t happen, of course. Susan Collins, Lamar Alexander, and other Senate Republicans assured us that Donald had learned his lesson and would be an upstanding citizen ever after.

(Pause for laughter.)

Instead, Trump was evicted from office in an even more resounding way, by the will of the people at the polls, which was what a parade of those Republican senators speciously informed us would be the better form of judgment, while abdicating their own responsibility as a co-equal branch to hold a criminal president accountable. Now of course those same senators are tacitly—and in some cases, actively—trying to help Donald Trump overturn the will of the people, but never mind. Joe Biden is a communist, everybody!

So the spectacle of an ousted POTUS standing for office again just nine months later didn’t come to pass, though the spectacle of an impeached POTUS who managed to dodge conviction did—another first. (In 1868, after avoiding removal by a single vote, Andrew Johnson sought his party’s nomination again but didn’t get it.)

But now we are faced with a less baroque but still quite rare possibility: a defeated President, deposed after one term, who might run again and successfully retake the office. It’s only happened once before, when President Grover Cleveland lost his re-election bid to Benjamin Harrison in 1888, then came back to beat him in a rematch in 1892. (Fwiw, Grover won the popular vote in all three of those elections.)

The notion of Trump pulling off a similar comeback is the stuff of nightmares. But how likely is it?

So let us look at the odds of that scenario so we can calculate how much pharmaceutical grade ketamine we will need to get through the period between now and January 2025.

ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS

Let’s take the two opposite extremes.

At one end, we have Donald Trump continuing to control the Republican Party like a high-priced dominatrix, tormenting the Biden administration from exile, maintaining an only slightly diminished profile in the media (with its obvious addiction to covering this trainwreck), and preparing himself for his revenge in 2024. 

I realize that that is both terrifying and depressing, and I hope it’s not the case. But there is reason to give this scenario serious credence.

Trump has all but formally announced that he will run again; by some accounts, he will make that announcement live, during Biden’s inaugural address, a high watermark both for counterprogramming and for pettiness. Even if that presidential run is just a feint, the whole point of a feint is to convince people to behave as if it is true until disproved, which might not be until the Republican convention in the summer of ‘24. That means that Trump will be able to keep a chokehold on his party, freeze the field of other potential Republican contenders, dictate GOP policy as the de facto leader of the opposition, remain in the spotlight he craves, and most importantly for him, raise money hand over fist from his cult of reliable suckers until they are bled dry.

He will most certainly try to do all that. Is there even one thing in Trump’s long, pathetic life history that makes you think he won’t?

In tandem with that tease, as many have speculated, Trump might also start his own media empire, or—being both lazy and incompetent—just become a ubiquitous, well-compensated presence on existing right wing platforms, from Fox to OANN to Breitbart. After all, as Yale history professor Beverly Gage writes, “When he no longer has access to the White House, he will still have his base, tens of millions of Americans whose identities and aspirations are wrapped up in the amorphous but energetic politics of Trumpism.” And for that reason, the Republican Party is likely to continue bend to his every whim. To grasp the depths of the GOP leadership’s servility, one has but to witness their craven obsequiousness even in this lame duck period, when they know he will soon be out of power, to the point of sitting on their collective hands while he tries to mount a coup.  

Speaking of servility, let’s listen to Lindsey Graham, who referenced Grover Cleveland by name in speaking to The Atlantic’s Peter Nicholas, predicting “that Trump will indeed run again—and that doing so is ‘the best thing for the party, frankly.’”

“Right now, assuming for the moment that Biden wins, it’s Trump’s nomination if he wants it,” Graham told me. (Like many other Republicans, Graham has not yet acknowledged that Biden has won the election.) “He has a lot of sway over the Republican Party. If he objects to anything Biden [does], it would be hard to get Republicans on board. If he blessed some kind of deal, it would be easier to get something done. In many ways, he’ll be a shadow president.”

Caveat: we must take Lindsey’s words with a Jimmy Buffett-sized shaker of salt. Once an otherwise reasonable Republican (if that’s not an oxymoron), Graham has since become one of Trump’s most nauseatingly reliable lapdogs, and these days never says a word that is not designed to flatter his master. So here he is almost certainly speaking to an audience of one, as opposed to offering an honest assessment.

But from Donald’s point of view, there is no down side to that plan, and no upside to a quiet life playing golf and cheating on Melania at Ma-a-Lago. Nicholas again:

For Trump, the party is a bankable asset under any scenario. Foreign governments considering his company’s projects might be more receptive knowing a once-and-perhaps-future president is on the other side of the deal. Audiences may be more apt to tune in if Trump starts a conservative news venture. Candidates looking for fundraising help will be courting Trump, enabling him to stockpile chits. So will members of Congress hoping to make inroads with his base.

A Republican consultant named Patrick Griffin put it even more bluntly, speaking to the right wing Washington Times:

Donald Trump is not exactly going to follow Jimmy Carter, who is out building homes with Habitat for Humanity after leaving the White House. This is going to be the worst leader in exile the world has ever seen.

IRRELEVANCE CALLING

OK, so we’ll need, like, a Burning Man-level supply of ketamine.

But then there is the scenario at the opposite end of the spectrum, which most informed observers actually think is more probable: that Donald Trump, like most defeated presidents, quickly fades into irrelevance.

After all, America hates a loser.

Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The President may imagine that he can remain the sole and powerful master of his following after January—and, perhaps, to strengthen his grip, he will even announce a preemptive campaign for the White House in 2024, as he has mused privately about doing. Yet he cannot deny a reality: generally, ex-Presidents lose power very quickly…..

Trump had no inkling what it was like to be President before he won the office, in 2016. Come February, he may be stunned again, this time by the speed at which former loyalists distance themselves.

Coll allows that “Trump may again prove to be a mold-breaker.” He does, after all, have, a lifelong record of cheating karma. But it may not be enough.

(E)lectoral politics is a ruthless zero-sum game. Trump failed decisively to be reëlected, becoming the first sitting President to meet that fate in nearly three decades. As Trump himself might put it: when you’re a loser, people can treat you like a dog.

I’d be lying if I said that prospect didn’t make me feel good. After four years of this shitshow, I think we’re all entitled to a little schadenfreude.

In addition to all the garden variety reasons for ex-presidential irrelevance, Trump also has issues unique to him that promise to bedevil his post-White House days.

Federal pardon or no, once he leaves office he is going to be hit with a tsunami of legal problems and criminal prosecution, almost surely including felony charges for everything from bank fraud to money laundering to tax evasion. Come 2024 he may well be in prison, or at least under indictment. (Not that that would stop him from running, or his supporters from voting for him.) There is even a movement, however remote, to charge him for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Even if he avoids the orange jumpsuit, he is already saddled with nearly half a billion in personal debt that is about to come due (to whom? Hmm, good question), and will soon have legal bills might bankrupt him.

Of course, Trump being Trump, he will only use such legal and financial woes as fuel for his candidacy, given that his political career has always been built upon personal grievance, in a feedback loop with the grievance of his supporters. But there is a limited appeal to that model, and the last four years have largely exhausted it.

Trump depends mightily on those hardcore followers, and the willingness of MAGA Nation to go along even with a coup stunned even Republican muckity mucks. A prime example is smartypants New York Times columnist Ross Douhat, who recently expressed shock that members of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party support leopards eating people’s faces.

Doubt it? Have a listen to right wing talk radio, if you dare. It will scare the shit out of you to think that this is the poison that is being pumped non-stop into the minds of gullible Americans.

But 74 million votes and a roughly 40% favorability rating in the polls, scary as they are, will not necessarily translate into an equal number of disciples once he’s out of power. Many of the people in that count aren’t diehard redhatters but casual conservatives who won’t pay to see a show that they used watch for free, especially once it’s canceled. We may find that the numbers of red-hatters who are willing to maintain that kind of passionate allegiance as Trump is evicted into the wilderness is far smaller.

Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic:

Trump certainly could stage a spectacular comeback. Maybe Americans will keep staring at his Twitter feed in horror or fascination for the next four years. Maybe primary voters will resoundingly anoint Trump as the Republican candidate in 2024. Maybe Trump will even make a triumphant return to the White House.

But what is possible need not be likely. And the odds that Americans will grow bored with the ever more histrionic antics of the sore loser they just kicked out of office are pretty good.

Of course, there is a whole world of possibility between the two extremes of shadow prez and just plain pale shadow. But on balance, the chances tilt much more toward the latter. In the New York Times, Steve Inskeep writes that history may ultimately view Trump as a nothing more than a footnote to Obama, which would be fitting for a human ball of envy and rage whose entire presidential life, beginning with the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, seems to have been nothing more than an attempt to spite the man from Honolulu.

DONALD WHO?

Already we see it happening. Once the threat abated that Trump might succeed with his attempted coup—that fraught period of about 20 days between the election and the GSA’s ascertainment of Biden’s victory—there has been an almost palpable sense that the bulk of the nation has moved on. Even now, coverage of his futile but continuing attempts to overturn the election—Rudy’s hair dye, Drunk Girl’s testimony before the Michigan legislature, even Trump’s outrageous call to pressure Georgia Governor Brian Kemp—has felt like a sideshow at best. The country is more interested in Biden’s plan to fight the coronavirus as we move into the grim winter months, more interested in the future than the past, more interested in regaining our sanity than in being subjected to Trumpian madness 24/7.

The Atlantic’s David Graham:

The past few weeks have offered a preview of what Donald Trump’s post-presidency might look like: The president fulminates at length, playing pundit, but is a practical nonfactor in policy discussions. He can still command the affection of millions—and raise millions of dollars from them—but the balance of the country has already moved on and tuned out. Trump’s ability to command the news cycle has been eclipsed by the virus he couldn’t be bothered to stop and the rival candidate he couldn’t beat.

Trump won’t go away entirely, and he certainly won’t get quiet, but fewer Americans will listen to or care about what he has to say. They’ve voted with their ballots, and now they’ll vote with their attention.

There is hard evidence that this disengagement from Trump is underway. Heather Cox Richardson notes that last week alone Congress finalized a version of the defense authorization bill that refused to reduce the number of troops in Germany and South Korea as Trump wanted, ignored his demands to punish tech companies like Twitter, and shrugged off his threat to veto the renaming of military bases currently named after Confederate generals.

HCR also notes that “Trump’s hand-picked Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel has invited about a dozen potential 2024 candidates to a meeting in January, signaling that she is not wedded to another Trump candidacy.” It’s true that McDaniel’s mere retention of the RNC chair reflects Trump’s continuing strength in controlling the party, and maybe her openness to challengers is just a ploy. But maybe not.

Trump may soon be a marginal figure in American culture: a pathetic, unhinged old man rambling around his Florida mansion in the grip of increasing cognitive decline, in between trips to the courthouse, beset with financial woes, ranting at an ever-diminishing following and leaving the rest of the country scratching its collective head at how this guy was ever president in the first place. 

So a shadow president? Whatever. A shadow has very little practical power, I’ve noticed. Trump tweeting non-stop bullshit from Mar-a-Lago while eating cheeseburgers and watching TV will not put any more kidnapped children in cages. So, as a grown-ass man, I ain’t afraid of no shadows.

The thing I am rightly afraid of—let’s call it on guard—is the extent to which we will still have to deal with Trumpism even when Trump himself has faded from the scene, and someday shuffled off this mortal coil, presumably to his Dantean reward.

In that sense, the ghost of Grover Cleveland worries me a lot less than the ghost of Joe Tailgunner Joe.

JOE WELCH GETS HIS ANSWER

In Washington Post, Beverly Gage, the aforementioned Yale history professor, compares Trumpism to McCarthyism:

Though we now think of McCarthy as one of the most hated men in American politics, even in 1954 he retained a passionate base of support, with about a third of the public backing his anti-communist campaign.

Once the Senate voted against him, the tale of how he had been victimized by a corrupt and self-interested Washington establishment helped fuel the far right’s grievance politics—and spark what would become the modern conservative movement. Far from bringing an end to McCarthyism, the 1954 Senate vote mainly pushed it out of Washington, and a new generation of right-wing activists took up his cause.

Gage calls this a “counternarrative that began to build among McCarthy’s grass-roots supporters during those years, in which the sheer volume of criticism aimed at the senator became proof that he was right all along: that the country was, indeed, run by a menacing but elusive liberal-communist conspiracy aimed at taking down right-thinking, God-fearing Americans…. (T)his tale—of a courageous warrior taken down by illegitimate foes—helped fuel a wave of institution-building on the right.”

Sound familiar?

And the connection is not merely a matter of resemblance but of direct lineage:

As recently as 2003, Ann Coulter published a book called Treason, arguing that McCarthy was right and his critics were not only wrong but, as the title suggests, traitorous. Trump himself was schooled at the knee of Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s infamous committee counsel, who long insisted that his good friend Joe had been the victim of an outrageous elite conspiracy.

McCarthy-like, Trump will soon depart office howling to his fans about conspiracies and an election that was stolen from him (read: them), “encouraging his base to see themselves as noble warriors against an illegitimate political order.” And in that effort, Gage notes, Don has an advantage that Joe never did, as he “continue(s) to sell the tale of his martyrdom through Twitter and cable news and talk radio and conspiracy sites—forms of direct public communication that McCarthy would have envied.” Even when Trump is gone there will remain “this vast swath of citizens who love and admire him will still be here, better organized than they were four years ago, now with a martyr’s tale for inspiration.”

While the Trump presidency will soon be over, the history of Trumpism is just beginning.

The McCarthy analogy is apt, but not the only one. The New Yorker’s Steve Coll compares Trump to George Wallace, the racist former Alabama governor and champion of segregation who won five states and 14 per cent of the national popular vote as an independent candidate in 1968.

By the time of Wallace’s death, in 1998, his influence over the electorate and the two major parties had dissipated to the vanishing point. Yet, as Dan T. Carter, Wallace’s authoritative biographer, writes, this was partly because, as Nixon and successive Republicans co-opted and mainstreamed aspects of Wallace’s strategy, “The politics of rage that George Wallace made his own had moved from the fringes of our society to center stage.” Carter concluded that Wallace “was the most influential loser in twentieth-century American politics.”

In Wallace’s time, it was common to dismiss his candidacy for the Presidency as a last gasp from the dying Jim Crow South. We can now see it as a warning flare—and as a reminder that it was not only Donald Trump who conceived of Trumpism.

This assessment helps us understand that, contrary to the self-comforting myths of Never Trump Republicans (sympathetic and grateful to them though I am), the rise of Trump was not a hostile takeover of the GOP, only the logical conclusion of where the party had long been heading. There really is no such thing as Trumpism: only a new incarnation of McCarthyism, which itself is only another manifestation of the very heart of right wing reactionaryism in toto.

Trump did not invent the Know Nothing, anti-Reason, paranoid reactionaryism that now bears his name any more than McCarthy did—far from it. Trump was just a con man who fit perfectly into an existing mold, an empty vessel for his apostles’ dark urges. So even if and when the man himself fades into irrelevance, Trumpism by any name will remain alive and well, merely the latest manifestation of a sickness as old as this nation, as old as humanity: the Erich Fromm-style appeal of authoritarianism, and the innate human susceptibility to the grift.

And that is what we have to worry about.

QUEEN’S GAMBIT

Whether Trump is the nominee or not, the 2024 election promises to be just as ugly as this past one.

Imagine four years from now, when even in the best case scenario, we will still be recovering from the ravages of COVID and its attendant economic destruction—ills that the GOP foisted on us with its monstrous incompetence and malevolence. With an infuriating level of obstructionism and hypocrisy, the Republicans will have spent all four of those years hammering the Biden administration mercilessly, blithely ignoring their own responsibility for the mess they bequeathed to it. Millions of Americans will buy that con. Millions did even last month at the polls, and continue to do so even now, while we are still in the middle of their horrific mismanagement.

It’s easy to picture a Republican demagogue, whether Trump or some even craftier successor, ginning up that juvenile public outrage and riding it to victory. In that case, I will publish a post called “The Ghost of Jimmy Carter.”

Speaking to the Washington Times, a Florida-based Trump supporter and GOP consultant named Brett Doster—who claims “Trump would destroy anyone in a GOP nomination contest in ‘24”—offered a vision of how that might work:

If Biden is tested by Russia and China, and if the economy free-falls, Trump can take the nomination without ever leaving Mar-a-Lago, and he’ll be invited back to Washington—not for the Oval Office but for a throne.”

He didn’t mean it in a cautionary way either; more of an optimistic, even prematurely jubilant one. To say nothing of Republicans’ general comfort level with autocracy.

For his part, Biden seems stunningly serene and self-assured, no doubt based on his long service in the Senate and confidence he can get things done. I hope he’s right.

But imagine if Biden—who will be 82 in 2024—retires after one term and hands the torch off to Kamala. Many of us would be delighted with that, and welcome the changing to the guard, even as we applaud Joe for the public service he has already done. (For my money he has already secured his place in history just by beating Trump.)

But can you imagine the obstacles of racism and misogyny Kamala will be up against, atop the usual vitriol aimed at a white or male (or white male) Democrat? Indeed, that venom is already in play even now.

And that is the more civilized scenario. Trump’s “shadow presidency” could easily turn into a violent insurgency, as we have already seen in various acts over the past four years, from the murder of Heather Heyer to the attempted pipe bombing by Cesar Sayoc, the killings in Kenosha, the foiled kidnapping and murder of Gretchen Whitmer, the death threats against Georgia election officials, and most recently, the mob threatening Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in her own home.

We might count ourselves lucky if Mitch McConnell’s obstructionism is all we have to deal with, as it’s clear that it would not take much to nudge MAGA Nation into a full-blown intifada.

I am not trying to be a buzzkill here, nor Schleprock, nor Eeyore, nor Debbie Downer, nor any other wet blanket of your choice. I am merely laying out the battlespace we’re facing and must prepare for.

The mad king is dead, or soon will be. But his loathsome movement lives on, and must be reckoned with.

*********

Photo: Grover Cleveland, 22^nd and 24^th President of the United States, 1885-89 and 1893-97

How many times have you been at a party and a fistfight has erupted over what’s Brecht’s best play? We’ve all been there, right? If I had a dime for every time some drunk kept shouting about “Mother Courage and Her Children,” while another loudmouth stinking of White Claws insisted on the merits of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” and of course the dilettantes wouldn’t shut up about “The Threepenny Opera” or “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny”….

But I’m gonna stump here for 1941’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” an allegory about Hitler’s rise, set in Roaring Twenties gangland Chicago. (I have it this week in my German Expressionist Theater fantasy league.)

At the end of the play, after the Hitler figure has been defeated, Brecht issues this ominous warning for the audience to curb its enthusiasm:

Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the beast that bore him is in heat again.

Res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for true dat.

The defeat of Donald Trump is cause for rejoicing, no doubt about it. The rise of Joe Biden marks a return to sane, rational governance by competent grownups—a return to governance full stop, for that matter. Even those who take issue with Biden, whether progressives down on him from the left or conservatives down on him from the right, will cop to a sigh of relief at the prospect of not being hammered night and day by insane, self-destructive, criminal edicts from our mad king…..of not waking up every day to wonder what fresh hell.

But of course, as Bertolt warns us, grave perils remain: chief among them, the fact that the conditions that gave rise to Trump are still dangerously in play. (74 million votes for him, even after observing his horrors for the past four years, tell us so.) It would be incredibly reckless to think our problems are solved, and—in addition to the massive repairs we must now undertake—that we need not be on guard for the return of the insidious foe we just vanquished.

And that foe is not just one morbidly obese, preternaturally orange-hued man.

As we have previously noted, Trump’s defeat is far from the end of Trumpism or the problems that beset us. The idea that Joe Biden will merely take us back to the good ol’ days, as if this was all just a bad dream, is both unrealistic and unwelcome, and neither possible nor desirable.

BETTER BUILD BACK BETTER

Early in his primary run, speaking to a group of wealthy donors at Manhattan’s tony Carlyle Hotel, Biden promised a return to normalcy—feeding the seductive notion that, if elected, he would return things to the way they were before. “Nothing would fundamentally change,” he told the crowd.

Outraged progressives seized on this speech as evidence that Biden was nothing but a classic neoliberal apparatchik and no real alternative to Trump. That image haunted him for much of the primary campaign, even if it reassured or even won over some “moderate” Republicans unhappy with Trump and willing to abandon him. At least that was so until the center-left and hard-left branches of the Democratic Party wisely made peace in the interest of defeating the common enemy.

Three things about that mischaracterization of Uncle Joe:

First, notwithstanding the temper tantrums of the left’s more adolescent members, even a classic neoliberal apparatchik who represented the pre-2016 order would have been preferable to Trump. Would it have been the best alternative? Of course not. But as Evan Osnos wrote in The New Yorker, describing the resistance from some progressives, “It was as if a waiter had returned from the kitchen with news that the specials were gone, and all that was left was oatmeal. (Of course, they always had the option of more rat poison.”)

Second and more crucially, Biden actually took that criticism to heart in building his winning coalition. Despite the grumblings of the Bernie bros, the truth is that Biden— experienced pol that he is, and capable of reading the room—genuinely adapted, moving to much more progressive policy positions almost across the board. That was an impressive evolution, especially since in so doing he had to thread a very thin needle. He successfully moved left to woo progressives while maintaining his credibility as a lifelong moderate, even as the GOP was trying—and failing to paint him—as a rabid Marxist (the loss of south Florida notwithstanding).

Third and most importantly, Biden’s willingness to shift left represented not merely a practical—some might say cynical—strategy, but a substantive recognition that things have to change and cannot in fact go back to the way they were. Biden and his team understood that it was that blinkered pre-2016 order that allowed Trump to rise in the first place. A mere return to it would only take us back to the toxic conditions that conditions that fed that catastrophe.

Don’t get me wrong. The failures of the Democratic Party in the post-Watergate era did not singlehandedly create this venal, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, kleptocratic con man-cum-demagogue. Per Richard Hofstadter, that strain goes back to the very beginning of our country, and has always been stronger than we wanted to believe, even when it has been subterranean. But Democratic failures did offer it fertile ground to grow, and those failures must be addressed if we want to avoid this kind of nightmare in the future.

Now comes the time when we hold Joe’s feet to the fire and ensure that he follows through.

Early signs are encouraging. For example, Biden has promised to claw back the Robin Hood-in-reverse 2017 tax cuts for the rich by raising rates on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, those making over $400,000 a year—a direct rejection of the appeal he made to those wealthy donors in June 2019. I suppose in this case, the charge of bait-and-switch (less a charge than a plaudit, from the perspective of the progressive wing) hinges on the definition of the word ”fundamentally.” Biden is not proposing a proletariat revolution—only a return to a fair distribution of the tax burden, akin to what we once had, and which helps ensure a stable, equitable society. Which is arguably both a return to sanity and fairness, and start toward something even better.

He is also moving quickly and aggressively regarding the Paris Climate Treaty, the JCPOA, and the border, along with much-needed moves on the coronavirus, on other foreign policy and economic matters, and just generally beginning to take charge and act like the President. Which is a good thing, as the guy currently in the job—even as he is frenetically trying to hold onto it—seems wildly uninterested in actually doing it, apart from lining his pockets and entrenching his loyalists on his way out the door.

WOULDA COULDA SHOULDA

There are two other—related—ways in which there can be no return to “normalcy.”

The first is that Trump and the Republican Party have done so much damage that there is no more normalcy left to return to. More precisely, we might say that the normalcy to which we were accustomed is dead and gone.

As Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic:

Since 2016, America’s international reputation has been transformed. No longer the world’s most admired democracy, our political system is more often perceived as uniquely dysfunctional, and our leaders as notably dangerous. Poll after poll shows that respect for America is not just plummeting, but also turning into something very different. Some 70 percent of South Koreans and more than 60 percent of Japanese—two nations whose friendship America needs in order to push back against Chinese influence in Asia—view the US as a “major threat.” In Germany, our key ally in Europe, far more people fear Trump than fear Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

That state of affairs cannot be fixed with a mere reset. It will require careful rebuilding that takes into account the world’s new awareness of the fundamental weaknesses and cancers in the American experiment. (It ought to go without saying that atop the permanent damage that Trump and the GOP have done, COVID-19 has of course irrevocably remade our world.)

The second barrier to “normalcy,” and an even more worrying one, is that it’s clear that the GOP has no intention of abandoning its scorched earth methodology.

We see that already in these wanting days of this lame duck administration, per the WaPo’s Dana Milbank on what Trump and his allies are doing in the final weeks before their eviction:

He’s trying to sow doubts about the integrity of the election he lost by 6.3 million votes. On Sunday, Trump’s madness extended to suggesting his own FBI and Justice Department may have conspired to commit election fraud against him.

Trump’s treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, is shutting down emergency Federal Reserve lending programs that the Fed says “serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy.”

In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, after busting up a covid-relief deal between the White House and Democrats, is now entering his seventh month of blocking pandemic relief, exposing millions to potential hunger and eviction. The absence of covid relief could in turn lead to a government shutdown in December—another potential shock to the economy—as Trump threatens to shoot down the annual defense bill for the first time in 60 years so that military bases will continue to honor Confederate generals.

And Trump just moved to strip job protections from hundreds of White House budget analysts and other experts, The Post’s Lisa Rein reports, part of an effort to make it easier to fire tens of thousands of civil servants.

And it will only continue.

Republicans are congenitally predisposed to be bombthrowing outsiders who can wreak untold havoc on a Democratic administration even from the peanut gallery—perhaps especially from there, as they will be relieved of the bother of having to actually make policy and govern (which, by contrast, they suck at). 

The GOP will also still wield significant obstructionist leverage if it manages to maintain control of the Senate, which remains likely despite Trump’s best efforts to ruin the Georgia runoffs for his team. Indeed, not holding the presidency but maintaining control of the upper chamber of Congress, as well as a majority of governorships and state legislatures, not to mention the federal judiciary, gives the Republican Party an almost ideal situation in terms of ability to set policy without being held accountable by the average American, who looks mostly to the White House. Which the GOP intends to screw with a vengeance.

Garden variety, pre-2016-style talk of Biden’s Cabinet picks, for example, strikes me as woefully naïve. From the Democratic point of view, the idea seems to be that nominating all these massively qualified centrists will make it hard for McConnell & Co. to oppose them.

Pull the other one, as they say in Britain. Who here believes that the GOP will not engage in a Merrick Garland-style blanket refusal to confirm any of Biden’s nominees, and for no good reason at all?

Talk of the Senate rejecting Neera Tanden to head the OMB because of her harsh tweets about Trump—oh, the irony!—or Sally Yates because of her criticism of the White House over Russiagate miss the point. The GOP is going to find a reason to object to every Biden nominee. The new President may have no choice but to use acting Cabinet officials, just as Trump did. (And he controlled the Senate!) At which point the GOP will howl about the travesty of such action.

This is what we have come to in American politics.

PRINCIPLES SHMINCIPLES

We already see this dynamic unfolding with the laughable nature of the initial Republican complaints. Oh, poor babies; is Neera Tanden too partisan for you? Unlike Mick Mulvaney, or John Ratcliffe, or Mike Flynn, or Ryan Zinke, or Bill Barr? Suddenly Republicans are all for consensus? Give me a break. (This after they made a real life Internet troll like Richard Grenell DNI…..or a real life Internet troll like Donald Trump POTUS?)

We saw Marco Rubio sneer at the “Ivy League” credentials of Biden’s picks, an attack right out of the faux populist Trumpian playbook. (You remember Rubio, right? “L’il Marco,” as Trump once dubbed him, before the Senator decided to surrender his balls.) After four years of having woefully unqualified Cabinet officers, the American people are desperate for actual leadership, and yet the GOP snickers at the idea of competence? We finally found proper crewmen to take over the cockpit of our plummeting aircraft, and Republicans continue to deride how elitist it is to want a pilot to fly the plane?

Coming from an alleged moderate like Rubio, one who is still mentioned as a potential leader of the party going forward, it’s an especially telling sign of how deeply Trumpism has infected the GOP and how hard it will be to eradicate.

But it’s no coincidence that Neera Tanden has been the chief target of the GOP’s assault, and it’s not because of her acid wit. It is, however, connected to his gutting of civil service protections and the installation of stay-behind Trump loyalists charged with gumming up the works for the Biden team.

As Heather Cox Richardson explains, the OMB that Tanden would head is an especially key agency in Trump’s plan:

Real Clear Politics obtained a memo saying that the Office of Management and Budget, which under Trump has been a vehicle for implementing the president’s plans contrary to law—it was the OMB that held up appropriated money to Ukraine in 2019, for example—is planning to put 88 percent of its employees into this new category.

In military operations, a retreating army will sometimes leave commandos behind as the advancing enemy advances, operatives who let themselves be “rolled over” so as to pop up and attack the enemy from the rear when that enemy has otherwise relaxed, believing victory has been won. That will be the role of these Trump-appointed bureaucrats embedded in the OMB and other civil service branches.

Until Biden’s infantry roots them out.

In terms of this sabotage as Trump leaves office, in some ways, it’s just fair gamesmanship. If a progressive administration were giving way to a reactionary one, I’d be all in favor of front-loading the system to keep our policies as strong as possible and hamper the new regime’s ability to change them. But in this case, in the context of Trump’s other anti-democratic, counter-majoritarian efforts to undermine the integrity of the election, delegitimize the new administration, and cripple it going forward, these efforts feel more insidious, and connected to his general refusal to accept peaceful transfer of power.

And even if they weren’t, at their root of course, the policies the GOP is trying to entrench and defend are simply odious in their substance. So I suspect history will not look kindly on Trump’s James Buchanan impression.

LIBERATE AMERICA

And there will be more demagoguery and shamelessness to come.

During Trump’s reign the GOP already blithely abandoned its alleged “fiscal conservatism” and ran up the federal deficit to the tune of almost 4 trillion of dollars, beginning with the aforementioned 2017 tax cut, even before the COVID stimulus packages. (Much as it did with the Bush tax cuts and the treasury-busting cost of the Iraq war. I see a pattern.) Already that hypocrisy is redoubling as—surprise!—Republicans re-discover their selective loathing for deficits now that Biden is about to take charge, even as the country is desperate for further pandemic relief.

What else? Well, half of all Republicans believe the presidential election was stolen (but not any other races). Many of those same folks even believe, in jawdropping defiance of all the evidence, that Trump won in an landslide. How can there be “normalcy” when tens of millions of Americans have become convinced that the Biden presidency is illegitimate, when the peaceful transfer of power itself—the very bedrock of democracy—has been despoiled? That is a recipe not just for gridlock for the next four years, but for a violent right wing insurgency—which the GOP will condone and even applaud and openly abet. We all knew this was coming because we watched Trump spend nine months ginning it up, but it’s still terrifying in its implications.

The willingness of tens of millions of people first to vote for Trump even after four years of observing his, ahem, vision for this country, and now to go along with his would-be coup d’etat, suggests that some 40% of Americans are basically cool with fascism. The cowardice of the GOP officialdom (they’re not worthy of the term “leadership”) in enabling him goes without saying.

As The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last writes, “We now live in a country where a coup is possible.”

That same segment of the American population also believes COVID is a hoax, and so is climate change. What kind of monsters are the people chanting “Fire Fauci!”, the violence-threatening “Liberate” cabal in Michigan, and others who traffic in flat earth anti-scientific denialism in the midst of a pandemic, putting us all at further risk? How will history view the nation in which they arose?

It goes on.

We are told that Trump—a TV showman at heart—is planning to announce his 2024 campaign during Biden’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 2021. A class act to the end, ol’ Donald. That this run is mainly a slush fund-filling scam, unfettered by pesky campaign finance laws, is not the point, except to make it even worse.

Meanwhile, as local officials in Georgia are subjected to death threats from MAGA Nation, an outraged state election official, Gabriel Sterling—a Republican no less—pleaded with Trump not to foment violence. Trump replied by doubling down on his incendiary claims, tweeting, “Rigged Election. Show signatures and envelopes. Expose the massive voter fraud in Georgia. What is Secretary of State and @BrianKempGA afraid of. They know what we’ll find!!!

Trump’s not alone in fueling violence, of course. Steve Bannon says Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Chris Wray should be beheaded, and Trump lawyer Joe DiGenova says former election security boss Chris Krebs should be shot. Both men, under intense pressure, later backpedaled, claiming they were just kidding. (Because, hey—funny, right?) But even if those were truly just “jokes,” do you think they’re taken that way by the kind of people who conspired to kidnap and murder Gretchen Whitmer?

But, hey, what matters conspiracy to commit murder to a man with the pardon power? With unassailable logic, NYU law professor and former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman, one of Robert Mueller’s chief lieutenants during the Russiagate probe, argues that Trump will definitely pre-emptively pardon his children and try to pardon himself. Even if the Supreme Court slaps down this patently illogical (and probably unconstitutional) ploy, what does Don have to lose? Worst case, he winds up exactly where he is now. Best case, his 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices he handpicked, gives him its blessing and he skates away like Brian Boitano.

And speaking of pardons, this week we learned that the DOJ is investigating the possibility that Donald Trump has been accepting bribes in exchange for pardons. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t; we’ll see. But one argument you’re never going to hear—not even from his defenders—is that it’s not possible because he would never do such a thing.

I could go on, but I see your eyelids drooping. Because all of this hellscape is of a piece with everything we’ve seen for the past four years: with the normalization of white supremacy, of hate speech, of kleptocracy on an unprecedented level, of heretofore unthinkable behavior by our elected officials, of the destruction of truth itself.

This is the USA in which we now live. We couldn’t go back to pre-2016 America even if we wanted to.

WE’RE ALL NORMAL AND WE WANT OUR FREEDOM

In fact, it’s the very façade of a return to normalcy that really worries me. The GOP wants to go back to its version of politics-as-usual, too., while retaining all the benefits it accrued under Trump. It wants us to forget what it did during the last four years and act like it’s a reasonable political party again and treat it as such, including blather about civility and reaching across the aisle and compromise. As if it engaged in any of that.

Fuck you, GOP. We’re never gonna let you forget what you did, what you condoned, what you applauded, what you abetted.

As I’ve noted many times (because it continues to be the most accurate assessment out there), Noam Chomsky has said that the contemporary GOP has ceased to be a political party at all and become a radical insurgency. He has also called it the most dangerous organization on Earth, which in light of the urgency of the climate crisis, the perennial danger of nuclear war (which it has always been very keen on), and now the ongoing evisceration of American democracy, might not be hyperbole.

In The Atlantic, the intrepid science journalist Ed Yong writes:

The US cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar.

Yong is writing specifically of the coronavirus and public health, but his prescription holds true for American problems across the board.

The only good thing that could ever be said about the Trump presidency is that it has overturned the rock and let us see the putrid slime underneath. We can no longer live in blissful ignorance of the ills that beset us as nation, or pretend that they are not there—and that is a blessing, painful though it’s been.

The time to reckon with it is now at hand.

**********

Photo by Ferne Pearlstein. Pro-Trump conspiracy-mongering graffiti on Canal Street, Lower Manhattan, November 2020.

Like many Americans—maybe a majority—Thanksgiving looms large in my life.

Ten days before Thanksgiving 1965, when I was two, my father was wounded in Vietnam. He was medevacked to the US and we spent the holiday with him in a hospital in Valley Forge, PA while he was recovering from his gunshot wounds.

Growing up as an Army brat, we ate a lot of Thanksgiving meals in the mess hall—my father in his dress blues—as it’s a tradition for officers to be with their young soldiers, many of whom are far away from home for the first time. We ate a few Thanksgiving dinners at Howard Johnson’s, too, like when my mom and I were alone in Ohio when my dad went back to Vietnam for his second tour.

In the late ‘80s, when I was an Army officer myself, stationed in what was then West Germany, my buddies and I endeavored to get four day passes and spend every Thanksgiving in a debauched haze in occupied Berlin, which was the greatest city in the world at the time. (Stories NSFW.)

I spent one Thanksgiving in Ranger School, the Army commando course where the students are denied food and sleep in order to create stress (averaging one meal and two hours of sleep a day for ten weeks). It just so happened that for my class, eight weeks in, Thanksgiving fell on an six hour-break after we finished the course’s Florida phase and before we flew to the high desert of Utah. After scrubbing our Zodiac boats clean, we got to eat in an actual mess hall, where the instructors screamed at us to shovel our food down our gullets and into our shrunken stomachs in the space of about thirty seconds. Exiting the mess hall, we all threw up in the parking area outside. (It could have been worse; the classes who were still training ate MREs in the swamps, if they were allowed to eat at all.)

In 1995, when I was a grad student, I went to Vietnam to film my dad and some other veterans returning to the battlefield on the 30^th anniversary of that firefight. On the way back home, I spent Thanksgiving at the notorious Caravelle Hotel on (what used to be) Tu Do Street in (what used to be) Saigon. As I was alone, I had dinner with a group of gregarious American businessmen who had, in those earliest days after Hanoi had opened up Western investment, come to negotiate the rights to build a snowboard factory in the Vietnamese hinterlands and brought a turkey with them for the Caravelle’s French-trained Vietnamese chef to cook.

When my wife Ferne and I lived in London in the ‘00s, we had two successive Thanksgivings with our English friends Peter and Helene, the location manager for the movie we were making there. Years before, they had gotten in the habit of having an elaborate Thanksgiving dinner for some other American friends, and continued to do so even after they fell out with them. The next year, when we were back in New York, Helene and Peter came to visit us here, and we had a memorable Thanksgiving with them, and our friends Sila and Jeff, at Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse, the kind of place where no one would go for Thanksgiving except us and a goombah-looking dude right out of Goodfellas who figured it was a safe place to bring his Chinese mistress and definitely did not want to be photographed and told us so, as we socked away several of Sammy’s trademark bottles of Absolut frozen in blocks of ice, and danced drunkenly to Dani Luv, on the Casio keyboard, as he has done for 22 years.

In 2009, after Ferne and I had been struggling to have a baby for several years, we decamped to the wintry Jersey shore to spend a cold and solitary Thanksgiving weekend after what felt like our last hope had failed. That Thanksgiving was grim, a low point in that grueling experience, but it occupies an important place in our memories. The next year, blessedly, Ferne was seven months pregnant and the following February our daughter was born.

And of course, like most people, I’ve spent many very ordinary but very lovely Thanksgivings with family or friends. Normally my sister-in-law Cindy hosts a big party, and my mother-in-law makes her famous clam dip, and the woes of the Eagles (even when they’re winning) are an omnipresent topic of discussion. For a number of years, before my mother died, Ferne and I ate two Thanksgiving dinners in the same day, first with my family at noon and then with hers in the late afternoon. Ferne used to say that it wasn’t as daunting as it sounds, because we paced ourselves at meal #1 and were already too sated to overeat at #2. Kinda, but let me tell you, if you eat two Thanksgiving meals in the same day, I don’t care how you spin it, you’ll be stuffed.

Lately we’ve taken to spending Thanksgiving weekends with our friends Amy and Joe and Tom and Jess and Anne down in Atlantic City, where Tom makes a mean “leftover pie” and Amy makes a mean paloma.

And I’ve always wanted to have spaghetti carbonara for Thanksgiving, like Calvin Trillin.

But this Thanksgiving promises to be unlike any other. We are facing a long dark winter, with a quarter of a million of our fellow Americans already dead from the novel coronavirus and the numbers climbing at an astronomical rate, and a criminal lame duck presidency committing what James Fallows argues is negligent homicide—and others like Greg Gonsalves of the Yale School of Public Health have called a crime against humanity—deliberately ignoring the pandemic, and actively shutting out the incoming administration from crucial steps it needs to take to save lives going forward, with the explicit intention of making the death toll worse and the spread more extreme and difficult to control.

This past Monday, very belatedly, the Trump administration finally bowed to reality—slightly; more of a head nod, really—and began cooperating with the transition process. The further damage caused by that delay, measurable in human lives as well as intangibles like the risk to US security and public faith in the integrity of our elections, is appalling, but also par for the course with these cretins.

We are talking about an administration that utterly failed to address the worst public health crisis in a century, that stubbornly refused to take the steps that would arrest it and instead promoted behavior that worsened it, and most egregious of all, that consciously pursued policies that let it run rampant in communities it wanted to decimate. Trump’s (mis)handling of the coronavirus promises to be remembered as one of the most outrageously criminal, indefensible episodes in the lifespan of this country. Even now, when new management has arrived to do the right thing, this White House has petulantly continued its lethal campaign.

History’s judgment will be withering.

So what am I thankful for?

I’m thankful that our country will soon be under adult supervision for the first time in four years. I’m thankful that we got our shit together enough to eject this cretinous motherfucker from office, even though I’m gobsmacked that more than 74 million Americans voted for him—six million less than voted for Joe and Kamala, but almost 11 million more than in 2016. I’m thankful for the faithful public servants of both parties who have done their duty in upholding democracy. (But let’s pretend it’s been an equal effort by both teams. To that end, I’m especially thankful for the tiny minority of Republicans who have put country above party in defiance of their monstrous leader.) I’m thankful for the first responders, front line health care professionals, and essential workers who have been the speartip of fighting the virus, and for all Americans who have done everything they can to help get us through this. And amid all that, I’m thankful that we as a nation have, at long last, had a centuries-overdue wake up call—tragic as it was—and began to grapple more seriously with the cancer of racism that has afflicted us from our founding.

The election was a decisive moment regarding what kind of country we want to be. It was as terrifying to see how many Americans are all in with neo-fascism, as it was to see how many more stood up and rejected it. This winter promises to test our mettle yet again, in a different and more protracted way.

But through it all and even now, I have faith in our nation. Let’s act in a way that will make future generations look back with admiration.

And with thanks.

*********

Illustration: National Geographic, off Norman Rockwell.

Let’s start with the obvious.

In the twenty days since the presidential election, Donald Trump has engaged in a campaign unprecedented in American history to try to nullify the results of the vote, discard the will of the people, and cling to power in a banana republic-style self-coup. In the process, he is doing horrific and perhaps irreparable damage to one of the most fundamental tenets of our representative democracy, the peaceful transition of power.

in a reign rife with strong contenders, history may well remember this as the worst of Trump’s many many sins. (Close seconds and dishonorable mention: playing violin while a quarter of a million Americans died, kidnapping and caging innocent children, and destroying the whole concept of Truth.)

Living through this latest and (we hope) final episode has been headspinning, and a bit like the Red Mirage/Blue Shift on Election Night. We all knew it was coming, it had been written about ad nauseam in advance…..and yet when it really happened, it was still shocking and terrifying, as if it took us completely by surprise. I myself made a cottage industry of predicting this precise chain of events for two and a half years, and I’m far from alone. Yet it’s still astonishing to be in the midst of it. (And we’re not out of the woods yet.)

The smart money says that the coup will likewise fail. Trump has exhausted his flimsy legal challenges; his efforts to get key state legislatures to throw out the popular vote and appoint Trump electors in defiance of the law seems to have sputtered out; and once the states certify their electors (in the eight days between now and December 1) and the Electoral College meets (thirteen days after that) his chances of getting the race thrown into the House look infinitesimal. Short of a Reichstag fire-cum-Wag the Dog moment that prompts the imposition of martial law, it’s hard to see how Trump can hang on, and even that farfetched scenario would likely lead to an uprising in the streets that might rightly drive him out.

This is not to minimize the damage he can and will do—and already is doing—on the way out. But make no mistake, out he will go. How he goes is a matter for another day. Likely he will never concede, only find some semi-face-saving excuse to slink off to Mar-a-Lago fuming that he wuz robbed and plotting his revenge (and a way to monetize it). That is a nightmare we shall have to deal with shortly. Stay tuned. 

But Trump’s mere attempt to overturn the election still leaves us with a bone-chilling realization about just how fragile our democracy really is. Having watched the leadership of the Republican Party willingly line up behind Donald and support his efforts, to say nothing of the even more ferociously loyal and rabid right wing rank-and-file, we now know this:

Trump’s self-coup will not fail because of principle on the part of the GOP, only because of practical matters that hindered it. Under circumstances more favorable to them, forty percent of our fellow Americans, led by an enthusiastic Republican Party, would gladly dispense with every once-cherished principle of American democracy, openly steal an election, and lead us into brutal autocracy.   

SOMETIMES IT SNOWS IN NOVEMBER

In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser notes, “There is simply no precedent for a President doing anything like what Trump is doing right now”—what she calls “a systemic attack on the integrity of the election itself.”

That should surprise no one who has observed Donald Trump’s career for more than fifteen minutes. But what is surprising, and much more alarming, is the extent to which the GOP has abetted him, as “Trump has, once again, made his Party’s leaders out as stooges and patsies.”

Glasser:

Look at how far Republicans have gone along with Trump’s folly after an election that was decisively won by Biden, a contest in which he beat Trump by more than five million votes and garnered three hundred and six electoral votes—exactly the electoral-college “landslide” that Trump secured in 2016. Republican excuses have grown increasingly pathetic: We’re just giving him time. We’re just letting the process play out. He’s entitled to pursue his claims in the courts.

In other words, the GOP is too cowardly to smack down even Trump’s weak and plainly illegal play, choosing instead to look the other way and wait for it to fizzle out. A real profile in courage there, guys.

But what if Trump’s play had been stronger? Would the Republican Party—the one that was too afraid to challenge a badly beaten lame duck—suddenly have developed the intestinal fortitude to attack him while he was in a position of strength? See me later if you’re interested in buying a bridge in Brooklyn.

I quoted The Bulwark’s  Jonathan V. Last on this point two weeks ago, but it bears repeating:

The only reason we believe Biden will become president is because we believe that his advantage is too big for Trump to succeed in overturning the election. We think that the rule of law will hold not because it is inviolable, or because both sides are committed to it, but because the results create too tall a burden on the would-be autocrat.

So, exactly as predicted in these pages and elsewhere, Trump’s coup failed only because Biden won so decisively. If it had been closer, if it had come down to just one swing state instead of five or six, if Trump had a real lawyer instead of Rudy Giuliani, if there had been genuine irregularities that the GOP could seize on to make its legal and public relations case, or if they had even been able to spin up fake ones, it might well have gone differently. We would be in a world of hurt.

Next time, it very well might.

STOOGES AND PATSIES AND PUNKS, OH MY

Perhaps we should not be surprised by the GOP reaction, given how supplicant it has been for the last four years. Yet its willingness to keep mum while Trump sets fire to the last and most fundamental of our democratic principles remains stunning.

The range of cowardice and venality runs from the full-throated toadyism of Matt Gaetz and Lee Zeldin to the mealy-mouthed equivocation of Moscow Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio, to the Sergeant Schultz “I see nahh-thing!” impressions of people like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. Among the worst, as usual, has been Lindsey Graham, with his outrageous pressuring of state officials. What business does a US Senator from South Carolina have calling Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to discuss the recount of a presidential election? Should the GOP hold onto the Senate, Lady G ought to be stripped of his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, not that anyone asked me.

For his part, that Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, has shown principle and backbone to shame his predecessor in that job, election theft specialist Brian Kemp, who is now governor of the Peach State.

And it gets crazier.

Last week, one of Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell, claimed that Biden owed his win to “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States.” It was a claim so batshit that even Tucker Carlson ridiculed it, describing the whole press conference as “truly bonkers.” (And got attacked by MAGA Nation for his temerity. Sorry Tuck!) And yet, as Heather Cox Richardson reports, “the official Twitter account of the Republican Party endorsed Powell’s statements.”

Bill Barr, curiously, has been very quiet. Maybe he knows a lost cause when he sees one. If so, his instinct for self-preservation has, for once, outweighed his oft-demonstrated capacity for hypocrisy. I give him no credit for integrity, however—if he has any, he would have spoken out against Trump’s actions and resigned, or better yet, never sacrificed his (already unearned) reputation as a respectable “institutionalist” and joined this criminal administration in the first place, nor done any of the horrific things he has done as a member of it.

Only a very few Republican officeholders have spoken out against Trump’s actions, including Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, and recently, retiring Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey. I’ve been very hard in these pages on Susan Collins and Ben Sasse, so credit where it’s due, they’ve at least weighed in, albeit in pretty measured tones. Joni Ernst also peeped some mild complaint. This passes for courage in the modern GOP, where obviously the bar is pretty damn low.

Not counting those out of office like George Bush or Chris Christie, the most prominent and toughest Republican voice, again, has been Mitt Romney, who tweeted:

Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on states and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.

But these folks are outliers in the contemporary Trump—er, I mean, Republican—Party, occupying a position of pariahood only one notch above that of the denizens of The Bulwark or the Lincoln Project.

Retiring Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander awoke from his slumber and spoke up, though it would have been nice if he had done that during the impeachment last February. Speaking of which, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes reminds us, during that process the GOP’s Senate majority predicated its votes to acquit on the risible premise that it ought to be left to the electorate whether to remove Trump from office. Let’s set aside the way that that excuse was a shamelessly dishonest abdication of their own responsibility as a co-equal branch and accept, for the sake of argument, the idea that it should be up to the American voters to decide Trump’s fitness or lack thereof.

Well, we decided. Now the GOP wants to disregard the will of those voters. So it should come as no surprise to learn that the Republicans’ original rationalization was nothing but a fuckin’ joke.

Strike that: less of a joke than an insult.

NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

For four years, MAGA Nation has been sneering at Democrats “You lost; get over it.” As Jeff Tiedrich notes, they are mighty quiet now. The other t-shirt popular among Moscow’s unwitting quislings (and some witting ones) reads “Fuck your feelings.” Yet now we are being asked to give Donald Trump endless amounts of “time” to come to terms with his defeat? Jesus Christ, how many more times in his miserable life will this loathsome meatsack be gifted with such unearned generosity?

In a brilliant essay for the Washington Post, Robin Givhan reminds us that “Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote but lost the electoral count to Trump in 2016, was barely given 24 hours to nurse her wounds before much of the country was tapping its toes anxious for her concession.”

So man up, you orange snowflake.

Not that I am holding my breath.

As Amy Davison Sorkin writes, also in The New Yorker, “We are at a strange point when soothing a President’s ego is seen as an acceptable reason to sow doubts about our democracy.” But it is not merely that the Republican Party is humoring him. They are waiting to see if he will gain traction, in which case they will surely throw in behind him.

The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, who grew up under authoritarianism, and lived through a coup attempt, writes that “An overwhelming majority of Republican elected officials are hedging their bets on the coup.” That hedging suggests they would readily go the other way if the wind shifted.

No aspiring dictator can commandeer enough military power to be able to dominate an entire country that refuses to recognize him. No coup plotters can close every channel of communication and stop all movement. No one usurping power can force people to forget that different norms and expectations existed as recently as yesterday. What successful coup plotters do is con enough people into thinking that they have already taken power.

If Republicans had a better hand, they might not be merely gazing at their shoes, trying not to offend Trump, and waiting him out. They might be in full-throated, Florida-in-2000 attack mode, trying to overturn this election.

Do you doubt it for a New York minute?

If the GOP’s plan has been to cravenly keep quiet and try to run out the clock, their strategy is being sorely tested by Trump’s willingness to take this to one extreme after another as each of his options is slowly but inexorably shut off. That process reached a new low last week when Trump invited the senior-most Republican leaders of the Michigan state legislature to the White House in order to pressure them not to certify the vote for Biden. (This after the whipsaw debacle involving the Wayne County Board of Canvassers earlier in the week.)

When considering just how jaded we’ve become under Trump, and what’s the most outrageous thing that he could do while we just shrug, this is a strong candidate. That his ploy—like his broader scheme—seems to have failed is not the point; the point is that he tried it at all, and it was not a national scandal.

In denying Biden’s win, and stalling the transition with baseless lawsuits and futile recounts, the laughably dishonest mantra of Trump’s surrogates is to “let the process play out.” (News flash: it has.) The decision point they repeatedly cite for when they will give up the fight is when the states certify their votes.

That moment will soon be at hand. As The New York Times reports, “six key states that Mr. Biden won—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin—have deadlines between (Nov. 20) and Dec. 1 to certify his victories.” Once that happens, watch the GOP refuse to accept the certification and gin up a new excuse to try to get the race thrown into the House. And failing that, as a last resort, perhaps some other pretext to declare the vote null and void?

(PS How can the GOP claim that it won all its other races, but not the presidential one?)

What’s that you say? We don’t know what Republicans would do if Trump did something REALLY outrageous, like invoked the Insurrection Act?

Two things about that.

First, he has ALREADY done numerous deeply outrageous things in trying to get the results of this election overturned. How much further does he have to go before Republicans poke their heads out of their hidey-holes and clear their throats in polite complaint?

Second, and more to the point, if they won’t complain about this stuff, which requires not a lot of guts, what makes you think they’ll suddenly develop a backbone when loaded weapons come into play, pointed at the heads of American protestors outside the White House? Moral courage doesn’t wait for the worst case scenario to make its voice heard; it emerges early, and vocally, if it’s really there at all.

No. What this shit show has clearly demonstrated, and what we ought never forget, is that the Republican Party has no principles whatsoever except the accumulation and maintenance of its own raw power at all costs. If given a viable opening, no matter how deceitful, it would not think twice about destroying every single democratic tenet on which this country was founded and instituting a full-blown neo-fascist autocracy in defiance of the will of the people. Indeed, for some 25 years now it has been engaged in an aggressive low-intensity guerrilla campaign to do precisely that, through disenfranchisement, court packing, and its commitment to countermajoritarian rule.

Its shameful silence and complicity while Trump tries to overturn the election is just a stark demonstration of how far Republicans would be willing to take that campaign.

SHINING PATH

In April 1992, Peru’s sitting president Alberto Fujimori gave us the term autogolpe, or “self-coup,” when, with the support of the Peruvian armed forces, he attempted to dissolve Congress, replace most of the country’s judiciary branch, and seize near-absolute power. Fujimori was forced to flee Peru, and eventually thrown in prison for crimes against humanity including murder and kidnapping, along with a raft of corruption charges, marking “the first time that an elected head of state has been extradited to his home country, tried, and convicted of human rights violations.”

So watch out, Donald, in case you’re thinking of decamping to Saudi Arabia. It might not save you.

Then again, Fujimori still had a 60% approval rating in Peru when he fled, and in 2017 a subsequent president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski  tried to pardon him before the country’s Supreme Court reversed it. Dictators the world over have long depended on that sort of bolstering from their enablers.

As Americans, we have long arrogantly imagined that we are better than anyone else on Earth when it comes to the strength of our commitment to democracy, that we are uniquely immune to the dangers (and temptations) or autocracy. Recent events have blown that hubris to smithereens.

Susan Glasser again:

(A) Monmouth poll this week found that seventy-seven per cent of Republicans now believe the election was tainted by fraud and are not certain that Biden won. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, have refused to denounce Trump’s increasingly unhinged and undemocratic actions, and, while privately conveying acknowledgements of Biden’s victory, have publicly remained silent. The GOP leadership, which has tolerated so many abuses by Trump, is now openly complicit in his worst one yet.

Gessen is even more cutting in calling out the laughable toothlessness of the pushback to Trump:

(A)s is his way, Trump is succeeding even as he fails. His project all along has been to destroy the political order as we have known it….

Whenever Trump tweets that he won the election, Twitter adds, “Multiple sources called this election differently,” as though we didn’t know enough to say instead, “Trump lost.” Trump’s bad con continues to show how easy it would be to stage a good one.

Yea verily. Trump has given the GOP the playbook. When a smarter, more disciplined wannabe despot comes along, what makes us think they won’t succeed where Donald—yet again—failed?

The day will come when succeed they will.

********

Photo: Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori in 1995

Here’s a sentence most living Americans never expected to read:

While the odds of a coup d’état in the USA seemed to have abated over the past few days, the situation remains fraught.

In fact, if you want to get technical about it (and I do), we are literally in the midst of a coup right now according to the dictionary definition of the term: A defeated president is refusing to leave office, insisting that he won an election that it is clear he lost, and refusing to hand over the reins of power to his successor as duly chosen by the people.

Folks, that is a coup. Period dot.

The fact that it now appears that Trump will not carry this much further is not the point. Inside sources report that he is morose, and knows that he lost, and intends to comply with the transition once the vote is certified by the states, even while refusing to concede out of juvenile pathology. (Big of ya, Don.)

But what he is doing now, as endless pundits have noted, is still grievously damaging to the long term bedrock of our democracy. In the short term it is putting US national security at risk by denying the incoming administration crucial access to intelligence. (Luckily, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee where she gets classified briefings, which helps somewhat.) Moreover, in case you forgot, we’re in the mist of a historic pandemic that has already killed a quarter million of our fellow Americans; the hampering of a smooth transition will kill untold more as the new administration is shut out of the early planning stages of the vaccine rollout, among other seminal tasks.

Trump’s reasons for resisting have been well established: because he’s a petty little child, because he craves the adoration of his base the way a crack addict craves the rock, because he hopes to position himself for his post-presidency media career and/or as a Republican kingmaker, or—Grover Cleveland like—for another run in 2024. (As if this behavior will help. Then again, in our dystopia, it might.)

Above all, he is doing it because as long as he disputes the results, he can squeeze filthy lucre out of his idiot supporters, lucre which is very likely going directly into his pockets. The contributions, ostensibly for the legal fight to question the election, are allowed by law to go toward the RNC and to Trump’s new PAC, unironically known as “Save America,” a scheme which the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank flatout called a “slush fund” for Trump’s personal use.

Reuters reports:

A donor would have to give more than $8000 before any money goes to the “recount account” established to finance election challenges, including recounts and lawsuits over alleged improprieties, the fundraising disclosures show. The emailed solicitations send supporters to an “Official Election Defense Fund” website that asks them to sign up for recurring donations to “protect the results and keep fighting even after Election Day.” The fine print makes clear most of the money will go to other priorities.

“Other priorities” indeed. Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, told Milbank, “It’s a straight-up bait and switch….There is no limit to how much Donald Trump can pay himself or any member of his family under Save America.”

For with Trump, even more so than the rest of humanity, the best investigative technique is always to follow the money: cui bono indeed.

And they are suckers to the end, MAGA Nation.

But I don’t really give a shit why Trump continues to deny the rightful transfer of power; that he is doing it at all is the issue. Once again we see that Donald Trump does not care a whit about this country, or anyone or anything except himself and his own interests. He would happily let the US burn to the ground if he thought it would gain him a penny, or burnish his ego.

BOOTLICKERS INC.

As always, the most stomach-turning thing is that the GOP is going along with it.

Even now only four Republican Senators have bothered to congratulate Biden: Romney, Collins, Murkowski, and Sasse. Some GOP congressmen, governors, and other figures, like George and Jeb Bush, have done so, while a few others, like Pennsylvania’s Sen. Pat Toomey, have more obliquely acknowledged his win.

A handful of Republican Senators, like Lindsey Graham, have grudgingly said they see “no problem” with Biden getting intel briefings while Trump pursues recounts and lawsuits (and slanders the electoral process), a bare minimum acknowledgment of basic civics that we are supposed to praise as courage and heroism.

Two cheers, guys.

(Graham, meanwhile, has problems of his own, such as calls for him to resign the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee over his strongarming of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to conduct an improper hand recount.)

Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee for Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management, somberly informed us that if Biden did not begin to receive the PDB this week, he was going to rip off his shirt Clark Kent-style and intervene, but to my knowledge he has not done that, and is still just a mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Stormer. Lankford later backed off his boast, while claiming he did in fact intervene with the GSA, and was satisfied with its response. But CNN reports that as of this writing Biden has not yet begun receiving intel briefings.

Truly, their cowardice and venality knows no floor. Just when you think they’re reached rock bottom, they find a shovel and begin to dig.

As noted before, the GSA’s chief administrator, a Trump appointee named Emily Murphy, is a one-woman heart blockage in this process, personally preventing the transition from taking place by refusing to “ascertain” (to use the term of art) the results of the election. And here is the heart of the GOP lie in defending her actions: citing “the contested 2000 race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush as their North Star, pointing out that the GSA chief appointed by Bill Clinton waited for a resolution before passing the transition torch.”

The vast difference, of course, is that that was an election in which the result was genuinely in doubt. This is purely a case of petty—yet incredibly dangerous—partisan obstructionism that is corrosive of the entire American democratic system, in which the peaceful transfer of power—like the vote itself—is a cornerstone, in case anyone in the GOP still cares about that. (News flash: they don’t.)

Can you believe we’re even in this situation? I refer you back to mid-2016, when Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee, and Republicans assured us that all the “hysteria” over how bad he might be as president was wildly overblown. Now we are in a position where he is flatly refusing to leave office—the most dictatorial imaginable behavior, and an attack a fundamental tenet of a democracy. Yet not only do they not decry it, they cheer it on.

NERO GOT A BAD RAP, DON’T YA THINK?

The daily reports of Trump’s mood, and the horserace prognosticating about if and when he might surrender to the obvious and the inevitable, are maddening. It’s absurd that even now we’re at the whim of this petulant manchild.

The truth is: we’re not, and we ought to stop acting like Trump has any ability—short of actually mobilizing a violent insurrection—to forestall Joe Biden’s inauguration as 46th President of the United States. (Or 47th, if Pence gets to be president-for-a-day in order to pardon Trump on the morning January 20, 2021.)

All Trump can do now is trash the country on his way out. And he is most definitely doing that.

In the Guardian, Judith Butler invoked Hitler’s so-called “Nero decree.”

(T)hough Trump is not Hitler, and electoral politics is not precisely military war (not yet civil war, at any rate), there is a general logic of destruction that kicks in when the downfall of the tyrant seems nearly certain.

In March 1945, when both the allied forces and the Red Army had vanquished every Nazi defensive stronghold, Hitler resolved to destroy the nation itself, ordering a destruction of transportation and communication systems, industrial sites, and public utilities. If he was going down, so too was the nation. Hitler’s missive was called “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory” but it was remembered as the “Nero Decree,” invoking the Roman emperor who killed family and friends, punishing those perceived as disloyal, in his ruthless desire to hold onto power and punish those perceived as disloyal.

We have already seen him purge the Pentagon and Intelligence Community leadership that he sees as disloyal or inconvenient. We have seen him spitefully shut Biden out of planning he will need to handle the COVID-19 pandemic going forward. He recently asked the major oil companies to tell him which parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge they want to buy from him before he leaves office. There is even speculation that he might sell top secret information to help pay his debts, and/or simply out of sheer greed, because he can.

There is also the legitimate fear that Trump will order the destruction of crucial presidential records on his way out in order to cover his tracks and hide his crimes. This not nothing new, since as Jill Lepore notes, “Governments that commit atrocities against their own citizens regularly destroy their own archives.” That’s appalling, but did it prevent us from learning about the crimes of Nixon, the Khmer Rouge, or the apartheid regime of South Africa?

Donald Trump will try, but he will not be able to run from the judgment of history.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CAN WE BOMB IRAN NOW?

Explanations continue to emerge for Trump’s national security purge—orchestrated by a disgraced 30-year-old former college football player, we’re told—ranging from sheer vindictiveness (always a strong contender) to a desire to declassify cherrypicked intelligence to support his obsessive claim that Putin didn’t help him in 2016, to an effort to keep Biden’s eyes off intel that would incriminate Don and his family. It’s likely all of the above, but machinations ahead of a coup seem to have largely faded from consideration.

Another reason for that HR massacre, reportedly, is Trump’s mulish desire to pull all US forces out of Afghanistan before he leaves office, a prelude to a humanitarian catastrophe and returned rule of the Taliban in that sorrowful country. That move—in connection with proposed withdrawals from Iraq and Somalia—is opposed by every credible foreign policy and military expert in the national leadership, Republican ones very much included, even Mitch McConnell, in a rare break with his White House partner in crime.

Reportedly Trump has also inquired about attacking Iran before he leaves office, to punish it for resuming its nuclear weapons program, only to be dissuaded by the likes of General Mark Milley, the brand new acting SecDef Chris Miller, SecState Mike Pompeo, and snowcapped fly-breeding host Mike Pence.

How Trump squares his “America First” neo-isolationism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia with his desire to start a ginormous and wholly unnecessary war with Iran, I dunno. But when hawkish shitbags like Pence and Pompeo are the voice of reason, you know things are bad.

Of course, the irony is that Iran has only restated that nuclear weapons program—and was only able to—because in 2018 Trump capriciously pulled the US out of the painstakingly negotiated JCPOA, the world’s best hope for containing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, simply to spite Barack Obama. Much to his chagrin, Trump is now finding, as I wrote in these pages back then, that brute force is generally a pretty useless tool in the world of non-proliferation, a hard lesson learned (or not) by many a hawk since 1945.

But hey, what do I know? It’s not like I used to host a game show on NBC.

ATLAS SHRUGGED

But as volatile the foreign affairs realm is, the pandemic is where Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the peaceful transfer of power is doing the most drastic and most immediate damage.

On that front there is nary a more vile figure than Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist and archconservative fellow at the Hoover Institution, who within the White House has usurped Dr. Anthony Fauci as the most influential voice on the coronavirus. Atlas’s policy advice is arguably responsible for some of the worst aspects of the Trump administration’s sadistic response to the pandemic, but he topped himself this week when he tweeted:

The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters #StepUp

That is absolutely criminal and I do mean that literally. Fourteen individuals were just arrested for plotting to kidnap and murder Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and only weeks later this cretinous medical doctor—who already has the blood of the botched pandemic response on his hands—tweets to the people of that state encouraging insurrection?

No two ways about it: that is incitement to violence in the midst of a volatile, incendiary situation and he ought to face legal consequences for it. People lose their jobs for lapses of judgment infinitely less than this. (Stanford has already tried to distance itself from him.)

Atlas later tried to walk it back, saying he hadn’t intended to imply violence when he wrote of “rising up,” but his claim is risible and he knows it.

“I’m not very good at Twitter and I take responsibility for what I tweeted,” Atlas told Fox News. “I didn’t mean anything, I think, that people are inferring from that and I clarified it right afterwards.”

Yeah: I guess we can’t expect a published author and presidential advisor involved in public policy, with a degree from the University of Chicago and a job at Stanford, to be good with, ya know, like, words.

CHECKERS GRANDMASTER

It seems clear now that not only is Trump not playing twelve-dimensional chess like Beth Harmon, but that he has no grand plan to ensure his survival whatsoever. He is just flailing from one desperate idea to another. But it’s still horrifically damaging.

(Both on camera and in tweets he has recently let slip his recognition of Biden’s victory, only to furiously backpedal, the better to keep his grift going.)

So, Don: I don’t really care if you go away mad….long as you go.

Much as I would have liked to have seen him convicted in his impeachment trial, as the facts and justice demanded, in some ways seeing him repudiated by the voters is sweeter. Then again, if Congress had done its duty and removed him over Ukrainegate, or even earlier, based on the Mueller report, we might have been spared the disastrous COVID-19 non-response, and more than a hundred thousand Americans might still be alive today.

On Facebook, the author Michael Gruber writes:

The suspense before the phony denouement is of the essence in reality TV, which is the only form of artistic expression, besides WWF wrestling, that Trump understands. It’s his last one, so he’s going to drag it out until state certification and beyond. He’ll give a speech in which he graciously allows the transition to continue, even though the Dems stole the election, because he’s a true patriot and doesn’t want the country to suffer. But he can tell you that Sleepy Joe will ruin America so much that Trump will win in the biggest landslide in history in 2024. Meanwhile, no one should cooperate with (Biden’s) illegal coup administration.

Such will be the even-more divided America we will occupy post-Trump. As George Packer writes in The Atlantic:

There’s no escaping who we Americans have become: This is the election’s meaning. We are stuck with one another, seeing no way out and no apparent way through, sinking deeper into a state of mutual incomprehension and loathing. The possible exits—gradual de-escalation, majority breakthrough, clean separation, civil war—are either unlikely or unthinkable. We have to live and govern ourselves together, but we still don’t know how. Winning in this state becomes a chimera. Whoever takes the presidency, all Americans will remain the losers.

The biggest.

********

Photo: Trump at his golf course in Sterling, Virginia this month. (Reuters.)