Is a Robbery in Progress?

Published on by thekingsnecktie3 Comments

Well, it’s the dog days of summer again. Many years at this point in our annual journey around the sun, I post about the melancholy feeling I get as my favorite season winds down and fall approaches—the Sunday scaries writ large. I have been especially on edge in the Augusts of the past two presidential election years.

But over the past four weeks since Joe Biden made the admirable and selfless decision to stand down from the race, that summer feeling hasn’t been quite so bad. As I wrote in my last essay for this blog, the surge of enthusiasm around Kamala Harris pleasantly surprised me, and her deft handling thus far of this strange and unprecedented campaign had only lifted my spirits further. (Are we sure she’s a Democrat?) It’s now clear that America was desperate for a bold, new alternative to Trump, and when presented with one, embraced her with both arms. Team Trump is on its heels, incredibly, having no contingency plan for a change in opponent, while its dear leader continues to rage and flail, his far right flank threatens to mutiny, and talk of firing campaign managers and even replacing his running mate is in the hot August air. And the numbers reflect this dramatic change, with Kamala executing a five point swing in the national polls (when RFK Jr. and his brain worm are included) since assuming her place at the top of the Democratic ticket, giving her a slight lead over Trump nationwide.  

So I am guardedly optimistic.

But as you are no doubt painfully aware, we don’t elect our president in a nationwide popular vote, or even by a conglomeration of statewide ones. The race remains neck-and-neck, including the seven key swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada). In many of those states Kamala has erased the advantage Trump had built in July, but the races remain razor close, with leads by either candidate generally within the margin of error. For that matter, that is true of the national numbers as well. We all know that a lot can happen between now and November, including the dreaded October surprise. It also bears remembering that, historically, Trump tends to outperform his polling (in part because some people are reluctant to admit publicly they support him.)

So we can’t let our foot off the gas, even for a millisecond. Team Democracy has to continue to make its case, expand Kamala’s lead where she has one, overtake Trump where he is still ahead, and put this race out of reach for the white nationalist theocrats of Team Weird, the ones who think The Handmaid’s Tale is an instruction manual. We cannot risk getting complacent…..especially against an opponent that is well-known for using every dirty trick in the book.

Which brings me to the subject of this week’s essay.

“DON’T WORRY ABOUT VOTING”

At a rally in Florida near the end of July, Trump infamously told an audience of right wing Christians that if they elect him to the presidency again, “You won’t have to do it anymore. It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Don’t remember that? Of course not: it was the outrage du jour almost three weeks ago. Since then Trump’s said a dozen new, batshit crazy, blood-boiling things, including insulting Black journalists to their faces and disparaging Medal of Honor winners. Still, it raised some brows.

Here’s Brian Klaas in The Atlantic, breaking down the two basic ways of interpreting that statement.

First, Trump could be implying that there won’t be any future elections if he comes to power. He may imagine himself as an American Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator he routinely praises, a leader who’s declared himself “president for life.” As he often does, however, Trump left just enough room in what he said for plausible deniability. A second and slightly more charitable interpretation of his remarks is that Trump believes his presidency will entrench so many pro-Christian policies into the United States government that no future election could realistically undo his transformation of the country.

MSNBC’s Zeesham Aleem meticulously teased apart the semantics of a slippery statement like that, and how Trump routinely uses such constructions to befuddle the press and avoid being pinned down, even as his supporters don’t need any handholding to get the message. There is a whole master class to be taught on the subject. But that is not really the point, because the difference between the two interpretations is functionally nonexistent.

As Klaas goes on to note, “Both interpretations lead to the same conclusion: that Trump is telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight, hoping to sever the link between voters and government policy.” Trump is once again saying the quiet part out loud, telling us that he and his party intend to put an end to free and fair elections in the United States. Oh, we’ll still have Potemkin elections, as more autocracies do. But they will be mere kabuki—or kayfabe, if you prefer the more in vogue term—preceding the inevitable re-coronation.

But it actually gets even more sinister than that.

As Rachel Maddow reported in a recent segment, the day before that Florida rally, Trump told a crowd not only that they’re won’t have to vote again if they re-elect him, but “that they don’t have to vote THIS time.”

To put it mildly, that is an odd thing for a politician running for office to say.

Like the statement to the “beautiful Christians” in the Sunshine State, there are at least two interpretations of that cryptic assertion. It could easily be passed off as bog standard, nonsensical Trumpian egotism. It might also be some clumsy attempt at reverse psychology. (Read The Gamepeople!) But there is a much more worrying interpretation that is probably more likely. Because it wasn’t just a one-off. Trump has made a curious practice lately of telling crowds at his rallies that he doesn’t need their votes; Maddow even played a montage of him saying that in speech after speech after speech. “What that means,” she observed, “is that he doesn’t think he needs to win the vote to win the election. He doesn’t think he needs to win the election in order to take power. He thinks something other than votes is going to determine whether or not he gets back in the White House.”

For all the surface level weird behavior and language and strange choices and incoherence and odd donors in the Republican campaign, the serious core at the heart of it is that they’re not planning on the vote being counted as normal.

And in fact Trump is now repeatedly saying the vote will not matter. He doesn’t even want your vote. The Republicans are counting on the election results not being certified, thereby creating chaos in Washington around the results. Just like 2020, right? Just like January 6th, 2021. Except this time with no Mike Pence in the way and with Republican officials already in place in multiple states saying, “Yeah, you may not get any sort of official vote.”

The dislocation from actually asking people for their votes, that means something. It means they are not trying win this thing in a normal way.

That Maddow segment the most alarming thing I have seen since Biden gingerly walked out onto the debate stage at the end of June.

PLANS “A” AND “B”

The Republican Party would certainly like to win the presidency in 2024, and retake the Senate, and increase its majority in the House. That is its easiest path to absolute power, and despite recent setbacks, it still hopes it can pull it off. But just in case, it is also preparing to prevent the certification of a Democratic victory.

It is no secret that the GOP has tried—and had appreciable success in—seeding local election boards with pro-Trump ultra-MAGA loyalists who will do Trump’s bidding during and after Election Day, including challenging vote counts, refusing to certify wins by Democratic candidates, conducting spurious recounts, and generally throwing the election into total chaos. I say “it’s no secret,” and yet it’s not widely reported on anywhere near the scale and scope that those alarming efforts call for. (Though still not widely discussed in the mainstream media, this threat is now being reported at least more prominently than in previous months. It was called to my attention by my friend Tom Hall, my go-to source—or should I say, or “come-from”—for all things political, cinematic, musical, and soccer-related.)

Longstanding Republican attempts to suppress the vote—through gerrymandering, voter caging, attacks on early, online, and absentee voting, and other skullduggery—are one thing, and terrifying enough. But the idea of Trump partisans controlling the tabulation of votes after the fact, or being in a position to challenge that tabulation, is a whole different order of pants-shitting magnitude.

As the saying goes, it’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.

Fears that the right wing would try to subvert the 2024 presidential election emerged almost as soon as Joe Biden was sworn in on January 20, 2021. After all, just two weeks before we had seen the outgoing Republican president summon a mob for a self-coup in a violent attempt to remain in power, the capstone to a far longer, multi-pronged attempt to overturn a free and fair election. There was every reason to believe they would try it again, and there still is. I have written at length about Republican efforts to do so, in fairly hyperventilating terms.

But in the first half of 2024, as Biden’s approval ratings continued to decline, and Trumpnesia took hold, not to mention the series of assists his presidential prospects got from the likes of Aileen Cannon and the Supreme Court, fears that Republicans would cheat their way back into power gave way to a new fear: that they wouldn’t have to, because—incredibly—the American people would return Trump to the White House willingly. As recently as a month ago, before Kamala replaced Joe as the presumptive Democratic nominee, that grim fear had for many of us become nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy, a fait accompli that we simultaneously could not fucking believe, and dreaded to our bones, and yet seemed a near certainty. Republicans were giddy.

What a difference a month makes.

But Republican plans to ratfuck the 2024 presidential election have never gone away. And now that their chances of a clean (or even semi-clean) electoral victory have dimmed considerably, those plans have resumed a place of prominence. Even if Trump is soundly defeated and Kamala wins the White House, the groundwork is inarguably being laid to challenge her victory and sow the seeds for confusion, chaos, and further undermining of public belief in the integrity of our elections, including incitement to political violence and perhaps even worse.

A VISIT TO THE HARDWARE STORE

So what are the nuts and bolts of how the Trumpified GOP intends to pull off this robbery?

The first step is to destroy public confidence in objective metrics like polls.

In a piece for the Washington Post titled “Trump Prepares to Reject Another Loss,” Philip Bump  writes:

A loss this November looks more possible than it did a month ago, certainly. Over the weekend, the New York Times released new swing-state polling showing Harris with leads across the Upper Midwest. So, naturally, Trump’s campaign released a memo suggesting that the polling was fake or misleading.

Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support—and by extension, the reliability of the results in November. Harris is a CHEATER, Trump asserts. It is not subtle.

Once Trump Nation accepts that the polls can’t be trusted, it’s but a short hop to destroying its confidence in another objective metric like the vote count. This, Bump notes, is a key part of Trump’s strategy: to relentlessly condition his supporters to distrust the media, the government, and any other credible authority. “That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.”

It’s all part of a broader conditioning program that has been going on ever since he left office, to set the stage for his return to the White House.

Recall that his efforts to reject the 2020 results did not emerge out of the blue in November of that year. Trump began raising questions about the purported insecurity of mail-in ballots soon after it became obvious that the coronavirus pandemic would spur more remote voting. He and his staff amplified all sorts of claims about ballot security, including a bizarre claim that July that a mail truck that caught fire was somehow suspicious. His base was more than prepared when he subsequently challenged the actual election results.

That’s the pattern that is again underway….

That scheme also includes portraying the legitimate criminal prosecutions of Trump as a liberal plot to rig the election against him. Donald has even begun to claim that the election is somehow “unfair” (one of his favorite complaints, the big baby) on the absurd grounds that the Democrats had no right to change their nominee. In his usual projecting, every-accusation-is-a-confession mode, he has repeatedly described it as a “coup” within the DNC.

(Pause to take in the irony.)

But it’s not just Trump and his clown car of second-rate Batman villains like Giuliani and Stone and the currently imprisoned Steve Bannon who are working on this. Elections expert Marc Elias recently wrote that “Republicans are building an election subversion war machine.”

Just about a month before Bump published that piece, Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasanti of The New York Times reported on what they described as “an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system” by Republicans, calling it “wide-ranging and methodical,” and “laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump.” The Times reports that this effort “involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee,” many of whom were key players in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The difference is that this effort is far more organized than four years ago, and far more focused on “a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.”

Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious—and legally dubious—attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.At the heart of the strategy is a drive to convince voters that the election is about to be stolen, even without evidence.

“As things stand right now, there’s zero chance of a free and fair election,” Mike Howell, a project director at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said at an event this week. “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”

That same Heritage Foundation has engaged in exercises war-gaming scenarios to dispute the 2024 results—one of many such measures going on in plain sight. Under the farcical umbrella of “electoral integrity,” Republicans in Nevada and several other states “have sued to tighten rules for voting by mail—currently a method preferred by Democrats. In Georgia and Arizona, they have filed lawsuits that, if successful, would effectively give local election board members the right to hold up certification and even conduct their own personal investigation into the vote.” The Times reports that already “election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week.”

The effort is strategic in its focus on local election officials, largely in swing states. Key to that task is seeding those election boards with fanatic Trump loyalists who are willing to block certification, typically by making outrageous requests, like demanding reams of voter information in order to personally examine it for cases of potential fraud. At the national level, it includes the RNC itself, now co-led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Oftrump (nee Yunaska), and a new position called “senior counsel for election integrity” held by Christina Bobb, a lawyer currently under indictment in Arizona abetting Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat in  that state four years ago. (Reportedly, a litmus test for potential RNC employees under the new regime is to assert that the 2020 election was stolen.) In Georgia, Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who was part of Trump’s effort to do the same in that state, “now runs the Election Integrity Network, a group that is advising activists on how to challenge voters’ eligibility.”

“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, Marc Elias told Rolling Stone. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”

As if to prove his point, Democrats have largely responded with our usual featherduster-to-a-flamethrower mentality of naïve belief that “the system” will protect us. Shortly before Biden stepped aside, his campaign advisers told the Times that right wing skullduggery of that magnitude was unlikely, because “the law and the courts would intervene to keep the process on course before any worst-case scenarios could come to pass.”

Yeah, right. Let’s hope Harris’s campaign advisors are a little more street savvy and gimlet eyed.

START THE STEAL

Way back in April, A.B. Stoddard had a piece in The Bulwark outlining Trump’s plan, predicting that he “will declare victory on election night before all the votes are counted, as he did in 2020—and as we know he had planned before election night.” If the results contradict his claim, he will insist that the results are wrong, tainted “by mail-in voting, machine voting, machine counting, ballot harvesting, corrupt election officials, liberal cities, and illegal immigrants.” But because Trump won’t be in office this time, and won’t have the levers of power at this disposal, “his best path to stealing an election is through the states, before the question comes to Congress on January 6, 2025.

“What Trump has planned for November and December, if he doesn’t win, is not a ‘pressure campaign’,” she wrote. “It’s another coup.”

Recently Stoddard had another piece in The Bulwark even more bluntly titled, “Get Ready Now: Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win.”

An investigation by Rolling Stone identified “in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania….at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results.” Of those seventy, 22 of them already have “refused or delayed certification” in recent past elections. Nationwide, Republicans have refused to certify results at least 25 times since 2020, in eight states—the most in Georgia.

The article describes social media posts from the zealots who have infiltrated election administration as showing “unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views.”

There are more than enough such individuals in these key posts to bring us to a constitutional crisis.

Although the courts have turned back some GOP attempts to get a chokehold on the electoral process, Stoddard notes that it’s foolish to count on that.

In retrospect, those efforts look like initial probes—like a bank robber casing the joint, figuring out where the guards stand and the cameras are while planning the real heist.

It sure doesn’t appear that the law is going to deter them from launching an unprecedented attack on our elections. And the ways that the potential scale of the assault will test the legal system is, in and of itself, daunting. The Brennan Center for Justice wrote, “little academic attention has been paid to the mechanics of state certification processes, leaving many in the legal community bewildered by the recent string of attacks.”

Two weeks ago, in the same Atlanta rally where Trump again attacked Georgia’s popular Republican governor Brian Kemp for not sufficiently backing the Big Lie in 2020, he also singled out three obscure state election officials—Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King—praising them as “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” Johnston, Jeffares, and King are three of the five members of Georgia’s State Election Board who, three days later, approved a new rule that could allow them to delay statewide certification of the presidential election ahead of the November 22 deadline. Stoddard reports that “Election experts say the new rule could disrupt the entire process across the state by allowing local partisans to reject results.” By casting doubt on the vote in Fulton County—where Atlanta is, and where most of the state’s Democratic votes are—Trump can claim he won the whole state, which is largely red everywhere else.

But Marc Elias believes that Republicans “are counting on not just that they can disrupt the election in big counties, they’re counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you can’t certify statewide results.

There are lots of unpleasant scenarios. A deadlocked election could get kicked to the House, where a one-state-one-vote show of hands would ensue, which would undoubtedly result in a Republican victory (as it currently stands). If the decision winds up in the Supreme Court, we know what ruling will come down from the 6-3 right wing supermajority that recently declared Trump is a king who is above the law. On that front, our only hope is that the far right has so overplayed its hand in blatantly capturing the Supreme Court and turning it into a wholly owned subsidiary of the RNC that no one has any faith in it as an honest broker, and if the justices try to pull a Bush v Gore 2.0, there will be riots.

What does it say that we are in such a state where that’s where we have to put our hopes?

But it could get even worse. Imagine a contested election that winds up in a standoff in the US Senate over the certification of electoral votes—not unlike January 6th, 2021. Except that this time, the vote count might really be illegitimate, due to Republican ratfucking at the state level, to include illegitimate slates of electors submitted by GOP-controlled elections boards. And who, as the sitting Vice President of the United States, and therefore president of the Senate, would be presiding over that process, and would have to be the one to stand up and stop the certification of fake electors prepared to award the presidency—again—to Donald J.  Trump?

I’ll give you one guess, in case you failed 7th grade civics (do they still teach that?). I’ll even give you a hint: She’s got a Howard University sticker on her car.

You can imagine what the GOP would say, let alone Fox News, OANN, and the shitkickers down at the gun shop.

UP ON A ROOF

Sigh. It’s hard to believe that four years on from the 2021 attack on the Capitol we still have to worry about the authoritarian Republican Party trying to steal an election. But we do. Stoddard again:

With all that has transpired since November 3, 2020, why are we here again?

Four years later we must ask this question. Our entire country has been held hostage by Trump’s mental and emotional deficits. He doesn’t “lose.” He is unwell and cannot publicly acknowledge defeat. Democracy was vulnerable before Trump, but its fragility could be fatal because of him.

The Big Lie, born from his pathological insecurity, led to a failed coup and a deadly insurrection. We had hoped those two things would undo or, at least, diminish the power of the Big Lie. Yet it has only grown more potent and widespread. It is an article of faith in the GOP base, with polls estimating that roughly two-thirds of Republicans are bought in.

There is nothing he won’t try.

The willingness of the once Grand Old Party to blatantly cheat is another measure of its descent into neo-fascism. Electoral mischief is nothing new, in America as elsewhere. But the sheer brazenness of the Republican effort, and the meticulousness and determination with which they have gone about it, is appalling—and telling. (Hey, what about the idea of winning elections by having policies people actually like? But that’s no good when your whole raison d’être is to enrich plutocrats and force a minoritarian religious agenda on the public against its will.)

Even as we raise the alarm about this threat to a free and fair electoral result in November, make no mistake: We first have to win before we should worry about the win being taken away. Job #1 is winning in November—ideally in such overwhelming numbers that no challenge to that victory is plausible by serious, thoughtful people. (But of course, we are not dealing with serious, thoughtful people.) No doubt the GOP’s Plan B is to sow chaos and doubt and file lawsuits in order to fuel Big Lie 2.0., along with more violent flagpole-and-bear-spray-oriented solutions. But their Plan A is to win in the first place. So we will be fortunate if we are in a position where our victory has to be doubted.

But even if we win, we’d be fools to imagine a polite concession speech from the Donald. We must be prepared for an assault on a Harris victory that will make the Big Lie of 2020—including the attack of January 6—look tame.

So what can be done?

One prophylactic solution that Stoddard recommends is for voters—and the media—to aggressively ask every last Republican politician, official, and candidate to state their position on “local certification of elections, electors honoring the popular vote of their state, preventing political violence—all of it. Repeatedly.”

Another is for high profile Democrats to sound the alarm now, and not wait for the crime to occur, when it may already be too late. There are small signs of that happening. Less than two weeks ago Joe Biden himself told CBS News that he is “not confident at all” there will be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses. That’s a jawdropper, but exactly what we need.

Harris isn’t likely to talk about this in her campaign, so it’s critical that other high-profile surrogates do. President Obama, President Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and others must educate voters about the plot underway to force more public pressure and accountability on the process.

It’s crucial that these plans are widely publicized. And they can be. Just like Project 2025, which was virtually unheard of and is now in the forefront of the political debate. Putting a media spotlight on this issue will force Republican officials to address what they are well aware of and are refusing to call out.

She goes on to quote the much-respected retired federal judge Michael Luttigremarkingon Trump’s attacks on the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan last March even as he presided over the Stormy Daniels case. “Never in history has any person leveled such attacks and been met with such passivity, acquiescence, and submissiveness by the nation,” Luttig tweeted. “The same can be said for the nation’s collective reaction to Trump’s plans to steal the 2024 election,” Stoddard writes.

So let’s shout it from the rooftops and keep it from happening. Like Biden’s remark, another good sign is that it is in fact beginning to get more airtime, including a front page piece in The Washington Post just today. As Stoddard wrote way back in April:

Trump’s plan to potentially steal a free and fair election should itself be a central issue of the 2024 campaign. It’s far more consequential than polls, fundraising tallies, or the electoral salience of student loan payments or a TikTok ban.

Trump intends to light the country on fire with his lies—again. We can’t stop it if we don’t talk about it.

Fascism Gets Thrown a Curve (f/t an excerpt from “Resisting the Right”)

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

So the twists are not exactly stopping, are they?

In my last two entries for this blog, I recounted the startling turns that the presidential race has taken in the last four weeks, from the disaster of Biden’s debate performance, to the Supreme Court’s no-look pass that allowed Judge Aileen “Employee of the Month” Cannon to dismiss felony charges against Trump for stealing government secrets, to SCOTUS’s outrageous ranks-closing to protect Trump from prosecution on charges of trying overturn the 2020 election (and granting him the powers of a dictator should he win again), to the assassination attempt on Trump’s life that for many might as well have been a coronation, to the Leni Riefenstahl-ready informercial that was the Republican convention. I don’t have to tell you, it had been a brutal month for the prospects of democracy in the United States.

So the latest 115mph curveball—Joe Biden’s heroic, legacy-defining decision to step aside in favor of Kamala Harris—was yet another wild twist, and a very very welcome one. Oceans of ink have already been spilled on the topic which I won’t add to here.

Well, maybe a little.

THIS JUST IN: LIFE IS UNFAIR

I was among the many who were deeply relieved by Joe’s decision, and admiring of it. As Jonathan V. Last wrote in The Bulwark:

I submit to you that no other president in our lifetimes would have believed that he was replaceable. None of those guys could have even countenanced the idea that the country might be better served if he passed the torch. Biden’s humility in this act is so unique that we risk overlooking it and failing to appreciate how singular and extraordinary it is.

In other words, history is going to be kind to Joe Biden—especially if Kamala wins. So I’ll reserve my thoughts on the former while we concentrate on ensuring the latter.

When Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, it was like a dam broke on the left. I was unprepared for (but incredibly pleased by) the wave of enthusiasm and the depths of the passion, which—with all due respect to Joe—just goes to show you how desperate the American people were for a strong, exciting candidate to take on Donald Trump. That in itself was deeply cheering.

The Republicans seemed utterly shocked at Biden’s decision, which is astounding, given that it had been a strong (if unprecedented) possibility ever since the night of June 27. The consensus seems to be that Trump and the GOP could not conceive of a truly patriotic and selfless leader who would put the country before himself, and were therefore caught absolutely flat-footed. Authoritarianism has many tactical and strategic advantages when it comes to politics, but this baked-in shortsightedness born of avarice and venality is one of its major disadvantages. And boo hoo, says I.

Trump has even complained that the GOP should get its money back because it spent so much demonizing an opponent who’s not going to be the Democratic nominee. It was glorious to watch him in his familiar toddler mode, holding his breath and stamping his feet because it’s not fair, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not!!!!

Republican claims that Biden was the victim of a coup (well, they are the coup experts) and  arguments that his deferral to Kamala is anti-democratic (again: the experts) or even illegal (and a triple!) are risible. The truth, of course, is that they are simply furious at being outmaneuvered. Their whole campaign was “Biden is old.” Now they’re the ones with the mentally impaired AARP nominee, facing an opponent whom they don’t yet know how to attack, except in the most obvious and disgusting way. It was no surprise that horrific racism and misogyny immediately began pouring forth from the right wing….so much so that just three days in, Mike Johnson had to tell his members, “Hey guys, tone it down, OK?” Uh, when you have to tell them that….you can fill in the rest.

But even these despicable attacks on the new Democratic nominee might backfire when it becomes clear that that’s what the GOP is doing. And it’s clear. The racists and misogynists and anti-Semites are already on Team Trump: I suspect further attacks on that front won’t attract many new voters…..but they will alienate plenty of them. This isn’t 1988 anymore, and while the Willie Horton playbook remains very much operative in the mind of MAGA Nation, the rest of America is hip to it. But we shall see. I underestimated the scope and virulence of that kind of bigotry in the Obama years and in 2016, so I am not letting down my guard.

In short, the race has been completely transformed. For Kamala to win is still a challenging task. Trump and his campaign managers—including the architect of the Swift Boating of John Kerry—will certainly pull out all the KKK-brand stops, and I’m sure they will eventually find some footing. But we are in a whole new world. So let’s keep the passion up, and the momentum, and drive this motherfucker down to defeat once and for all. It’s glorious to see that, at long last, the sane segment of the American public is alive with passion and the belief that we can in fact do so.

EVERYDAY I WRITE THE BOOK

This week also marks the publication of my new book, Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, a kind of handbook for how to prevail if Trump returns to power. I wrote it over the past two years not because of some fatalistic assumption that that dark fate would come to pass. On the contrary: I have always believed that we can beat Trump, and in the wake of Joe’s withdrawal from the race, I am more convinced of that than ever. But as a matter of sheer prudence, I thought it wise to look over the horizon (as the Pentagon says) and prepare ourselves for the worst case scenario. For even if we defeat Trump in November, as I believe we will, even when his cheeseburgers-and-Diet-Coke-addled corporeal form is rotting in his grave,  the neo-fascist movement that he represents will still be with us.

The first part of the book therefore surveys how we got to this alarming state of affairs in the first place, and the long term structural changes we can make to shore up our democracy against right wing authoritarianism in the future. As we are about 100 days out from Election Day in the midst of a radically transformed presidential race, and with our hopes newly invigorated and the Republicans on their heels for a change, it’s that “nightmare prevention” aspect of the book that I’d like to focus on in the excerpt that follows.

As the American people get ready to go to the polls to vote in what is inarguably the most important election of our lifetimes (yes, I know you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s true—again), it’s worth taking a look at what the Republican Party is and stands for, as it makes the gobsmacking request that we put it back into power less than four years after it tried to overturn the last free and fair election.

*********

From Resisting the Right, now available from OR Books, at your local bookstore, or from the usual online retailers:

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA

The contemporary Republican Party is unrecognizable from the GOP of only a few decades ago. Both Nixon and Reagan would be ostracized from the Republican Party of today. On taxes, on the environment, on foreign policy, on nuclear arms control, on wage and price controls—across a range of issues, they championed ideas that would cause the contemporary GOP to scream liberalism, or even socialism. More likely, if I may speculate, those men, operating in today’s climate, would have quickly changed their tune, as so many other contemporary Republican politicians have done, keenly aware of the melody that the right-wing piper is calling.

All political parties look for wedge issues to peel voters away from their opponents, but the GOP has made an art form of it. In his 2012 book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, Mike Lofgren, a longtime GOP congressional staffer, pulled back the curtain on this kayfabe, declaring in an interview with Truthout that same year: “The primary purpose of the GOP these days is to provide tax breaks and other financial advantages—such as not regulating pollution and other socially costly externalities—to their wealthy donor base. All the rest of their platform, all the culture wars stuff, is simply rube bait.”

That “rube bait” included guns, abortion, homosexuality, trans rights, immigration, and a whole slate of other social issues that the plutocratic wing of the party did not really care about. Trump himself—who had been a registered Democrat for almost a decade before running against Clinton—was very much on record as being pro-choice, moved comfortably in circles with gay people, and was generally live-and-let-live….appropriate for someone who was himself so libertine. But he was also happy to reverse course like a stunt car driver doing a screeching, rubber-burning one-eighty when it served his ends. Prior to that, Trump’s low-information liberalism was largely a function of the well-to-do Manhattan milieu in which he moved. It was not a world where Confederate flag decals and gun racks were often seen on Lincoln Town Cars. But as a natural-born shitbag with a long history of ignorant, incendiary, unsolicited commentary (see: the Central Park jogger case), Trump had no problem whatsoever feeding the most disgusting instincts of the GOP’s aptly named base. But like all demagogues, he also took his cues from his audience, and tailored his act to suit it. In that regard, he was simultaneously leading the mob and following it.

For example, the Republican Party of the 20th century had always had a nativist bent, but the euphemistic “family separation policy”—better described as a deliberate and openly sadistic campaign of kidnapping small children and caging them in inhuman conditions—represented a new low of almost incomprehensible depths. As Caitlin Dickerson concluded in her Pulitzer Prize-winning reportage for The Atlantic, “family separation” wasn’t an unfortunate by-product of Trump’s border policy: it was the goal, aimed purely at punishing migrants and thrilling the base. Or her Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer wrote, in what might be the single most memorable comment ever made about the Trump administration, “The cruelty is the point.”

This willingness of both casual conservatives and diehard denizens of MAGA Nation to get onboard with Trump’s worst atrocities was a worrying sign—a chilling homegrown demonstration of Arendt’s banality of evil, and the crucial complicity of the great swath of nonchalant citizenry in abetting the monstrous actions of authoritarian regimes. And it would only accelerate throughout his time in office.

This hold Trump had on his followers—and still has, for many of them—has led many observers to refer to Trumpism as a “cult-like” phenomenon. But other experts argue that the modifier is unnecessary.

In a 2018 piece for Truthdig called “The Cult of Trump,” the journalist and author Chris Hedges outlines the ways in which Trump’s followers meet the dictionary definition of a cult, and not just metaphorically, noting that the “more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity.”[i] Hedges goes on at length: about the use of the language of hate and violence; of fearmongering and divisiveness; of the denial of objective reality and the malleability of facts and truth, even when it comes to the leader’s own past statements; of the leader’s bombast and grandiosity, emotional abusiveness, and insecurity; and of the fawning obedience they demand, and the psychology of their followers’ willingness to submit.

Sound familiar?

Of course, not all Republicans can be said to be in the grip of the Trumpist cult of personality the way that its most Kool-Aid-drunk adherents are. In some ways, however, the Republicans who are not Trump cultists but merely making a cynical, utilitarian calculation are worse, in that they cannot be excused by reason of mental incapacitation. They are quislings and collaborators who will one day face history’s harshest verdict. (Looking at you, J.D.)

As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait writes: “Would-be dictators gain crucial support from allies in the political system who may not be committed authoritarians themselves but side with a factional leader who will advance their policy goals at the expense of democracy,” a segment the Spanish political scientist Juan Linz calls “semi-loyal actors.”[ii] In The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (1978), Linz, who was born in Germany on the eve of the Nazi era, writes that in order to stop a political party that is showing autocratic tendencies, reasonable political parties that are otherwise in opposition to each other must join together—in other words, put country before party. It happened in Belgium and Finland in the early 1930s, successfully stopping the rise of homegrown authoritarian parties even as kindred spirits rose to power elsewhere in Europe. As recently as 2016 it happened in Austria, despite that nation’s chilling history of susceptibility to fascism. In the United States, it would have meant key leaders of the Republican Party breaking ranks to join with Democrats in opposing Trump, publicly announcing the threat he posed to the nation, and perhaps even declaring their support for Hillary Clinton. Precious few did, and those were all excommunicated, or left the GOP willingly before that sentence was pronounced upon them.

The question of whether or not Trumpism is a literal cult, then, is ultimately moot. Even absent Trump himself, right-wing fanaticism in the United States remains extraordinarily dangerous, such that—as Hedges points out—the mere demise of the man and the breaking of the fever of his followers will not solve our long-term problem. We must salt the earth from which it sprung.

THE DEATH OF NORMALCY

The enduring notion that Trump was an aberration in US politics, or that the GOP would return to some sort of “normalcy” if and when he is ejected from a position of power, flies in the face of history.

Trump represents the logical end state of the process that began with the Southern Strategy, carried on with Reagan’s courting of the religious right, and came to a boil with Newt Gingrich and the rise of politics as bloodsport. The GOP’s alliance with segregationist dead-enders, and then with Christian fundamentalists, and finally with outright white nationalist semi-fascists comprising both of those strains, was a deal with the devil that had finally come due. The plutocrats had imagined that they could use these allies as shock troops, and for a time they did. But now the center of gravity in the party has shifted to its openly seditionist, neo-Confederate faction. We should therefore postpone any mourning parties for the “Rockefeller wing” of the GOP, which after all, brought this fate on itself, and continues to be a willing—now junior—partner in this antidemocratic axis. The irony of its sorcerer’s apprentice-like plight in no way mitigates the danger to the entire nation, and world, that it unleashed.   

It’s true that the tension between MAGA Nation and those Republicans who merely grit their teeth as they bend the knee to Trump may help keep the party paralyzed, a case of malevolence tempered by squabbling. But as the anti-Trump conservative Jennifer Rubin notes in The Washington Post, the media rarely holds the GOP “moderates” to account and does “a disservice to the voters by characterizing them as somehow more sensible than the Freedom Caucus crazies.” Team Normal, as it likes to style itself, has thus far not shown enough courage to power a nightlight, belying its own self-flattering moniker. 

The fact is, there is little evidence that the policies that the moderates wish to pursue are much different from that of the party’s far-right wing. As Rubin writes, “it would take only a few of them to defeat radical measures. Yet time and again, they cave”—because the ends they seek are largely the same even if their methods are less aggressive.[iii] Caving, then, is almost too generous. The pattern of centrist submission suggests either cowardice or dishonesty, with these alleged moderates using the seditionists as cover to advance far-right policies with which they privately agree.

Rubin’s fellow conservative Robert Kagan goes further, arguing that these ostensibly anti-Trump Republicans, consciously or not, are actually aiding the Trumpist cause by insisting on business as usual “even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.”

Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?

Personally, I am astonished that any American gives the Republican Party even passing consideration as a viable political organization, or that any candidate can run under its banner without crippling shame. But apparently you can kidnap and cage children as a matter of deliberate policy, preside over the deaths of half a million Americans through sheer malevolence, and try to overthrow the government on your way out, and still demand to be treated like legitimate public servants. 

Why do people continue to support this openly neofascist, would-be theocratic party that is openly rife with corruption, brazenly antagonistic to the basic ideals of this nation, eager to suppress your vote, and dedicated to a long-discredited brand of reverse Robin Hood economics that hurts the very people it claims to champion? I know that just asking the question invites withering criticism for being a snotty and condescending “coastal elite.” But the Republican Party did so much damage to this country in so many different ways during the Trump years (we can go back further if need be, but that period will suffice) that no sentient American ought to give it the time of day unless and until it undergoes a radical reformation of a kind it seems unlikely to undertake.

In a 2022 interview with Al-Jazeera, Noam Chomsky noted that, in the past, he had typically described the Republican and Democratic Parties as merely two wings of the same “Business Party.” But that characterization no longer obtained. The GOP, he argued, had ceased to be “a political party in the traditional sense,” but was now “a radical insurgency that has abandoned any interest in participation in parliamentary politics.”[iv] The Party itself gleefully announces it.

So let’s be clear. The Grand Old Party has no business presenting itself as any kind of reliable steward of the public trust, and its efforts to do so ought to be dismissed out of hand. I am not astounded that Republicans are brazen enough to say and do the things they are currently saying and doing: their shamelessness is well-established. But I am astounded that we are letting them get away with it.

**********

Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm is out now is available from OR Books, or at your local bookstore, or from the usual online retailers.

 

 

 

 

What Fresh Hell?

Published on by thekingsnecktie3 Comments

The luckiest man on earth is on a real run. In the space of a couple of weeks, his opponent self-destructed in their debate, the Supreme Court gave him a get-out-of-jail-free card and de facto permission to be a dictator (that wasn’t luck, though: he and his party carefully engineered it), and a deranged shooter who was a registered Republican gifted him the chance to act like a martyr. Oh yeah, and two days later a federal judge who lives in his coat pocket capped two years of slow-walking by throwing out a near-slam dunk case against him for stealing nuclear secrets from the US government, freeing him—temporarily at least— from the threat of prison—in that case, at least—and allowing him to (falsely) claim exoneration. And all of it in the run-up to the live informercial that is the GOP convention.

For those who are still wondering, there is no God.

Any one of these things would have been huge news, even if spread out over several months. Instead we got everything everywhere all at once. The United States is going down a fascist rabbit hole, and fast. And while dumb luck has played a role, so has our failure to reckon with this threat. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

Biden’s apparent refusal to step aside (he might yet!), combined with that run of outrageous and undeserved good luck, has left many Democrats feeling despondent. The notion that Trump might well win has given way to a few isolated suggestions that he might win in a landslide, to that terrible inversion of a Stevie Nicks ballad becoming the conventional wisdom.

I am not ready to give up. But I am definitely girding myself for the worst. Somebody oughta write a book. 

PAGING SUSAN SONTAG

Last week’s post was titled “The Crisis for Democracy Takes a Very Weird Turn.” This week’s sequel could well have been titled “The Crisis for Democracy Takes YET ANOTHER Very Weird—and Dangerous—Turn.”

Trump has always been a lucky SOB. Part of that is part and parcel of being the feckless heir to obscene, ill-gotten wealth. That’s how he got out of Vietnam, and how he got into business and survived multiple bankruptcies owing to his incompetence, and how he stiffed vendors for decades by bleeding them to death in litigation, and how he avoided criminal liability for his various misdeeds over and over again, and how he got Mark Burnett to resuscitate his career. Part of it is also the natural tactical advantages that come with being a reprehensible, amoral sociopath instead of a decent human being, and part of it, especially lately, has been the cover provided him by allies who stood to gain from that—like the Republican Party. But this week might be the luckiest week of his whole misbegotten life.

So let’s start with the assassination attempt.

Any act of political violence is unconscionable, and it would have been terrible for our country if that shooter had hit his target. (As it stands, one innocent person was killed and two injured.) But the fact that he missed by two inches is one of those moments when history could have been irrevocably changed forever.

Butterfly effect wise, this was one for the ages. If Trump had just been hustled offstage after a stray round whizzed harmlessly by his head, the incident would have been largely forgotten, or at least had far far less impact. If he had been killed by a clean hit, we would have been faced with the terrible specter of him being made a martyr, and the prospect that he would never face judgment at the ballot box, or justice in a courtroom. (He may never face the latter anyway.) But it would undeniably have reshaped American politics and perhaps the whole course of human history. As some wags instantly asked online, “Are we sure that the shooter wasn’t a time traveler from the future?”

Instead, a barely grazed ear is the mildest of injuries that gives Trump the hugest of political benefits, and therefore the worst possible outcome for democracy. I am glad he was not killed or seriously wounded, because I don’t wish that on anyone (unlike many of his supporters). That said, this was a gift from the gods that enables Trump and his cretinous followers to portray him as a hero and a martyr (despite surviving) and a self-styled tough guy, not to mention a victim of political violence rather than the chief advocate of it. I dunno what Thomas Matthew Crooks’ real motive was, but I know he gave Trump one of the biggest boosts imaginable.

Thanks, guy.

And a direct aspect of that boost was that instantly iconic snapshot.  

Thanks to that Iwo Jima-like photograph by future Pulitzer Prize winner Evan Nucci of the Associate Press, the chances of Trump winning in November—already on the rise—just went up appreciably, again. The emotional power of that event, and of that image specifically, is overwhelming reason, which was already on life support in America. It’s also overwhelming the collective memory of the nightmarish Trump years, from the kidnapping of children as a matter of deliberate and barbaric state policy, to wanton corruption, to bootlicking servility to Vladimir Putin, to the borderline genocide of a botched response to the pandemic, to January 6th. Not to mention the fact that the Trump party is now openly promising as an encore a white nationalist theocracy where women will be chattel, the poor will be punished, the military will establish concentration camps, the DOJ will go after Don’s enemies, and Trump and his friends will rob the country blind.

As John Heilemann writes in Puck:

In Milwaukee this week, a Republican Party that already saw Donald Trump as a righteous victim even before he dodged an assassin’s bullet will hail him as more than a martyr: as a bona fide hero, a literally bloodied warrior, maybe even a messiah. But many Democrats fear that Trump’s brush with death will make him something else: a landslide winner in November.

IT’S JUST A FLESH WOUND, LAMBCHOP

As usual, the press is serving as Trump’s useful idiots on this matter. Two days after the shooting, the Washington Post’s headline writers again covered themselves in glory—sorry, strike that; I meant dogshit—with a headline reading, “Trump Says to ‘Stand United’ as FBI Seeks Motive in Assassination Attempt.”

Soon after the shooting Trump had released a statement on Truth Social that it was immediately clear had been ghosted for him, as it began with thanks to someone other than himself (the Secret Service) and expressed sorrow for the dead and wounded—two things never associated with Donald Trump—and contained nothing in all caps, and no use of the words “haters,” “losers” or anyone being “sick” or “demented.” But I do believe he wrote the subsequent post saying it was God who diverted the bullets away from him. His supporters seem to agree. So God must really have hated Corey Comperatore, the retired fire chief that one of those bullets hit and killed. Unless—stay with me here—that’s not how it works? Comperatore v. Trump is Exhibit A in the Ain’t No Such Thing as Karma debate.

Melania subsequently issued a statement of her own—rare for her—which read like it was written by an AI that spoke only Slovenian, then translated into Esperanto, then back into Slovenian, then into English. And it was batshit crazy in any language. Melania wrote: “A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music and inspiration.”

AYFKM? I’ll look for Don at the next Haim show.

Speaking of the press, one thing unremarked upon in the post-shooting video of Trump being hustled into an armored SUV was the number of rallygoers who turned to the camera and gave it the finger, clearly seen angrily shouting “Fuck you!” Hey, I frequently criticize the media myself (I just did it—see above), but these guys are in a different league. The level of vitriol is at Nuremburg levels.

Think about it. These people, who were eyewitnesses to a historic assassination attempt on a former US president and current presidential candidate—their hero—stopped watching it unfold as it happened so they could yell obscenities at the press. Yikes.

It also must be said that it’s not yet clear whether Trump’s ear injury was really from being grazed by a 5.56mm round of ball ammo, or from broken glass from a shattered teleprompter. (Remember on the campaign trail in 2016 when Trump said, “I always wanted to get a Purple Heart.”) What’s the rule? Don’t post stuff until you know if it’s true? Well, I’d like to comply, but since the other side likes to get control of the narrative from the jump irrespective of what facts later emerge, I’d be a damn fool to do any different, as Yossarian says in Catch-22. It may well prove to be the case that he was in fact clipped by a round; the doctors have yet to issue a statement. But just putting this out there until the jury is in. (So to speak.)

People are also saying Trump shat his pants after he dropped to his knees during the shooting—that’s why the Secret Service took so long to move him. I dunno if it’s true, but people are talking about it, amirite? Just seems like something that is being discussed. Like I say, I dunno—just passing it along.

Lastly, before we move off the shooting, indulge me in a little military detour.

That Crooks had a clean line of sight from less than 150 meters away—a middling target on a rifle range that any average infantryman with an AR-15 should be able to hit—is a separate scandal that the Secret Service will have to answer for. This was not Oswald hitting a moving target with an old bolt action Italian rifle, getting off three rounds in six seconds. This gunman should never have had a clean shot at Trump in the first place. The USSS’s sharpshooters did a fine job once the threat was identified, but they should never have had to pull their triggers at all. And while “countersniper” is a justified term for those fine Secret Service marksmen, I would reject the term “sniper” for Crooks or any other madman who decides to open fire on his fellow Americans. In my day as a tactical intel officer for a parachute infantry regiment, we had the unit’s sniper teams under our operational control (not for assassination, as popular lore would have you believe, but because snipers are a valuable intelligence-collection resource), and conducted a portion of their training, though I am not and never was a sniper myself. In my view, that term is reserved for calm, cool, well-disciplined military professionals. So please refrain from honoring this would-be killer with that title. 

REICHSTAG IN ALLEGHENY

It ought to go without saying that the attempt on Trump’s life was another shocking demonstration of the precarious state of the nation. But we are a violent country and always have been.

My friend Jim Moseley forwarded me a message from his grad school mentor, Rich Megraw, a retired professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, who wrote:

Consider this alone: We’ve had, to date, 45 presidents (46 minus Cleveland twice).  Of that number, we’ve killed four (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy). But someone tried to shoot Andrew Jackson and both Roosevelts. (The shot at FDR killed the mayor of Miami.) Puerto Rican nationalists tried to shoot Harry Truman when he was out walking, Squeaky Fromme squeezed one off at Gerald Ford, and John Hinkley tried to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.  Those are just ones we know about.

That’s an attempt, four of them successful, on 10 out of 45 presidents—nearly one-quarter the total.

That said, hold onto your hat. It’s only going to get worse. 

I would add that Squeaky was joined by Sarah Jane Moore, who took a shot at Ford that same month (and also missed). And that list does not include mere presidential candidates, like George Wallace, paralyzed by a would-be assassin’s bullet in 1972, or as Prof. Megraw notes, the likely many many attempts that were thwarted by the Secret Service and others that we never heard about.

So will this assassination attempt be Trump‘s Reichstag fire? I won’t go so far as to claim it was a false flag operation like that one. It wasn’t. But it functioned that way, and will provide Trump the exact same benefits. It’s even better, in fact, since it was a legitimate act of violence against him, even if committed by a politically confused loner and (I say again) a registered Republican, not a left wing hater as the right would have us believe.

But even before it was announced that he was Trump’s pick to be his running mate, J.D. Vance wasted no time in blaming Biden and the Democrats for the assassination attempt, on the grounds that they have painted Trump as an existential threat to democracy. (Republican Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia went further, calling for the Attorney General of Pennsylvania to arrest and charge President Biden.) But that Trump is a threat is a demonstrable fact, and in no way equivalent to a call for vigilantism. Maybe J.D. is projecting, based on how his own party operates.

It ought to go without saying that this is an absurd, cynical, totally dishonest claim. (I said it came out of the facehole of J.D. Vance, didn’t I?) But it was utterly predictable, even inevitable, coming from the Republican Party—and Vance and Collins were not alone. As the Washington Post reported, “Many supporters of Trump, both rank-and-file voters and elected officials, quickly took to social media to argue that the rhetoric of Biden and his supporters—casting Trump as a threat to democracy—led to Saturday’s events.” So the GOP is now, er, weaponzing the event as an excuse to put off limits any criticism of Trump, hysterically and dishonestly claiming that it promotes violence. “Political violence in all forms is unamerican and unacceptable,” tweeted Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), a proponent of the Big Lie and defender of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

That is gaslighting at its finest.

We don’t yet know all the facts or much of anything about the would-be assassin, but he appears to have been a classic, Travis Bickle-like deranged lone wolf, a 20 year old kid who’d been bullied, who’d never even voted in a presidential election, and now never will. What he was pointedly NOT was a left wing devotee of MSNBC, driven to attempted murder by Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow.

TRUMPNESIA

The brilliant essayist A.R. Moxon writes that there is indeed an active political movement “which is fully dedicated to forcing us to all live in a world of easy massacres and accelerating normalized political violence. It’s our political violence party, and I’m told it is leading in the polls right now.”

In the wake of Saturday’s shooting, Moxon gave one of the most scorching assessments of this Republican hypocrisy, writing of the daily trauma of living in what he calls a bully’s paradise:

Well I’m given to understand that today and for an extremely limited time, the members of our nation’s political violence party are shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of easy massacres and normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame.

I’m kidding, of course. They’ve already decided who is to blame. It’s the same culprit they hold at fault for every other real and imaginary problem in their lives: Everybody except them.

The GOP is a party whose leaders include folks like Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who in a rant against liberals, recently told a church audience (a church audience!) that “some people just need killing.” It’s a party whose leading “think tank,” the Heritage Foundation, recently called for a second American Revolution, as Moxon writes, “to be waged by MAGA America against all the rest of us, which we were assured would stay bloodless as long as we didn’t resist.”

(W)e’ve all seen the little threats and little hopes for retributive violence, peeking out at us around any turned corner, thin blue line flags and Punisher logos and violence-celebrating car wraps and bumper stickers and “Rope. Journalist. Tree. Some Assembly Required.” t-shirts, marring a bright sunshiny day with the sudden knowledge that we share this beautiful world with people who are comforted by the idea of a coming day when they may be able to see a lot of us die, and would like us to understand that the threat they pose is real and ever-present…..and just last month the tempo of the drumbeat was massively increased when the MAGA supreme court attached a bump stock—a modification MAGA America demands as a crucial element of what they call freedom, which expresses itself as their right to kill whoever they want whenever they see fit.

But I think it’s all going to be a bit too much to take if we’re also to be blamed by the bullies who made this world for us….if these fascists, realizing that they too have to live in this world they’ve created, decide that the people to blame for this is everybody except for themselves, and that this now justifies even more violence against the rest of us.

We are in a moment drenched in irony. As Republicans clutch their pearls and fall back on their fainting couches demanding civility, let us remember that Trump publicly ridiculed Paul Pelosi, an 80 year old man, when he was beaten in the head with a hammer by a crazed right wing assailant. Many of his followers, including Don Jr. followed suit.

Let us likewise remember that he has threatened a “bloodbath” if he does not win in November.

Or that he suggested “Second Amendment people” could dispense with Hillary Clinton.

Or that he has called for the execution of government officials who leaked internal administration secrets.

Or that he told his private army of thugs to “stand back and stand by“

Or that he encouraged cops not to be “so nice” when manhandling detainees.

Or that he has proposed that thieves be shot on sight.

Or that he repeatedly called for using the US military to suppress domestic dissent, asking why they can’t just shoot protestors in the legs?

Or that he is on record calling his enemies “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of the country,” (and you know what we do with vermin, right?), promising “I am your retribution.” (To a crowd in Waco, TX no less.)

Or that he summoned a mob to murder his own vice president and various members of Congress by way of overturning an election so he could stay in power?

There is simply no analogue among the leadership of the left, not by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how much the GOP wants to gaslight us that there is, and the civilized and humane response of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to Saturday’s events prove it, yet again. So spare me, J.D. Vance.

But now that someone’s taken a shot at Donald, the Republican Party is whining at top volume, and trying to exploit the moment, as it always does. Moxon again:

The people in the political movement that openly calls for civil war have this in common with the rest of us: They apparently have a real problem with actual shots actually fired—although for them that opposition appears confined exclusively to cases where they feel they might be the target. Bullies hate to bleed their own blood.

CAPITOL HILLBILLY

I’m not even including Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate as part of this litany of recent horrors, because I don’t necessarily think that’s a plus for the GOP. Apart from buttoning up Ohio, which is already pretty damned red, what does he bring to the ticket? Does anyone except the already Kool-Aid-drunk MAGA faithful like him? I may be biased, but seems to me that a lot of Americans find him repulsive. But I am glum mainly that, for at least the next four months, at a minimum, we will have to deal with this cretin, who makes Ted Cruz look good, which I didn’t think was possible.

To that end, the main takeaway from Vance’s selection is that Trump is doubling down by picking a Mini-Me, which is a sign of how he and his party care not a whit for old school Republicans or “moderates,” and how they intend to govern if they win. As if Project 2025 left any doubt.

Dear Lincoln Project, DNC, and pro-democracy Super PACs: Please run ads 24/7 reminding us how Vance has previously called Trump unfit for the White House, the equivalent of heroin, a “cynical asshole” (physician, heal thyself) and an “American Hitler.” But for Trump, I think that’s a plus. As with Rubio and Cruz and Lady G and so many others, it’s the sadism of making former critics grovel and kiss his ring that he loves, even more than he loves the true believers who have always been by his side.

I am, however, a little surprised Vance got the nod after reading how much Trump hates facial hair. So the question is, will J.D. have to shave? And if so, how much of Trump’s semen will be in those whiskers as he shears them off?  Unless it’s Peter Thiel’s. Might need to do a DNA test.

Like Vance, I don’t have the brainspace right now to get into Cannon dismissing what is nonchalantly called “the documents case,” but is better described as the theft and withholding of nuclear secrets. Could there be a more serious crime? Only trying to overturn a free and fair election by force, I suppose, another thing the right wing judiciary seems determined to let Trump get away with. To that end, I couldn’t listen to much of the analysis of Cannon’s decision, and the alleged silver lining of potential legal avenues going forward. It’s all moot if Trump wins. For now, the point is that Cannon has now allowed him to (falsely) claim exoneration on this matter, which enhances the chances of that win.

But it’s clear that the GOP is no longer even pretending to abide by the rule of law, so certain is it of its control of the judiciary such that it can justify anything he does, and of victory in November which will solidify it, and of its chance to establish a right wing dictatorship. After all, that photo of Trump was so freaking cool, right????

Such is the level of political discourse and sophistication in this once proud country.  I’m almost afraid to wake up in the morning and see what tomorrow holds.

But I don’t want to end on a defeatist note, because they don’t call it “defeatism” for nothing. Team Trump would love for us to give up and accept his coronation as a fait accompli. Let’s make like the angry crowd at the Butler, PA rally and respond with a collective middle finger. Perhaps this shocking stretch over the past few weeks will wake some of our heretofore somnolent countrymen and women up to just how close we are to a second Trump presidency—which is to say, to the ascent of the first ever truly fascist regime in these United States.

There is still time to avert that—if we have the stomach.

********

Photo: Trump cowering beneath Secret Service agents after suffering a minor flesh wound.

Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The Crisis for Democracy Takes a Very Weird Turn

Published on by thekingsnecktie2 Comments

Well, this is a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

For the past eight years, I’ve been among the tens of millions singularly focused on getting a neo-fascist would-be despot in a red ballcap out of the Oval Office and keeping him out. Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to American democracy—at this point, file that under “dog bites man.” Approaching the 2024 election, his third attempt to take power (he’s batting .500 so far), right wing voter suppression, electoral subversion, and political violence all seemed likely to be key factors that might vault him back into office and put an end to 240 years of participatory democracy in the United States. But while a white nationalist autocracy remains very much a threat, more than ever in fact, the likely means of its ascent suddenly looks radically different.                                                         

Show of hands: who thought Joe Biden’s stubbornness would be the thing that ultimately toppled American democracy by letting Trump back in office?

I fear that’s where we’re headed unless a dramatic change takes place tout suite.

STAND DOWN MARGARET JOE

Lots of informed, serious voices on the left have continued to call for Biden to face reality and do the right thing for the good of the republic. Prominent among them, George Clooney made news yesterday with an op-ed in the New York Times politely but firmly calling for Biden to step aside. (For that matter, the Times’s own editorial board had published a similarly scathing plea only two days before. )

Naturally, conservatives will sneer (“Shut up and act!)”; the only actors who they think are entitled to political opinions are Scott Baio and Kirk Cameron. Even some Democrats will bristle at such boldness, a new high watermark for Hollywood chutzpah, especially for a party that has long been scorned for its showbiz connections. But George’s essay was eloquent, respectful, and right on target. He is leveraging his fame and influence for good, and good on him. Best of all, as an insider who just appeared at a massive fundraising event for Biden only eleven days before the disastrous debate, he could attest firsthand to the President’s diminished acuity.

Hey, maybe Clooney can be president. I’d take him over any Republican you care to name. But he’s just an actor, you say! Hell, so is Trump….in fact, Trump’s not even an actor, he’s just a game show host.

Meanwhile, Republican strategists reportedly are planning for a Trump landslide, and they might not be wrong. (Even Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, has warned of it, on national television no less.) We always assumed this race would be razor close, like the last two, even though in any rational world Biden would be winning by 30 points. (This just in: we ain’t in no rational world.) Instead we may be looking not only at a loss, but a blowout for the neo-fascist party, as gobsmacking and shameful as that would be as an indictment of the American character for all the world to see.  

For several years now, while livid at the neo-fascists of the Republican Party, I’ve also been angry at my own feckless side for mounting an insufficiently robust campaign to defeat them. But now that anger at the left has passed into a new dimension, one of utter disgust, and weirdly, it is making me slightly less furious with the right. Sure, they’re monsters. But who can blame them for taking over the country when we’ve made it so easy for them to do so? If we’re gonna commit political malpractice by sticking with Biden, the GOP deserves to win.

Down on the South Jersey shore last weekend, the oats-feeling among the denizens of MAGA Nation was palpable. Houses that in the past have flown Trump flags but had taken them down over the past few years had them back up again. Big-ass Jeeps and pickup trucks with Blue Lives Matter and Punisher decals, cruising around flying giant American and Trump flags, were far more prevalent than they have been of late, not to mention a noticeable uptick in the number of assholes yelling insults at me because of the Biden sticker on my car. There were even giant Trump flags being flown by sunbathers on the beach. (So pleasant!)

These people are clearly emboldened, convinced now that they are going to win in November and preparing for the retribution that will follow. But I shouldn’t say “retribution,” because there is nothing they have been targeted for or victimized by that they should seek retribution for. They purely want to exercise their power over those they hate. And even though they are a minority, we seem like we are foolishly going to put them in a position to do it.

WILL ROGERS, ORGANIZATION EXPERT

As I noted last week, Joe Biden deserves Olympian credit for all he has done to save the country after the nightmare of the Trump years. But if he stubbornly insists on remaining the Democratic nominee—which is to say, if we let him do that—he will destroy his legacy. In that event, as a John the Baptist-like Mark Leibovich has been saying long before the debate, and long before this view became commonplace in the Democratic Party, Joe will be remembered only for the final act of his political career, not the massive good he did between 2016 and now.

But clearly Biden himself cannot see that.

To that point, Democratic leaders were said to be as alarmed by Biden’s laissez faire, business-as-usual reaction in response to the debate debacle as they were by the debate itself, a sign that he truly did not appreciate how bad that performance was. He certainly did not mount an all-hands-on-deck campaign of damage control, and the measures he did take, like the Stephanopoulos interview, didn’t come close to repairing the damage. What could? Even if he had knocked it out of the park it wouldn’t have been enough. And he didn’t. (It was more like a groundout to first.)

The exchange with George that particularly infuriated many was this one:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you’re warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

BIDEN: I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.

No, that is NOT what this is all about.

But as my friend Aaron Naperstak says, as long as Joe gets his participation trophy…..

Far be it from me to question the political instincts of a man who was first elected to the US Senate while I was still in short pants, but Joe Biden is beginning to look like he’s suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to his assessment of the state of the race. Many pundits have noted the irony that in his belief that he alone can beat Trump (a second time), he is skirting dangerously close to Trump’s own egomaniacal “I alone can fix it” mentality.

To quote another US president: I cannot tell a lie. I am losing patience with him and his ego.

Joe is beginning to remind me of Hindenburg, another enfeebled head of state who facilitated the rise of a dictatorial monster. (Volker Ullrich fans: I know it’s not a perfect analogy. Paul was cajoled—or strongarmed—into powersharing with a despot-in-waiting. Joe seems poised, out of sheer ego and obstinance, to allow one to seize power. But indulge me.)

One narrative is that Democratic “elites” are calling for Biden’s head over the will of “the people,” whom, we are told, don’t even remember the debate! (Debate? What debate?). But as Ezra Klein and Tim Miller recently discussed, the actual evidence shows just the opposite: it’s Democratic power brokers who—thus far, at least in public—are defending Biden against a groundswell of public sentiment that, we love ya, Joe, but ya gotta go.

Is it hard to retire and leave the spotlight at the end of an illustrious career? Sure. Ask Brett Favre, or Willie Mays. But it’s not up to the player, or shouldn’t be, especially when the stakes are this high. With all due respect to Joe and all he has done for this country, we cannot let him hold the party, the election, and the country hostage. If we do, per above, we’ll get what we deserve.

INFLECTION POINT AHEAD

Before the debate, I was firmly in the camp of “Don’t knock Biden, it only helps Trump.” But after the debate, that no longer obtains. I won’t fault SNL for mocking Joe when it returns in the fall, which used to enrage me. The damage is done, and we would do well to acknowledge it and fix the problem while we can. Saying out loud that he’s a dead man walking—politically speaking—is not going to hurt him any more than he’s already hurt himself, or than pretending he can win is going to make it happen.

That said:

The time is approaching when I will stop writing screeds on this topic. If Joe Biden does not soon step aside, or is forced aside, if he is the nominee of his party after the Democratic National Convention in (gulp) Chicago next month, there will no longer be any point in bemoaning his liabilities. At that point, such complaints will in fact only do harm. If Joe is the nominee, I will STFU and concentrate on making the case that, old and doddering or not, he still represents an infinitely infinitely infinitely better choice than a openly corrupt convicted felon, serial liar, adjudicated sex offender, racist, misogynist, seditionist whose party has openly published its plans to destroy the United States as we know it.

However, I will have a hard time making that case to my snickering conservative friends who for months (years, even) have been bathing in a vicious right wing campaign to portray Biden as old and senile. That’s a hard portrait to counter when Joe goes on national TV and seems to prove it.

In the past two weeks, the people of Britain have ejected the Tories after 14 years in power, the people of Iran defied the odds and elected a reformist (by Iranian standards) who favors a nuclear deal with the US (making him saner than any Republican), and the French left and center made a sensible deal to keep LePen and her Vichy Redux party out of power. Can we Americans prove ourselves as wise and as grownup as our foreign friends?

There is still time for us to change course and get a stronger candidate atop the ticket. Soon there will not be. The proof of the wisdom of that course of action is that the Republicans are terrified of it.

If the Democratic Party can’t get its act together sufficiently to deal with this situation and do the sensible thing for itself and the country in the midst of this epic existential crisis, my middling disgust with the Party—heretofore massively overwhelmed by my Everest-sized loathing for the fascist, Trumpified GOP—will turn to open contempt. And I won’t be alone. We’ve watched the Republican party destroy itself, morphing into a death cult of personality. If the Dems botch this, and if Trump wins and has a downballot coattail effect that carries into the House and Senate (in addition to the Supreme Court he already owns), and if he wields absolute power in a second term, come 2028 there may be no more Democratic Party left to pity and mourn.

Tick tock, and watch this space.

*********

Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

SEAL Team Six

Published on by thekingsnecktie8 Comments

So let me get this straight. One party is running a presidential candidate who has been convicted of 34 felonies, is an adjudicated sex offender, summoned a violent mob to try to overturn a free and fair election, and has promised to be a dictator who would openly shred the Constitution, to list just a few items on his CV. And it’s the OTHER CANDIDATE who is facing cries from his party to step off the ticket?

Now, that may seem like the start to a “Stick with Biden” plea. It’s not. The pro-democracy movement in this country is in a five-alarm emergency. But it is a good starting point for a survey of an absolutely terrible week for the prospect that we will be able to keep the dark night of fascism from descending upon these United States.

IRONY DIED IN ATLANTA

There is no denying what happened on the CNN debate stage in Atlanta last Thursday night.

For many months the Republican Party has been painting an outrageous portrait of Joe Biden as doddering and infirm and not mentally sharp enough to be leader of the so-called Free World. I have long been among those dismissing that as pure propaganda. But Biden’s performance was an enormous gift to Trump and GOP, confirming their caricature of him in front of some 51 million viewers in a display far worse than even the most pessimistic Democratic strategist could have imagined.

There’s no need to rehash it here in yet another agonizing post-mortem. We’ve seen them all, and from all the most respected pundits.(But if you want to wallow, I recommend David Remnick, Mark Leibovich, Tom Nichols, Jennifer Rubin, Ronald Brownstein, Jeet Heer, Fintan O’Toole, Melissa DeRosa, Matt Yglesias, and even an institutionalist like Peter Baker.)

In an already razor-close race, it felt like a death blow. Biden had one job and he blew it, giving the worst debate performance ever in what some rightly called the most important US presidential debate ever. Personally, I have not felt that sick to my stomach since Election Night 2016. And it’s hard to imagine that the memory of that horrific performance will be forgotten. “It’s like seeing your grandma naked,” James Carville later said, with characteristic élan.. “You can’t get it out of your mind.”

Like many people, I felt terrible for Biden, as honorable a man as there is in American politics, subjected to this humiliation in the twilight of his career. But in terms of its implications, I feel more terrible for the republic. The United States is in danger of collapsing into an autocratic white nationalist theocracy, and thanks to a confluence of factors, the pro-democracy forces working against that outcome have mustered a champion who is not up to the challenge.

Joe Biden is a national hero. He was probably the only Democrat who could have beaten Trump in 2020, and thank god he got the nomination. Once in office, he pulled us out of a historic pandemic that had been homicidally botched by his predecessor, revived a moribund economy and brought it roaring to life better than ever, restored sanity to US foreign policy and repaired our badly damaged reputation abroad, and enacted the most progressive and successful legislative agenda since FDR, despite outrageous Republican obstructionism and a defeated opponent who had convinced some 30 percent of the electorate that Joe wasn’t even a legitimately elected chief executive. Hats off, people.

But the cold hard fact is that we need a candidate who can beat Donald Trump, a world class grifter at the head of a fanatic fascist cult that poses an existential threat to American democracy and the stability of the whole wide world. As Mark Leibovich of the New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic has long been saying, if Biden insists on running for re-election and loses—a loss that seems more likely than ever now—he will be remembered only for his RBG-like stubbornness, and the fascist darkness that he allowed to settle over the country. And we will be complicit because we didn’t demand better.

FRANK SINATRA HAS A COLD

Setting aside Biden’s performance, David Frum made the salient point that the whole premise of the debate was a farce. Why did we let Donald Trump stand up there like he was any other legitimate candidate for the White House, and not a seditionist who had led a violent effort to overturn the last election, a crime for which he is awaiting trial, and yet has the gall to ask for his old job back? (Shades of CNN’s disgraceful Trump Town Hall last year. And I thought they’d fired Chris Licht.)

Why was the first question not, “Mr. Trump, considering what you did on January 6th, not to mention leading up to it and continuing after, why should any American trust you with the presidency a second time?”

I dunno. But it wasn’t.

After the debate the Democratic Party immediately cleaved into two camps—stay the course and dump Biden—who were at each other’s throats as bitterly as the intra-party divisions over Gaza. (Just what you want in the run-up to an election.)

When it comes to the Biden loyalist argument, there are two sub-groups.

One is naïve: “Trump is awful! And Joe is right on everything substantive!”

That is the kind of statement that begs for the reply, “Bless your heart.” In other words, it’s sweet and kind and innocent, and above all, true as the day is long….but it is also utterly irrelevant. If the issue were Trump’s personal ghastliness and horrific record versus Biden’s inherent decency and policy accomplishments over the past three years, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Joe would be cruising to re-election by a thirty-point margin. But reason is not in play here.   

Yes, absolutely, Trump is the one who should be under pressure to step down. Yes, Biden stumbled but Trump spewed outrageous lies with the force of a firehose (Everybody wanted Roe overturned?) which the CNN moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, didn’t bother to challenge. But too many Americans gladly buy his snake oil, not to mention the fact that he is the head of a party of craven, power-mad bootlickers who collectively don’t have an atom of integrity among them and wouldn’t stand up to him even if he called their wives ugly and claimed their dads shot JFK. 

“Anybody can have a bad night!” the stick-with-Joe camp says. Sure. But when Obama had an infamously bad debate against Romney in 2012, he was not already being relentlessly accused of suffering from dementia.

“Joe had a cold!” Please. And the dog ate my homework, and my girlfriend lives in Canada, and Tonya Harding broke her bootlace. You think that carries any weight with the voting public?

DREW BLEDSOE REDUX

Which brings us to the second “stick-with-Biden argument,” which is a pragmatic one: “There’s no realistic way to move Biden aside for another candidate, trying it would do more harm than good, and even then that mythical replacement would probably do no better.” As Joy Caspian Kang wrote in The New Yorker (in a piece called “The Case for Joe Biden Staying in the Race”), the backup quarterback is always the most popular man in town.

This is a somewhat more persuasive argument, but not necessarily correct. It’s true that there’s never been a change at the top of the ticket this late in a presidential race. But there’s never been an opposing candidate who staged a self-coup, who was a convicted felon, or who promised to be a dictator and build concentration camps either. It’s also true that there is no obvious heir, except Kamala Harris, who presents problems of her own given the racism and misogyny she already faces, as well as logistical and procedural hurdles concerning campaign finances and such. But none of those are reasons for mulishly sticking with a losing candidate, especially when the stakes are this high.

One voice calling for course-staying has been that of Rick Wilson, of the Lincoln Project, who argued that Democrats were being weak-kneed, and that Republicans would lock arms and defend Trump even if he had shat himself on live TV. He went on to ask what would have happened to Great Britain if the British people had given up at the first sign of Nazi bomber planes over that green and pleasant land in 1940.

I like and respect Rick Wilson a lot, but I think he’s dead wrong here. Sure, if Trump had explosive diarrhea onstage Republicans would still say it was the greatest debate performance in human history……but they are speaking to an audience of Kool-Aid drunk cultists. The same Jedi mind trick does not work in the reality-based world of the left, or for swing voters. To minimize the disastrousness of Joe’s performance is suicidal denialism. And for what it’s worth, the Battle of Britain analogy is flat-out wrong. No one I know is giving up the fight against Trump—on the contrary. A better analogy would be to ask: what if Britain had no RAF in 1940, only slingshots, and still thought it could beat the Luftwaffe, and opted to stick with that plan instead of upgrading at least to rifles.

And here’s the proof: The Trump campaign seems privately terrified Biden will drop out, which is why they are acting as if it’s impossible. Republicans were crowing with delight as soon as the red lights went off at the end of the debate, but they won’t be crowing if a more electable candidate takes over as the Democratic nominee. Lara Trump told Fox News that the Dems can nominate only Kamala, which is a tell that they would love that, rightly or wrongly. She went on to say that skipping to another candidate would be a violation of “the democratic process”—which is quite a statement from the people who tried to storm the Capitol in 2021.

Of all the Joe-steps-down scenarios, an abdication in favor of the Vice President might actually be the most plausible. There have even been calls for Biden to resign before the election, which would give Kamala (some) of the advantages of incumbency. Adam Serwer made a cogent case for that in The Atlantic, as did Jeannie Suk Gerson in The New Yorker, Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times, and her fellow Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. Tellingly, Rep. Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina eminence grise who saved Joe’s nomination in 2020, tactfully told MSNBC that he would support Kamala as the nominee were Joe in fact to step down.

Will Biden be convinced to step aside, perhaps as the result of a somber, come-to-Jesus intervention by the likes of Obama, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Clyburn, Schumer, Klain, et al, not to mention Dr. Mrs. Jill, who so far seems to be very much inside the bubble? I don’t know. God knows what’s going on behind the scenes even as Democratic leaders put up a brave front. Maybe they’re awaiting the polls, which are beginning to come in and are not good. Maybe negotiations are ongoing.

Or maybe the Democrats will just move on in hopes that the debate will have little impact and be soon forgotten, that the two sides are already calcified and it won’t matter (much), that Trump’s impending sentencing will further change the conversation, that it’s all about turnout, etc etc. That strikes me as self-deluding madness, but hey, what do I know? I do know, however, that Biden’s lack of public urgency on the matter, and his all-is-well bonhomie, is reportedly making top Democrats even more concerned, as a sign of detachment from reality.

So we shall see. But I’m worried anxious nervous scared terrified.

If Joe will not stand down, I will be by his side and do everything I can to re-elect him. But in this life-or-death crisis for the republic, we progressives and Democrats and others on the left have made our task far more difficult than it had to be by running a candidate with such liabilities, and it got exponentially harder last Thursday night.

Which brings us to the other front on which American democracy—already hanging on by its fingernails—took a baseball bat to the ribs this past week.

WITH AN ASSIST FROM THE POTOMAC SIX

Trump had a very good week not just with the debate, but because the bought-and-paid-for legal arm of his campaign—er, I mean the Supreme Court—finally handed down a pair of decisions that helped him immeasurably, both in his effort to stay out of prison, and in terms of the hell he will be able to unleash should he manage to regain the presidency.

The first was  the Court’s decision in Fischer vs. United States striking down an obstruction charge used to convict hundreds of January 6th insurrectionists, and at the heart of two of the four charges Jack Smith has brought against Trump in his own J6 case. We already knew that case would not come to trial before the election, thanks in part to SCOTUS’s feet-dragging, and now, when it does, half of the charges will have been wiped away. Unless Trump is already president by that time and orders it dropped altogether.

The statue in question, 18 U.S.C. §1512(c)(2), clearly states that 20 years in prison await anyone who corruptly “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” Sounds like January 6th to me. But the court twisted itself into knots to find a way to argue that that’s not really what it says. Even Amy Coney Barrett thought that was ridiculous, and dissented. (Oddly, KBJ joined the majority, temporarily trading lunchroom chairs with ACB.)

But the second and far more reaching was the Court’s decision in what election expert Richard Hasen called “the most important case in this Nation’s history,” aptly named Trump vs. United States. That case addresses The Former Guy’s absurd claim that he is a once-and-forever king who has total immunity for everything he ever did or will do.  

Seems like a no-brainer, right? To say that the president is above the law defies the fundamental democratic principle on which this country was founded, as I wrote last March, in a piece called “History Will Shake Its Damn Head”:

It boggles the mind that the highest court in the land is even bothering with this ridiculous appeal, one that has been thoroughly debunked by lower courts, and the consideration of which poses vast dangers to the republic. But bothering it is….

At the time, the chief consequence of the Court granting cert seemed to be the delay it caused.Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, called it “the approach that helps Trump the most while appearing not to,” tweeting, “The Court effectively granted Trump immunity for his alleged crimes, regardless of whatever ruling they make later.”

But few observers thought the Supreme Court would actually endorse Trump’s imperial claim. One who did was the highly respected retired federal judge and conservative anti-Trump icon Michael Luttig, who back in March argued that the only plausible reason the Court took the case was because at least one or two justices (read: Clarence and Sam) believed Trump was in fact immune. Now Judge Luttig had been proven right, and the delay has turned out to be a sideshow compared to the astonishing decision itself.

The Supreme Court has said that a sitting US president has total immunity for any official acts he or she undertakes, no matter what the motive and even if for a corrupt purpose. That is a tectonic reinterpretation of the Constitution. (Originalism rocks, amirite people?)

The devil is in the “official acts” part. The SCOTUS’s right wing cabal knew it could not say “Presidents have total immunity.” A sixth grader knows that’s unconstitutional. So it has seized on this fig leaf, opening the door for Trump and any criminal successors (Don Jr.? Ivanka?) to claim that any given act was “official,” no matter now criminal or corrupt, and therefore beyond the reach of the law, even when those acts are patently NOT official. Good news for fans of the Unitary Executive Theory!

Back in March, my friend Scott Matthews predicted that SCOTUS would rule this way, allowing Trump to claim that his actions regarding overturning the 2020 election were part of his duties as chief executive, or at least sufficiently close, placing them in an area where presidential immunity is already settled law. (That was what—hold onto your red baseball hat—the Wall Street Journal thought, too.) Of course, it’s risible that trying to overturn an election would fall under a president’s official duties, but not inconceivable that a Supreme Court with a right wing supermajority would rule that way. It wouldn’t be the first time those folks in black robes reached in and decided a presidential election.

Here’s what I wrote back in March:

If the Court makes an honest assessment of Trump’s immunity argument, I’m betting on a 7-2 ruling against him, delivered at the very end of its term, in early July. But if the majority takes the coupmaking-is-an-official-act position, it could go 6-3 the other way.

So two cheers for me and my own prognosticatory skills.

In an incredible two-fer, the Court not only handed down this endorsement of monarchy, but with it also managed to create further delays in the Trump case by sending it back down to Judge Tanya Chutkan of the DC District Court to distinguish between immune and non-immune presidential conduct in this matter, which (ahem) is something else I predicted last March. So having already gifted the GOP by taking that case at all, when it could easily have let the lower court’s decision against Trump stand, and by taking as long as humanly possible to decide it, the Court’s right wing supermajority has now continued acting as an arm of the Trump campaign by kicking the case back down, creating further delay. Even Trump’s state-level conviction for electoral fraud in the Stormy Daniels case is now in question, with sentencing—which was supposed to take place next week—now pushed to September, so his lawyers can claim that the SCOTUS decision somehow applies to actions he took even before he was president. Chutzpah, thy name is Donald…..but who can blame him and his Republican allies when these batshit claims have consistently gone their way? (Look for Aileen Cannon to find a way to throw the Florida documents case out, too, even though much of what Trump is charged with was post-presidency.)

That is why Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society spent forty years getting control of the US justice system in the first place.

HAIL CAESAR

The impact of the SCOTUS decision on Trump’s January 6th case and other legal troubles is one thing. But the implications for a corrupt president in terms of the havoc he can wreak in office are far more chilling.

Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner called the decision “an invitation to dictatorship,” noting that “Had the Supreme Court ruled similarly on Richard Nixon’s claims of being above the law, Nixon never would have been forced from office.” Kuttner also called it another cost of Trump’s having been allowed to name three justices, writing, “The Court is now a corrupted institution and a shameless enabler of a corrupt president.”

I quibble only with the word “now.”

In her dissenting opinion—joined by Kagan and Jackson, which pointedly did not include the adjective “respectfully­— Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.”

Here’s the legal scholar Kim Wehle, in The Bulwark:

We don’t need to imagine the threats that Sotomayor is foreshadowing here. We lived through a president who acted with the mindset of a tyrant, one who stoked a bloody insurrection after other machinations to steal an election failed. At the end, even the Republicans who had tired of Trump were making the case that the legal system would serve as a check on him. 

Now, that guardrail has been significantly diminished. And the American people will be left to rely on the delusional belief that future presidents will choose to act in good faith with their own conscience as a guide rather than abuse the virtually unlimited power the radical majority just gave them.

Republicans, naturally, praised the decision, scoffing at the risks. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson actually said with a straight face: “No one who is elected (president) is going to be prone to this kind of crazy criminal activity. What the court is saying here follows common sense and, of course, our Constitution as well.”

(Pause to take in crippling irony.)

The obvious question is: Would the Court or its right wing amen corner give Biden the same immunity? Of course not.

It did not take long for progressives to seize on that idea by suggesting—in jest—that Biden should just order SEAL Team Six to assassinate Trump, since the Supreme Court had just ruled that that was totally kosher. Less tongue in cheek, some called for Biden to test the limits of this eyepopping expansion of executive power he has been given, say, by appointing ten new Supreme Court justices (we control the Senate, right?) and daring the GOP to stop him.

Or hell, he could just call the election off altogether, right?

For his part, Trump doesn’t need SEAL Team Six when he’s got six toadies on the highest court in the land happy to do his bidding and kneecap his political opponents and shield him from criminal accountability for his actions.

The Court—painstakingly bought and controlled by the American right—is shameless in abetting the march of fascism. And why wouldn’t it? A third of the justices owe their jobs to Trump, and two others who pre-dated him are even more radically in his camp. The sixth, John Roberts, seems to flatter himself to believe he’s a moderate and an honest broker (“Balls and strikes!”) while consistently bowing to the wishes of his archconservative fellow travelers, making him either a coward or so deep in his own self-delusion that he’s feckless.

If Trump regains the presidency, the Supreme Court has already given him the “steal home” sign to do whatever the fuck he wants, secure in the knowledge that he will never be prosecuted. Don’t doubt for a second that he will. You think you saw criminality and corruption and neo-fascism in his first term? The second will make that look like a garden party.

Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic:

If Trump wins, he will have the presidency Nixon wanted, one in which nothing the president does is illegal. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which aspires to staff a future Trump administration, has made clear that the MAGA right contemplates using this newfound imperial power to employ political violence against its opposition. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the far-right network Real America News. Trump’s supporters seem less to wish to govern than to rule indefinitely by force, and they believe that the Court has given them its blessing.

Eight years ago this month, the joke around Great Britain was that England just had its worst week since 1066, with the Brexit vote and a loss to Iceland (Iceland!) in the 2016 Euros. Someday we may look back on this week as the worst one America’s had since….well, the week of November 8, 2016.

KICK SAVE AND A BEAUT

Earlier this spring, Bill Kristol wrote in The Bulwark that we should not expect the courts to save us from Trump, any more than Bob Mueller or the House J6 Committee did, let alone the Senate in his two impeachments. Only we can save ourselves. “After all,” he wrote, “here the people rule.”

For now.

But we are not asking the courts to “save” us. We are simply asking them to apply the law fairly, and not act as Trump’s personal law firm.

As I wrote last March, “Maybe Kristol is right. Maybe even if all the trials are delayed, Biden will beat Trump anyway….But the ‘system’ is sure giving Donald every possible advantage to avoid that fate.”

And that is why Biden’s disastrous debate performance is so worrying. The Supreme Court has again helped Trump’s re-election prospects, and on top of that, laid the groundwork for a horrific far-right wing autocracy should he win. Are we going to throw up our hands and let that happen?

I don’t know the right path forward re the election, and smarter people than me presumably are at work on that even as we speak. But I do know that we appear to be on the verge of allowing an entirely preventable tragedy to unfold out of sheer incompetence, inertia, and unwillingness to get up and do what needs to be done.

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Photo: Six key members of the Trump campaign, Legal Division.

The Siren Song of Violence

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

Consequence Forum is an online literary magazine that, in its own words, “addresses the consequences, realities, and experiences of war and geopolitical violence through literature, art, and community events.” CF provides “the public with works and voices from around the world to promote a clearer and more nuanced understanding of what’s at stake in choosing to wage war or engage in conflict.”

In the words of Hal David, that is certainly what the world needs now.

It was my pleasure to have a piece there a few weeks ago, on the heels of some previous work over the past couple of years. What follows is a slightly expanded version of that new essay. Thank you to Consequence’s Executive Editor Matthew Krajniak and to my dear friend Alexandra Marshall for putting us together.

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The Siren Song of Violence

As we speak, two major land wars are raging in the world, involving two of the most powerful militaries on the planet, with vast assistance from even more powerful players abroad. The level of violence and human suffering is on a scale above and beyond even the already bloodsoaked baseline of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—what we typically call the postwar period. The name is proving a tragic misnomer.

The repercussions of each of these two wars, let alone the two taken together, promise to be so tectonic that they will reshape geopolitics for decades to come. Zhou Enlai-like, it is far too early even to begin to contemplate their long term consequences. But this much we can say with confidence: They have lowered the public’s threshold for the use of force as a tool of statecraft, and prompted a disturbing uptick in self-righteous, even fanatical cheerleading for killing people in pursuit of political ends.

For American observers, the war in Ukraine reignited a World War II-style righteous passion for the use military force that had largely lain dormant since the fall of Berlin. Certainly in the ensuing 79 years there had been idealistic fervor aplenty for using violence to advance the cause of democracy—to a fault, some would say, be it the starry-eyed naivete of progressivism or the self-deluding rationalization of neoconservatism—and often as cover for less noble goals. But brazen Russian aggression against Kyiv had even old hippies waxing poetic about the bravery of the Ukrainian army, adorning their windows and blue-and-yellow flags, and ending their Facebook posts with Slava Ukraini!

They were not wrong. Who could begrudge the Ukrainian people the right to self-defense against a ravenous, bullying neighbor, led by a monstrous despot? Only resort to the force of arms could defend the country, even as the craven, pro-autocratic Trumpist GOP continues to do its level best to stand on Zelenskyy’s neck and prevent that from happening.

But even among Ukraine’s American supporters, that sense of gung ho has noticeably dimmed as the war has grinded on, and the romance of blackening Putin’s eye (remember the sinking of the Moskva?) has given way to the monochromatic tedium of warfare of a nearly Great War variety. Even the proliferation of combat porn on Reddit has grown repetitive. That our solidarity with the Ukrainian people proved so flimsy did not reflect well on the self-flattering fervor of its early days.

The rise of other high-profile conflicts have also intervened—one in particular—eclipsing the sense of Ukraine as a once-in-a-lifetime global conflagration.

For sheer complexity and unyielding, often blind fervor by the two sides, the war in Gaza is surely the most Gordian political crisis of any of our lifetimes. (The Cuban missile crisis still retains the crown for most dangerous, but it lasted only thirteen days.) In the US, it has scrambled old allegiances, created odd new political bedfellows, and even thrown a highly unpredictable new element into the presidential campaign. Among its most disturbing aspects, many supporters both of Israel and of the Palestinian cause show a remarkable lack of empathy for the suffering of anyone but their own…..and that is true not only of the extremists, but of people who heretofore have been widely considered moderates.

Imagine a group of people filled with righteous anger over the injustices they have suffered. Their legitimate pain and frustration and fury is so great that they have come to believe that anything they do in retaliation is justified, to include the most terrible acts of barbarity against innocent non-combatants, little children among them. These people are quick to cite sophisticated intellectual doctrines and theories to support such action, some of which have the imprimatur of the most highbrow, moral thinkers. But the blood that is shed is just as red.

Imagine now that both parties feel this way. Imagine the rest of the world looking on and taking sides, often without a thorough and nuanced understanding of this ancient and byzantine situation.

In purely practical terms, it would have been unrealistic to expect that Israel would not respond militarily to the attack of October 7, and unreasonable to expect that it should not. The contours and duration of that response, however, are a different matter. It was not hard to predict that an overreaction by the Netanyahu government would ensue. In fact, that was surely one of Hamas’s chief goals, and it’s impossible dispute that it succeeded on that count.

Historically, young people—college students especially—have been passionate about protesting human rights abuses. For their trouble, they are frequently scorned by older generations as disproportionately idealistic, uninformed, and immature. Some of that criticism is on the mark, some not. But notwithstanding those qualifiers, just as frequently, those young people prove to have been remarkably correct. At the same time, righteous anger has frequently tipped into apologia for atrocities committed by one’s own side (adopted or otherwise). We have heard the repetition of slogans that the chanters don’t begin to understand, and the name Nat Turner evoked, and comparisons to the Vietnam-era student left, along with debates over whether such activism helps or hurts the cause, and the presidential candidates it might inadvertently elect or defeat. For idealistic and aggrieved young people especially, a Fanonist belief that revolutionary violence is justified, even required is romantic, and intoxicating….and wildly dangerous.

But maybe even Fanon is too tame. Perhaps we are in Robespierre territory.

On the other side of the divide, enthusiasm for an all-but-unrestrained response by the Netanyahu government has gripped a large section of America, cutting across traditional ideological lines. Once reliably liberal American Jews have been heard to comment on how Fox News actually makes a lot of sense. Irrationally, they have allied themselves with the far right wing of American politics—which is to say, the mainstream of the Republican Party—whose affection for Israel is transactional at best, given its simultaneous embrace of neo-Nazis. Jewish Americans who have been critical of Israel haven been vilified by some in their own community, as a vast paradigm shift is underway in both progressivism and American Jewry at large.

Across the board and irrespective of stance on Gaza, many of us have all found old friendships strained and once civil discourse turned into angry recriminations. We have been surprised by the intransigent, doctrinaire views of people we thought we knew, or with whom we presumed to have a shared worldview and set of values. Even Jerry Seinfeld, as apolitical and proudly anti-substantial an entertainer as any in the modern era, has suddenly had an ideological awakening—or alternatively, chosen to voice his political opinions for the first time—and taken significant heat for it. Even the mildest and most anodyne observation can barely be offered these days without giving offense to someone, let alone a stronger opinion—which has not stopped very many people from offering them, with varying commands of the facts.

But what is most disturbing is the casual advocacy for the use of violence, and half-baked ethical justification for it.

Without wading into a doctoral thesis-length discussion of moral philosophy, generally speaking, most people would instinctively agree that there are acts that are beyond the pale, even in a just war. That is why we have the very term “war crime.” But we need not drag morality into it. Whether one supports it or condemns it, Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign in Gaza is exposing the persistent delusion that force can solve all problems, and exposing the limits of violence as a tool of national policy. That is a simple matter of pragmatic reality separate from any moral considerations of who is right and wrong. (As if the thorniest geopolitical problem of the postwar era could be broken down into such Manichean terms.) Yet some of Netanyahu’s fiercest critics simultaneously hew to a celebration of force and violence on behalf of the other side that is just as terrible.

Ukraine provided an almost unicorn-rare example of a conflict the cleaved neatly into good and evil, as the naked aggression of one side contrasted so starkly with the valor of the other. Apart from a small—but politically powerful—pro-autocratic faction of Americans that lionizes Putin, overlapping with a miniscule group of no-exceptions isolationists, and a handful of reflexively contrarian elements, it was easy to swell with vicarious passion for the outgunned, beleaguered Ukrainian underdogs. (Unless you’re a Republican.) Almost too easy. As if made to order, the war in Gaza offered a diametrically opposed counterexample, as complicated and morally gray as possible. Yet even that assertion of grayness will rankle some, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, who point to the ghastliness of their antagonist’s actions, eliding those of their own, which only proves the complexity. Even my comment that hackles will be raised is itself likely to raise hackles. The rabbit hole is very deep.

Even calling what’s going on in Gaza a “war” is controversial. It is certainly an armed conflict between two military forces, albeit a highly asymmetrical one. Some will say that October 7 can only be characterized as an act of terrorism, undeserving of designation as a military operation, which lends it undue legitimacy. Likewise, the operational imbalance of the response, and its attendant, near-apocalyptic destruction, felt most painfully by the civilian populace, has led some to argue that a word like “massacre” is more descriptive of ongoing events than “war.”

Both arguments have some semantic merit, but both ignore the quasi-Clausewitzean understanding of war as the infliction of pain to force submission to a desired political end. Everything else is just arguing with the refs. But both Ukraine and Gaza ought to remind us that that technique does not always work, and that a self-congratulatory ruthlessness, even born of a legitimate grievance, cannot justify slaughter without quarter, by anyone, state actor or non.

Even under the best of circumstances, mankind is remarkably quick to reach for the weapons of war…..and we are currently not operating in the best of circumstances. The siren song of violence is at high volume at the moment, loudest of all in places far from harm’s way, where the human toll of the violence is very abstract and distant, where tribal allegiances—as real and as deeply felt as they are—nevertheless feel like those of passionate supporters at a spectator sport. When we calculate the casualties of the Gaza crisis, first and foremost are the very real ones, in flesh and blood. But another more abstract casualty has been the loss of perspective—and humanity—among those observing from the safety and comfort of home.

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Illustration: The Intervention of the Sabine Women, Jacques-Louis David, 1799

“Resisting The Right”—an Online Discussion

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

Next Saturday June 15, at 3pm ET, I’ll be doing an online conversation with my dear friend James Carroll regarding my forthcoming book RESISTING THE RIGHT: HOW TO SURVIVE THE GATHERING STORM, as part of Writers for Democratic Action’s Democracy Book Club.

Formed in August 2020, Writers for Democratic Action began as a small group of writers, poets, and journalists—Paul Auster, Peter Balakian, James Carroll, Carolyn Forché, Todd Gitlin, Siri Hustvedt, and Askold Melnyczuk—who believed the Trump administration to be uniquely dangerous to our society. Today it is a volunteer organization of writers, readers, editors, and booksellers with a membership of more than 3000 worldwide, standing together to champion democracy and the institutions that embody and protect it. 

The WDA is devoted to defeating Trump in 2024; to fighting the wave of book banning in places like Florida and Texas and censorship in all its guises; to connecting citizens to their bookstores and libraries; to defending civil liberties including the right to vote and to have our votes counted; and to advocating for justice and equality in the US and across the globe.

Every month, the WDA’s Democracy Book Club features a book on a pressing issue related to those matters. In the past year the Club has done talks with Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Congressman Jamie Raskin, Dahlia Lithwick, and many others. I’m honored to be included in that parade.

My book surveys the current emergency for democracy in the United States and what we can do to protect the republic from the autocratic forces that Trump represents. Out of prudence—but not fatalism—it also contemplates the “worst case scenario” of a second Trump presidency and what we can do should that dark fate befall us.

You can register to see my talk about it with James Carroll here.

Having previously previewed it in these pages, here’s another brief passage from the book, which is available for pre-order now from OR Books here in New York, and will come out next month.

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The primacy of the vote in a democratic society can hardly be overstated. Every other nightmare, no matter how horrible—whether it’s a policy of forced birth, or of kidnapping immigrant children, or of accelerating an environmental catastrophe that threatens the very future of human life—can be addressed so long as we have recourse to free and fair elections as a means to eject elected officials with whom we are unhappy. But once that is gone, democracy is gone with it.

As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes in his slim but seminal 2017 book On Tyranny, when free elections disappear, few citizens realize they are voting in the last one. That paradigm, of course, is common in many nations that succumb to autocracy. In the modern era, the demise of a democracy via an extralegal takeover, violent or otherwise, is much rarer than one that begins at the ballot box, with an authoritarian party ascending to power through legitimate or quasi-legitimate means, then slowly choking off the very mechanisms it used to gain that power and installing itself in permanent control.

 In How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer voluminous historical examples, including Mussolini and Hitler of course, but also Fujimori, Chávez, Orbán, Erdoğan, and to some extent even Putin.Almost all follow the same pattern, which involves capturing the courts, controlling the media, neutering (or co-opting) the legislature, and installing loyalists in every relevant arm of the bureaucracy. Surprisingly, control of the military and law enforcement—the chief tools of old-school autocracies—are less important, and typically fall into place once the other goals are achieved. Also omnipresent in these scenarios: vicious demonization of the regime’s critics and opponents that justifies their subjugation.

For America to go down that dark path, all that remains is for the GOP to obtain control of the US government, which it very much aims to do in 2024. When it does, it is unlikely ever to give it up.

But rare is the autocracy that needs to maintain power through total repression of a seething, resentful populace, or can. More often a Stockholm syndrome takes effect, an invitation to conspire in one’s own bondage.

“The truth about many in the GOP base (is) they prefer authoritarianism to democracy,” writes Jennifer Rubin, noting that about 26 percent of the US population qualify “as highly right-wing authoritarian,” according to a recent study—twice the number of the runners-up, Canada and Australia. In order to keep the American experiment alive, we will have to reckon with this demographic, the one that facilitates and gives oxygen to the Republican Party’s campaign for countermajoritarian power and is energized by it in return.

Autocrats want you to be discouraged. Instilling a sense of apathy and resignation is one of their favorite and most frequently reached for tricks, as they prefer a public that believes it has no power to improve its lot and can’t change things. But we do and we can—and the ferocity of their gaslighting is evidence of that power and how much they fear it. Human history is thick with examples, even with regimes far more brutal than we have yet faced in the United States.

“Ordinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives,” writes Professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor of Northwestern University. “But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence.” In fact, even in the best of circumstances, when American democracy is functioning reasonably well, change typically comes from forces outside the government putting pressure on it—which is to say, from the people. Should a truly repressive, retrograde right-wing government come to power, the onus will shift even more in that direction.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has spoken of democracy dying the death of a thousand cuts, but autocracy can be brought down in the same way. Many of those thousand cuts are in the seemingly small, quotidian actions of ordinary citizens like you and me. Our starting point is the simplest of all, which is the very way we think about what we are doing, for the psychological preparation for the pro-democracy struggle requires full-time vigilance to the ways that autocracy demands our complicity.

In On Tyranny, Snyder advises us: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” This impulse to bend voluntarily to an oppressive regime is what he calls “anticipatory obedience,” and need not even take the form of active support. It can be simple apathy, and a Niemöllerian indifference to the sound of marching boots and knocks on neighbors’ doors, and to the even almost-inaudible sound of democratic norms falling one by one.

We are often regaled with Frederick Douglass’s famous line from 1857, that “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” But it’s well worth considering the longer quote, and the context of that maxim:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The first thing to understand, then, is that the source of all political power, even in the most repressive police state, is the consent of the people.

“Obedience is at the heart of political power,” wrote the political scientist Gene Sharp in his three-volume magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), calling the submission of the citizenry ”the most important single quality of any government, without which it would not exist.” The citizens of free countries give their obedience gladly, while those living under despotic regimes give it less so. But they give it nonetheless. 

“To say that every government depends on consent of the people does not, of course, mean that the subjects of all rulers prefer the established order to any other which might be created,” Sharp continued. “They may consent because they positively approve of it—but they may also consent because they are unwilling to pay the price for the refusal of consent . . .The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.”

In other words, repression only works when the people are cowed by it.

Admittedly, it sounds naïve. How can an unarmed citizenry under the heel of a tyranny that controls all the levers of power, including a monopoly on violence as exercised by the police and armed forces, possibly avoid submission? 

In his own epic history of nonviolence, The Unconquerable World (2003),Jonathan Schell writes of the delusion “that the foundation of all state power is force,” arguing that it is a confusion of police power with political power. “Terror, even as it keeps its practitioners in office for a time, destroys the foundations of their power,” Schell argues, contending that “each time the  Soviet Union used its tanks to crush a rebellion in Eastern Europe, it was diminishing its power, not increasing it.” Even Clausewitz, Schell writes, was of the opinion that “military victories were useless unless the population of vanquished army then obeyed the will of the victor”—a formulation that calls into question the very definition of victory itself.

But let’s not stop with Clausewitz, an admirable enough figure as far as Prussian generals go. Even Adolf Hitler, the very model of the most monstrous totalitarianism, declared that occupying a conquered nation was largely a psychological matter. “One cannot rule by force alone,” he wrote in the midst of subjugating much of Europe in July 1943. “True, force is decisive, but it is equally important to have this psychological something which the animal trainer also needs to be master of his beast. They must be convinced that we are the victors.”

Sharp then asks a bold question: What happens if the people refuse to accept militarily successful invaders—or domestic oppressors—as their political masters? His conclusion is that “noncooperation and defiance by subjects, at least under certain conditions,” has the power to thwart those rulers, and even destroy them.

“If this is true,” Sharp asks, “then why have people not long since abolished oppression, tyranny, and exploitation?” The answer, primarily, is that “The subjects usually do not realize that they are the source of the ruler’s power and that by joint action they could dissolve that power”—and tyrants have every reason to keep them from so doing. As we have just observed, inculcating a sense of resignation, hopelessness, and despair in the citizenry is the ruler’s greatest tool. Sharp goes on to cite the South African philosopher Errol E. Harris that, consequently, a public subjected to despotism “become[s] its accomplices at the same time as they become its victims. If sufficient people understood this and really knew what they were about and how to go about it, they could ensure that government would never be tyrannical.”

“A nation gets the government it deserves,” Harris wrote. That is not to blame the victim or to allege weakness, only to say that a despotic regime can only remain in power if the citizenry is unwilling to mobilize sufficiently against it (without underestimating how difficult that mobilization might be). That is bitter pill for any nation to swallow, but it can also be inverted. If it is only the complicity of the ruled that enables their oppression, that acquiescence can also be withdrawn. Therefore, it is within the power of the oppressed to be the means of their own salvation. 

 It is this understanding that is central to any American defiance of an autocratic right-wing regime that might arise under Donald Trump and/or the Republican Party. We are the majority, and power flows only with our consent, which we have the capacity to withdraw.

It Does Matter

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Last night I was proud to be a New Yorker.

Actually, I’m proud of that most of the time. (Exceptions: Kitty Genovese. The ’95 Knicks.) But I was especially proud when twelve brave and honest ordinary New Yorkers had the courage to do what the Republican-controlled US Senate would not—twice…..what the entire craven, erstwhile GOP has been unwilling to do….what the US justice system at large had been unable to do for more than 60 years, and that is hold Donald J. Trump accountable for a few of his many crimes.

While Congress and the federal judiciary are mired in the grip of the neo-fascist Federalist Society, New York State got ‘er done, as they say in Real ‘Merica. So hats off to that jury, and to Alvin Bragg and his team, and to Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over this fraught case masterfully and fairly, despite constant attacks from the defendant and his army of brownshirt wannabes.

What follows from here is anyone’s guess, but for one fleeting moment, we got a W. Which is more than the Knicks managed in Game 7 of the ’95 Eastern Conference Semis.

FLORIDA MAN CONVICTED

As David Leonhardt of the New York Times succinctly put it this morning, the long of the law has finally come up with Donald Trump. After 77 years of outrageously undeserved good luck, combined with a Roy Cohn-like willingness to manipulate the system, and all the benefits that obscene inherited wealth and privilege bring, not to mention a cult of fanatics and one of our two major parties defending him, he was no longer able to dodge at least this one situation.

Leonhardt:

(Trump) has spent decades on the edge of legal trouble. First, he was a New York businessman whose company violated discrimination laws, failed to repay debts and flirted with bankruptcy. Then, he was a president who impeded an investigation of his 2016 campaign, tried to overturn the result of his re-election defeat and refused to return classified documents he took from the White House.

Throughout, his central strategy was the same: delay. Try to push off legal problems for as long as possible and hope that a solution somehow presented itself. It usually worked, too. And it seemed to be on the verge of working again this year, with two federal trials and one state trial in Georgia all unlikely to finish before Election Day.

Yesterday, however, a criminal jury judged Trump for the first time. The verdict was guilty, 34 times, pronounced late in the afternoon in downtown Manhattan. The prosecutors argued that Trump had falsified business records to hide a sexual affair from voters and corrupt the 2016 election. After two days of deliberation, the 12 jurors agreed. Trump has become the first former president of the United States to be a convicted felon.

Barring a reversal on appeal, or some weird intervention by the Supreme Court (don’t rule it out), Trump will now carry the scarlet F for the rest of his miserable life. That’s especially important as this looks to be the only one of Trump’s multiple criminal trials that will take place before Election Day.

And the beauty of it is, because this is a state conviction, even if Trump somehow goes on to win the presidency despite this historic stain, he can’t pardon himself because it’s not a federal case. (So let’s keep a Republican out of the governor’s mansion in Albany, shall we?) Apparently he could, however, sue to have the conviction vacated on the grounds that imprisonment would keep him from fulfilling his constitutional duties as president. But we’ll cross the Francis Scott Key Bridge when we come to it.)

Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois), excommunicated from the GOP for opposing Trump and serving on the House J6 Committee, wrote in The Bulwark:

It is a sad day for our nation….this isn’t a point of pride. Despite this verdict, America still looks like so many struggling democracies, where strongmen violate laws and bend the system to their will. The anti-Trump coalition, this uneasy and awkward alliance, must stand together, united to defend the sanctity of our system and the presidency.

He’s right of course. But at the same time, it is a point of pride that we were able to overcome the Republican gaslighting and Trump’s own legal maneuvering and at last hold him accountable in a court of law, the way most reasonable nations do with corrupt former leaders. (See; France, Italy, South Korea, Peru.)

Trump now faces 20 years in prison:. (That’s four years apiece for each of the 34 charges, to be served consecutively, not concurrently, though New York state has a 20 year cap.) Of course, with no prior convictions, and a non-violent crime, and at his advanced age, it’s unlikely he’ll do any time at all. Still, it’s sobering. And let’s not forget that the judge who will decide his sentence is a man whom he has spent weeks attacking and insulting. His family members too.

There also remains the principle that the boss of a conspiracy deserves at least as much punishment as his foot soldiers. Michael Cohen got three years for his role in this exact scheme….and he expressed remorse and cooperated with prosecutors, neither of which Trump did in the slightest, of course.

So we’ll see on July 11. Meanwhile, the Times reports: “Before sentencing, Trump will sit with a psychologist or a social worker and have a chance to explain why he deserves a light punishment.” What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall in that room, a scene that is BEGGING to be a “Saturday Night Live” sketch….except that what Trump will say is already beyond parody. Witness his rambling, unhinged speech at Trump Tower the morning after the verdict was announced.

I know a lot of people—Trumpies, and even non-Trumpies, and a number of hardcore anti-Trumpies—have pooh-poohed the New York case as trivial. It was a “mere” hush money trial, involving a porn star, and did not exactly have the epoch-shattering gravitas of the Florida documents case, or the January 6 case in DC, or even the election interference case in Georgia. Right?

Wrong. This is not a “hush money” case, except insofar as that payoffs were part of election interference. Which is how we should always always always—correctly—frame it. The whole case hinged on the fact that the payments to Stormy Daniels were designed to avoid damage to Trump’s presidential campaign. If it were just about hiding a one night stand from Melania, he would have been acquitted. This case was anything but trivial. It is of a piece with the election interference cases in Georgia and DC.

THE ART OF THE (IM)POSSIBLE

So that’s the legal end of it. Politics is a different matter.

There is of course a lot of wild speculation about whether the convictions will hurt Trump, help him, or have no effect. In the words of Tevye, I’ll tell you:

I don’t know.

But first of all, it doesn’t matter.

Just like the impeachments which we correctly carried through with despite the fact that we knew there would be no convictions by the cowardly Republican-controlled Senate, Trump has to be held accountable for his various crimes if we have any hope of maintaining the rule of law in this country. That is true even if his convictions have no effect on the election: we do not pursue criminal prosecution for political purposes, no matter how much Trump and his fans want us to believe that we do. That’s what they do.

I would even go so far as to say we had to pursue this prosecution even if we knew or feared that conviction would help Trump politically, again, just as we did with the impeachments. Because in long run, doing otherwise would be worse for American democracy. Please recall: Trump’s two impeachments, even absent convictions, did not cause him to be re-elected as Republicans had warned, Br’er Rabbit-like.

So, having just said that the as-yet-unknown political fallout of yesterday’s events doesn’t matter, let me simultaneously argue that it does. Very much.

Because regardless of what people say, genuinely or with an agenda, it’s kind of a big deal when a former US president is convicted of 34 felonies. Democrats and other anti-Trump forces should shut that from the rooftops and never let the Republican Party or American voters forget it.

What will Trumpists say? They’re already saying it: that it was a sham trial, politically motivated, orchestrated by Biden, blah blah blah. All lies, and total projection of what they want to do. But let’s not let them get away with that and control the narrative. We have to counter it with our own message, which is the truth. And you can tell that Republican leaders are afraid of that truth because of the desperate ferocity of their outrage over the verdict and their pathetic efforts to show Donald Trump how much they are on his side.

POLL POSITION

For some time now polls have shown—remarkably—that a small but significant number of would-be Trump voters have said they would abandon him (or at least consider abandoning him) if he were convicted of crimes. That always surprised me. Why would that be the thing that changed their minds after sticking with him through so much else? Especially when one could easily see MAGA Nation chalking a conviction up to the Deep State unfairly going after him, which is exactly what Donny & Co. pre-emptively claimed, and have doubled down on overnight?

Yet now that it’s happened, we’re instantly seeing a Joey Chitwood-style, screeching rubber, tire-smoking 180 to the received wisdom that of course it won’t have any effect.

The pessimism is understandable, because we’ve been burned before, over and over. There have been so many things over the past nine years that should have sunk Trump, beginning with “McCain’s no hero,” all the way through Access Hollywood, revelation of the Stormy Daniels incident itself, Russian interference in 2016, wanton corruption while Trump was in office, the Zelenskyy call, telling people to drink bleach, and on and on all the way up to and including an attempted coup. So we can be forgiven for being beaten down, and jaded, and—Charlie Brown and the football-like—bearish on the notion that this at last will be the camelback-breaking straw.

But it might be. And we shouldn’t forfeit the chance to make it so. If not, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is exactly what the right wing would like.

Here’s Bill Kristol in The Bulwark:

Inflection points don’t inflect themselves. We have to act to make certain moments inflection points.

Later on, long after the struggle is over, commentators will say this or that moment was an inflection point. But it only became an inflection point because people at the time, in real time, made it an inflection point.

So Trump has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of 34 felony counts. But it’s up to the rest of us to make sure our fellow citizens know this, understand this, grasp the significance of this. It’s up to us to make sure Trump and his apparatchiks don’t succeed in gaslighting Americans about this.

The coming weeks—and there only about 20 of them before Election Day—are uncharted waters, and promise to be rough ones. (Eddie would go? Yeah. But in this case, we are all Eddie, and we have no choice.) No one knows how any of it will shake out, including the consequences of yesterday’s verdict.

But one thing we should absolutely not do is cede the fascists an advantage and downplay how damning yesterday was for Donald Trump, and the starker-than-ever electoral choice that is now before the American people.

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Photo: Justin Lane/Pool Photo via AP

Grilling The King’s Necktie

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This month marks seven years that I’ve been writing this blog, and with mathematical convenience, my 300th essay in it.

It has been my great pleasure—and therapy—to vent more or less weekly lo those many years, and I am grateful to everyone who has supported this labor of love and self-care on my part….by which I mean everyone who reads it, or even just diplomatically moves it into the trash folder every week without bothering to unsubscribe. Your kindness and tact are much appreciated.

To commemorate this anniversary, I’m turning the tables and letting myself be interviewed by my good friend Isabella Tuttisanti del Barilla, the renowned Italian photojournalist, internationally famous sunglasses designer, award-winning amateur pastry chef, and professional parkour competitor. (Good luck at the 2028 Olympics in LA, Isa!)

Edited for clarity and vetted against libel by The King’s Necktie’s crack legal team of Saul Goodman, Esq. and Dewey Cheatem & Howe LLP. (Note to self: This month’s retainer is overdue.)

TLDNR

ISABELLA TUTTISANTI DEL BARILLA: It’s nice to see you again, Bobby. It’s been what? Three years?

THE KING’S NECKTIE: Yes. Since Kuala Lumpur, and “the incident.” You in the clear now?

ITdB: Yes, the doctor gave me an ointment; thanks. And thank you for asking me to do the interview. Do you mind if I smoke?

TKN: I’d prefer if you didn’t.

(She lights up.)

ITdB: So what made you start writing this blog?

TKN: Concern for my own mental health, mostly. When Trump came to power….I hate to say “elected,” because I don’t dispute that he won the Electoral College, or that that’s the super fucked up way we choose our presidents, but I don’t want to suggest that a majority of Americans voted for him. Just enough to make it happen.

Anyway, when Trump came to power my head was at risk of exploding with every passing day and every new outrage, so after a few months I needed a way to let off that steam. Luckily, the Internet exists, or I’d be standing on street corners handing out mimeographs.

But when I started writing this thing in May of 2017, it felt self-indulgent to me—like, who gives a shit what I think? But I really didn’t care, because I was so angry. So I began writing the blog primarily just as catharsis, and I figured if anyone other than me got anything out of it, that was a bonus. I’m a big Peter Greenaway fan, and back in the ‘90s, at a Q&A at the San Francisco Film Festival, I heard an audience member ask him about the accusation that he makes films only for himself. And Greenaway looked surprised, and said. “I think it’s the height of arrogance to imagine that one makes films for anyone but oneself.“ That’s my ethos too, with this blog.

I do feel a little embarrassed still, but I can’t stop. Or more precisely, I should say that I am unwilling to stop. If I didn’t let off that steam, I’d go nuts.

Does that answer your question?

ITdB: Sorry—I nodded off. What were you saying?

TKN: Just that—

ITdB: Where did the name come from?

TKN: I’ve always been fond of the quote that appears on the masthead, ever since I first read it years ago, but I was under the impression that it was from Edward Abbey. Then I learned that wasn’t the case. Apparently when he was the editor of his college literary magazine at the University of New Mexico in the Twenties, he’d used that it on the cover of an issue and attributed it to Louisa May Alcott, for the sake of sheer absurdism, I presume. After I learned that, I was under the mis-impression that the quote was really from Diderot, the French Enlightenment philosopher. But then a  sharp-eyed reader informed me that it was really Jean Meslier—another Frenchman—who was an apostate priest turned atheist in the early 19th century. But I like the original Louisa May Alcott joke. For a long time, about once a month I’d get some wiseacre writing to tell me it wasn’t Alcott, so finally I put a disclaimer in the fine print saying, “Yes, I know it was really Meslier.”

ITdB: Yes, but isn’t it a little violent? The imagery? Especially in these fraught times?

TKN: I hear you. When I started the blog, as angry and upset as I was about Trump, the idea of political violence in the US wasn’t really a worry. Obviously, the quote is just a somewhat tongue-in-cheek quip about the insidious power of despotism and organized religion, which frequently go hand in hand, you may have noticed. But after January 6, talk about stringing up political leaders doesn’t feel so metaphorical, or distant anymore. So I’ll admit it makes me a little uneasy now. But at this point, the brand is what it is.

ITdB: Everyone has their reasons, right?

TKN: Right. So why shouldn’t I? Like the bit in Catch-22, where they ask Yossarian about his request not to fly any more missions: “Suppose everyone felt that way?” And he answers, “Then I’d be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”

ITdB: One of the things about this blog is that it’s a bit….

(pause)

TKN: Long-winded?

ITdB: I was going to say exhausting. Have you ever thought about writing shorter pieces?

TKN: What do you mean?

(Long, uncomfortable pause)

I kid. Yes, of course. Lots of people have suggested that. I’ve tried it, on occasion and I understand the advantages. But the whole point of this blog was as a place for me to vent without any adult supervision, and without the editorial hand that’s on me in all my other work—for the good, usually. That includes both work-for-hire and my own stuff, where my agents and editors and publishers often press me to be briefer, for my own good. The blog, by contrast, is deliberately and unabashedly self-indulgent in that regard. But my feeling is that nobody’s under any obligation to read the whole piece, or any of it. So I’m happy with this paradigm.

ITdB: But don’t you think shorter pieces would be…..you know, better. And have more reach, and more impact?

TKN: Yes. How’s that for brevity?

Also, the speed at which I write doesn’t give me a lot of time to reflect on a piece and cut it down before posting. Like Mark Twain said, “Pardon the long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

ITdB: I think it was Louisa May Alcott who said that.

BLOGGER WALKS INTO A BAR

ITdB: Speaking of which, what about the humor in the blog? Personally, I don’t find you very funny, but I’m told some people do.

TKN: (annoyed) Awaiting your question, Isa.

ITdB: The question is, what do you say to the complaint that the jokes—“jokes”—detract from your credibility, and represent a lack of seriousness?

TKN: Well, first I would say that humor and seriousness are not antonyms. You can use humor in a deadly serious way. In fact, Ferne and I have spent a lot of time delving into that area. But semantics aside, I understand the critique.

ITdB: Awaiting your answer, Roberto.

TKN: The answer is that the humor is integral to the style. In my book, Resisting the Right, which is about to come out, I indulge in it less, for that very reason. The tone is similar, but I don’t veer off on absurdist asides, and I’m generally a little more sober.

ITdB: Not a quality you’re known for in your personal life.

TKN: Funny. And they say Italians are humorless.

ITdB: What about the criticism that you’re just preaching to the chorus—

TKN: Choir.

ITdB: …..or worse, doing harm by actively insulting and alienating people who aren’t as anti-Trump as you are?

TKN: I never set out to reach Trump supporters. That’s not what this blog is about. It’s about rallying our side. I wanted to commune with kindred spirits, and exchange information, and organize, and keep up morale. It’s purely a cheerleading task—as Jacques Servin of the Yes Men describes what they do. I didn’t intend to reach across the aisle and change the minds of any Trump supporters….and I think it’s safe to say that, as far as I know, I haven’t.

At this point I think very few Trump supporters are persuadable anyway, and I don’t wanna spend my time trying. I know there is a small sliver of folks in that squishy middle who might go one way or the other, and I know they might be pivotal in November, so I’m glad somebody with more generosity and patience than me is trying to woo them. But that’s just not what I do.

ITdB: But aren’t you doing harm by alienating them? By feeding their sense of snotty liberals who look down on them?

TKN: I suppose. But are they really reading this blog in the first place?

ITdB: Probably not. Even I don’t read it, and I hate Trump.

TKN: Compliment received. But man, I am really sick of being told to walk on eggshells so as not to offend Trump supporters. Fuck that and fuck them. They damn sure don’t worry about offending us. I don’t think it does democracy any good to infantilize these people and not call them out for their outrageous and destructive anti-American bullshit, or pretend that they’re good faith actors or that the things they’re saying and doing are “legitimate political discourse” and not an active attempt to put an end to the republic. That just plays into their game, which is the deceitful subversion of the democratic process.

When it comes to the contemporary Republican Party—which should rightly be renamed the Trump Party, by the by. I don’t think the “GOP” deserves that title, or the legacy of Lincoln, and I say that as someone who, in his youth, was a registered Republican. It’s the Trump Party now, and we should call it that.

ITdB: Focus, babe.

TKN: What I’m saying is that when it comes to the contemporary Republican-slash-Trump-Party, we are not dealing with rational actors or a legitimate political party any more. We’re dealing with a radical insurgency that intends to exploit the very means of democracy in order to destroy it, all the while shrugging and feigning innocence, or worse, acting like they’re the real defenders of the Constitution and the principles this nation was founded on, and not neo-fascist white nationalist theocrats. And we should not let them get away with that bullshit.

ITdB: (smiling) Now that’s what I came for: vintage King’s Necktie. A very on-brand diatribe.

TKN: One tries.

ITdB: Any concerns about self-righteousness?

TKN: A few. But you don’t have to be perfect or blameless yourself to notice that the next guy is a monster. Or idolizes one.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE, SANS IDIOTS

ITdB: Do you ever go back and read your old essays?

TKN: Rarely. Drunk dialing old girlfriends usually doesn’t end well. But I admit, I do occasionally have a reason to pull up an old post, and I’ll read a bit, or skim it.

ITdB: And?

TKN: And I usually find some nice stuff, but I’m also often embarrassed at what obviously should have been cut. To circle back to your earlier point about brevity.

ITdB: OK, so sticking with just people who are predisposed to share your politics: what has the reaction to the blog been over the years?

TKN: It’s been amazing, and I remain really humbled by that—

ITdB: I would take issue with the word “humble,” or that you can claim to “remain” that way….

TKN: —I’ve just been surprised at how many people read it, and the positive feedback I’ve gotten. I have some diehard supporters who I commune with every week online, people who I know only through the blog. And then sometimes I’ll run into an old friend, or even a casual acquaintance, and they’ll tell me they read it every week and love it, and I can tell from their comments that they really do. That always astounds me, because of course I have no idea how it’s landing with most people. A few people have told me, “Your blog got me through the Trump years,” which like I say, is a huge part of what I set out to do.

I’m actually shocked that so few people have unsubscribed—only a handful, literally less than ten, and I’m equally surprised which ones they were. I think there must be a substantial number of folks on the distro list who are too polite to hurt my feelings, and just dutifully move it to the trash every week.

But people have been so supportive. For example, I have a wonderful woman named Gina Patacca who is a professional copy editor who voluntarily edits it pro bono every week. Bill Moyers became a fan and a promoter of the blog, and even began publishing some of my essays on his own site, so that was a huge thing for me. I’m honored, and in his debt.

ITdB: How did that come about?

TKN: The blog was sent to him by a mutual friend, the great Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Bill Jersey, who’s now 96, and who’s been a friend and mentor to me since I first left film school. So as the saying goes, “It’s not what you know, or even who you know, but who knows you.”

Ferne has been the most supportive of all. You’ve heard of a golf widow? She’s a blog widow. Sometimes she’ll see me staring off into space while we’re in line at the supermarket or something, and she’ll say, “You’re writing your blog, aren’t you?” But she couldn’t be more supportive, which means a lot, because she’s a much better and smarter publicist for the blog than I am.

ITdB: You’re lucky to have her.

TKN: I know.

ITdB: Any haters?

TKN: Oh yeah. I’d be falling down on the job if there weren’t. Occasionally some Trumper stumbles across it. But less of that now than in the early days, which either belies the conventional wisdom that the algorithm seeks to create conflict, or confirms the other conventional wisdom that it silos people and trades in confirmation bias.

ITdB: What essay drew the most fire?

TKN: The most—and most hateful—pushback I got was for a couple of posts about gun violence in 2018, in the wake of Parkland. Even my essays about abortion have not been met with that kind of vitriol….though those two demos overlap a lot, which is worrying in its own right.

But it was a real glimpse into Bizarro World, with right wingers attacking me and saying crazy shit, like claiming I’d never been in the Army, for example. Which I assure you I was. But you don’t have to take my word for it, because Uncle Sam keeps records. Unless you want to believe they’re forged too, as part of some grand Illuminati-brand conspiracy.

ITdB: Let’s not rule that out.

TKN: Plenty of folks don’t. After all, lots of records were destroyed in a mysterious fire at ARPERCEN in the ‘70s.

RESISTING THE RIGHT

ITdB: So has writing the blog fulfilled your expectations, the ones you had when you started it?

TKN: Oh, yeah. Exceeded them. It’s let me develop a different set of muscles than I use as a screenwriter, which has been my main gig for more than twenty years. And it’s led to various opportunities, which I’m very grateful for.

ITdB: Perfect segue. Do you want to plug your book?

TKN: Does Rose Kennedy own a black dress? If I can’t plug it on my own blog, where can I plug it?

The book is called Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, and it’s being  published by OR Books here in New York. It’s available for pre-order now and will ship at the end of June. It’s a kind of “worst case scenario” guide for what to do if Trump retakes power, and we find ourselves living under a right wing Christian nationalist autocracy, which a second Trump term would be.

ITdB: Jesus Christ. I don’t even want to think about that.

TKN: But we have to.

ITdB: So it assumes a Trump win is a fait accompli?

TKN: Far from it. I am guardedly optimistic that we will prevail, if we stay focused. The book aims to help us do that, and then contemplates what we can do if we fail. I think it’s only prudent to plan for all contingencies. That’s something I was trained to do in the Army—both in the infantry and in military intelligence—and I’ve tried to apply that mentality to our current political crisis.

So the first part looks at the current state of play and how we got here, and what we can do before November 2024 to shore up our democracy and prevent a Republican return to power. In that regard it goes way beyond Trump, because even if he were to drop dead at the defendant’s table in a Manhattan courthouse tomorrow, the fascist movement will carry on.

The second half looks at how to respond if the worst does befall us, and is structured as a handbook for ways Americans can push back across a range of areas: civil disobedience, economics, journalism, public health, education, religious organizations, the arts, and even interpersonal relations, among others.

In writing it, it was my privilege to speak to loads of highly experienced and eloquent folks and to try to distill their expertise and recommendations, from Rev. Norvel Goff, Sr., who was a deacon at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, at the time of the 2017 mass murder there, to Zoharah Simmons of SNCC, who was a legendary leader in the Civil Rights Movement; to MacArthur winners Jon Else and Dave Isay; Rabbi Michael Berenbaum; Tim Heaphy, who was the lead investigator for the House J6 Committee; Jacques Servin of the Yes Men; Tom Hall of the Back Row Manifesto; Shantal Palacio of the New York State Department of Education; the political strategist Jim Bernfield; the journalist Eric Alterman; the incredible James Carroll, who graciously wrote the foreword; and many others. It also draws on the work of folks like Gene Sharp, Saul Alinsky, Maria Ressa, Masha Gessen, Hannah Arendt, Tim Snyder, and so many more.

ITdB: I don’t mind telling you, Bob, I hope we don’t need your book and it sits on a high shelf and gathers dust.

TKN: Me too. But as I say, American authoritarianism isn’t going away—it has been with us in one form or another since before even the founding of this county, and it’s a safe bet that it always will be. In that regard, I would describe the book more broadly as a manual for defending democracy. And that’s a never-ending struggle.

Two other things about it that I want to mention, if I may.

ITdB: As Barack Obama told Mitt Romney, please proceed.

TKN: In the book I discuss how “resistance” is really the wrong word, per Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, who wrote that the forces of human rights and democracy are not the ones “resisting.” We are the mighty river that authoritarians and their supporters are trying to dam.

Similarly, “Gathering Storm” is in the subtitle to allude to ‘40s fascism. But like “resistance,” the word “survive” is misleading. Because my prescription is not just for survival, and a return to the status quo ante, meaning pre-2016, pre-Trump politics, but how to get on the path to something better—something closer to a true democracy, which the US has always aspired to, very ostentatiously, but never truly achieved for all its citizens.

ITdB: You mean, to build back better?

TKN: To coin a phrase, yes.

ITdB: Then I hope you sell a whole library of books, and that no one ever needs them.

THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN (BUT I HAVE A ROUGH TREATMENT)

ITdB: So how long are you going to keep this up? The blog, I mean.

TKN: Well, after the 2020 election a lot of people asked me if I was going to keep writing it. I think that was a common feeling at the time—that we’d ejected this motherfucker from power, and now things would get back to normal. But I never thought that would be the case, or that it would be safe to relax.

I’ll admit, though, that I didn’t think the nightmare was going to continue at this intensity, and even get worse, in terms of the danger we’re facing, I didn’t expect that a guy who summoned a mob to try to overthrow the government by force would stand a 50-50 chance of being returned to power. But what did Mencken say about underestimating the American public?

ITdB: And after November? What’s the future of the blog then?

TKN: Well, if Trump wins they may come kicking down my door, so I dunno. I don’t flatter myself to think that mine will be the first house they’re gonna visit, by the way; I think I’ll have a few weeks while they go after The Nation and The New York Times and The Bulwark and MSNBC first. But I do think free speech and criticism of the government is going to be a lot more fraught if that nightmare comes true. A lot.

But even if Joe wins, I think a violent white nationalist insurgency is here to stay, including its political arm, which is to say, what we used to call the Republican Party. So I don’t anticipate hanging up my blogging spurs any time soon.

ITdB: So you’re going to keep writing this thing until you die?

TKN: Or until fascism in the USA is put down for good like the rabid dog it is. Though that’s an insult both to rabies and to dogs.

So whichever comes first, yeah. I’d put my money on death.

********

Illustration: Photo by Ferne Pearlstein, taken at Grand Army Bar in downtown Brooklyn, April 5, 2024.

Behold Democracy’s Last Stand

Published on by thekingsnecktieLeave a comment

The Supreme Court will surely reject Donald Trump’s absurd claim of total immunity for any crimes he committed while president, right???

That’s what all the experts have been telling us for months. Even after the Court made the brow-raising decision to hear the case at all—rather than letting stand a definitive lower court ruling that slapped down this Hail Mary argument, which it could easily have done—and even after it took as long as possible to take up the case and schedule oral arguments, aiding Trump immeasurably with that delay, we were still told over and over that the justices—even the shamelessly partisan right wing ones—would ultimately do the right thing.

They had to, right? They’re not stupid people, unfamiliar with the Constitution. They have lifetime appointments and are not beholden to Donald Trump, even though he put three of them in their jobs. They might be believers in a revanchist right wing ideology, but they couldn’t possibly be that shamelessly partisan…..right???

The better question is why we continue to be so naive. The NFL may have changed the kickoff rule, but Lucy is still pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, and like Chuck, we seem to fall for it every time.

Here are Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, both of them savvy, veteran Supreme Court observers, describing the self-soothing reasoning:

There were promising signs: (The justices) had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote).

We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

That was the collective delusion. The only question now is when we’re going to wise up and recognize what is right before our eyes:

That the archconservative majority that controls the US Supreme Court is a corrupt arm of a neo-fascist movement.

Hyperbole? I’ll gladly eat crow if that turns out to be the case, come June. But oral arguments yesterday do not bode well.

PARTISANO

Lithwick and Stern’s piece was one of the best on yesterday’s terrifying shitshow, so I’ll put this in cruise control and let them take it for a bit. (Wake me in a few.)

After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends.

This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act…..They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.

Echoing a thought experiment about SEAL Team Six posed in the lower court hearing, Trump’s counsel, John Sauer, told Sonia Sotomayor that, under the right circumstances, the president could legally order the US military to assassinate a political rival. Similarly, he told Elena Kagan that a president could order the military to mount a coup, again, if the right circumstances arose. What those circumstances could possibly be he declined to explain.

Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis tweeted: “Unbelievable that Supreme Court justices who see forgiving student loans, mandating vaccines, and regulating climate change as a slippery slope toward tyranny were not clear-eyed on questions of whether a president could execute citizens or stage a coup without being prosecuted.”

Elections expert Marc Elias tweeted: ”I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the US Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”

And here’s Edward Luce of the Financial Times: “Still can’t quite digest that a former and possible future American president is telling the supreme court that he should have immunity to kill political rivals. Utterly surreal.”

But according to Trump’s argument, almost EVERYTHING a president falls within the scope of the his official duties. (Hell, even the Pope doesn’t get that kind of authority, but has to be deliberately speaking ex officio to be considered infallible.) But as Justice Sotomayor asked, if everything a president does can be classified as an “official act,” what was Nixon’s pardon all about? Tricky Dick certainly agreed. “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” as he infamously told David Frost. But he still took he pardon, didn’t he?

Trump, of course, has long believed that he (and he alone) is above the law, both as a private citizen and as president. “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president,” he said in 2019, during the Mueller probe of his collusion with Russia over the 2016 election. No one disputes that this megalomaniacal malignant narcissist thinks that. But for the Supreme Court to agree? When you’re a star they let you do it, I guess.

That belief has not prevented Donald from embracing the opposite tack when it served his needs, of course. Lest we forget, in his second impeachment trial, in January 2021—the one stemming from his actions on January 6—Trump’s own lawyers argued explicitly that the proper avenue for adjudicating the charges against him was post-presidential criminal prosecution, by way of dodging the more pressing threat. “After he is out of office,” said one of those lawyers, Bruce Castor, “you go and arrest him.”

But that was then.

It’s impossible to imagine this Court responding positively if it were Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton arguing that they had absolute immunity to do whatever they wanted as president. (In fact, the same Republicans who are on Trump’s side in this case just recently tried to impeach Joe Biden). And in the wake of a SCOTUS decision in favor of Trump, you can be sure that no future Democratic president—if there are any, or any free elections at all in  America—will ever be allowed to make the same defense, without the Court finding (or inventing) some loophole why it doesn’t apply to them. The one thing you can count on is that the Court will frame its ultimate decision in such a way that Biden is not able to avail himself of that same imperial authority, only Donald Trump or some other Republican successor.

SEARCHING FOR THE REAL KILLERS

But “what the president does” did not seem to be on the docket yesterday, only the actions of his foes.

“Five justices sent the message, loud and clear,” wrote Lithwick and Stern, “that they are far more worried about Trump’s prosecution at the hands of the deep-state DOJ than about his alleged crimes, which were barely mentioned…..(T)he court has now signaled that nothing (Trump) did was all that serious and that the danger he may pose is not worth reining in. The real threats they see are the ones Trump himself shouts from the rooftops: witch hunts and partisan Biden prosecutors.”

Much-respected retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig remarked, “The Court and the parties discussed everything but the specific question presented.” Several times when the special counsel’s advocate, former Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben, wanted to talk about the specifics of this case, and of Trump’s conduct, the right wing justices insisted he go back to hypotheticals carefully constructed to bolster their own pro-imperial position. (Gee, I wonder why.)

In fact, the right wing justices seemed singularly focused on avoiding any mention of the pertinent facts of this case, such as Trump’s own actions for which he is criminally charged, or—speaking of future presidents—the fact that he is again running for the highest office in the land.

“I’m talking about the future!” Kavanaugh declared at one point to Dreeben, pitching himself not as Trump’s human shield but as a principled defender of the treasured constitutional right of all presidents to do crime. (We’re sure whatever rule he cooks up will apply equally to Democratic presidents, right?)

Nixon, too, famously professed not to be acting not out of self-interest, but on behalf of future presidents. Trump has echoed that farcical claim. Justice Neil Gorsuch actually said: “I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.”

Which is more appalling: that he’s “not concerned about this case”—that is, the one before him—or that he thinks the DOJ is the real danger here?

Sam Alito even made the Orwellian argument that total immunity is necessary to prevent future presidents from committing illegal criminal acts:

“Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”

The mind reels. (PS The defendant in question is not a president who headed off into a peaceful retirement, or even left office peacefully at all, but one who tried to mount an autogolpe and has since encouraged his followers to political violence even as he runs for the White House yet again.) So Alito is worried that the threat of a post-presidential prosecution would have a chilling effect on presidents who wanted to commit crimes while in office? I suppose that’s correct—and, like all deterrence, intentional.

Is there a genuine risk of overzealous prosecutors going after a genuinely innocent former president for partisan reasons? Sure. But it has never happened in 235 years of American democracy. Very much the contrary, in fact: there has been an extreme reluctance to charge former presidents with anything, even when they have in fact committed major crimes.

You know what has happened in our history, though, and very recently? A president trying to overturn an election by means of a violent self-coup. And that guy is still out there, and seeking a return to power. Which danger do you think is more real and pressing?

But none of that matters to the Court’s right wing cabal.

FALL OF A FIG LEAF

The night before oral arguments, Never Trump conservative Tim Miller of The Bulwark suggested on MSNBC that the right wing supermajority on the Supreme Court‑—including a justice whose own spouse helped foment this very insurrection—was playing a cowardly and deceitful game that would enable it to maintain a patina of legitimacy by ultimately rejecting Trump’s absurd claim to total immunity, but only after it helped re-elect him. Like many, Miller suggested that not even these Unitary Executive Theory-friendly justices are willing to endorse a completely imperial presidency. (Hell, Joe Biden might get ideas!) But they are moving as slowly as possible—not to mention the consideration of that claim in the first place—in order to aid Trump’s bid to regain power after that they can reject it with an Alfred E. Neuman-like “What, me worry?” shrug of faux innocence.

After oral arguments, however, I am forced to take a far darker view that the Court may not even bother with that fig leaf, but will simply agree with Trump’s outrageous neo-fascist assertion.

It’s true that it’s notoriously difficult to parse how a Supreme Court decision will go based solely on the justices’ questions. (Some, such as George Conway, have specifically counseled caution on that front, and even offered cause for optimism.) The justices may well have been engaging in some wild-ass thought experiments in order to shape the contours of this very grave matter, on the way to a rational and clear-eyed decision. Or not.

But it may not matter.

Even if the Court ultimately rules against Trump, the delay (and further delays it might cause by sending the case back down to Judge Amy Chutkan for further clarification) have already been a massive gift to Trump and his cause. For that matter, so was the mere matter of dignifying his claim in the first place.  

Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU, an expert on authoritarianism, tweeted: “Folks, whatever the Court does, having this case heard and the idea of having immunity for a military coup taken seriously by being debated is a big victory in the information war that MAGA and allies wage alongside legal battles. Authoritarians specialize in normalizing extreme ideas and involves giving them a respected platform.”

Were there any bright spots? Only a few. At one point, Trump’s own attorney admitted that some of his acts related to overturning the election were “private,” opening the door for Smith’s prosecution to proceed even if some charges will be thrown out. But the delay alone could still be deadly to the special counsel’s case, to say nothing of depriving the American people of a verdict before they go to the polls.

It is ironic that Trump benefited—again—from the justice system’s generosity the very same week that Harvey Weinstein had his conviction for sexual assault in New York state thrown out on what some would say is a technicality, though others believe it is a more substantial issue of jurisprudence. (The good news: he still faces 16 years in prison in California for a separate rape conviction.) The system sure is good at meticulously protecting the legal rights of rich and powerful white guys, the more horrible the better. In fact, Ronan Farrow has already written of the ways in which the New York court’s logic in overturning the Weinstein conviction might also help Trump get off. As it were.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK

Over the past years, we have been shocked time and time again by the unthinkable coming true, from Trump’s election in the first place to the court overturning Roe. But we should not have been shocked by any of it, because it has been telegraphed far in advance. The same thing is happening now with the immunity claim.  

It is fitting that SCOTUS is arguing this issue even as a perma-scowling Donald Trump sits petulantly at the defendant’s table in a New York State courthouse in Lower Manhattan, on trial for election interference in the form of hush money payments to a porn star, and his illegal efforts to hide those payments from the authorities. (Chutzpah Hall of Fame: Trump even tried to take the payments as a tax deduction. Very on brand.)

But Trump certainly does not want to be at that defendant’s table, as his Resting Asshole Face shows us every day. He does not think the law applies to him the way it does to ordinary mortals, which is how he has lived his whole miserable, entitled life, and more or less what his lawyer in the J6 case argued before the Supreme Court. Much as he would like to stay home eating cheeseburgers and watching Fox and Friends, however, he can’t just not show up in court, because for the moment, he is subject to the rule of law. If he didn’t turn up, some New York State Troopers would come knocking on Trump Tower and haul him down there in cuffs.

The image of Trump sitting at the defendant’s table and scowling (when he’s not nodding off or farting) is a reminder that, for the moment, the rule of law still pertains in the United States. But if he has his way, he will never be a defendant in a courtroom ever again, nor held accountable for anything at all. And a lot of people—including some in black robes (and some in white ones) are working very hard to help him achieve that goal.

If Donald Trump wins the election and regains the White House in November, you will never again see a picture like the one that illustrates this essay, because Donald Trump will squash all criminal proceedings against him and his allies, pardon the January 6 insurrectionists whom he summoned to try to overthrow the government, and operate as the head of state who is above the law and can do whatever he wants.  

COURTING DISASTER

Of the four criminal trials that Trump is facing, the NYC trial will likely be the only one that will take place before the election, or maybe at all, since it concerns crimes he (allegedly) committed before becoming president. In fact, it concerns crimes he (allegedly) committed in order to become president. If the Court rules in his favor, the DC, Georgia, and Florida cases may all be thrown out.

Therefore the Supreme Court decision on Trump’s immunity claim may prove a pivotal nail in the coffin of democracy. At the very least, it is a damning statement about the dysfunction of our political and legal system, largely owing to deliberate sabotage by the American right wing going back to the time of Newt Gingrich if not before. As Liz Cheney wrote in a New York Times op-ed when the Court first agreed to take this ridiculous case, “It cannot be that a president of the United States can attempt to steal an election and seize power but our justice system is incapable of bringing him to trial before the next election four years later.”

Oh, but it can be. If the archconservative members of the Supreme Court—three of who were put there by that individual—want it to be.

But even if Trump—incredibly—skates out of this jam the way he has so many near-death experiences before, the failure to lock him up will not be the final word. As we all know, even conviction and incarceration—though richly deserved—in and of themselves would not be enough to keep him out of the White House, by law. Only the voters can do that. Notwithstanding the title of this essay, the New York trial not really democracy’s last stand, nor is the J6 case, nor Florida nor Georgia; it is but one in a series of events that collectively comprise that die-in-place defense. The really pivotal one will be on Election Day.

Because in the end, the courts will not save us, any more than Mueller did, or the Senate did in two impeachments, or the House Committee on January 6 did, and we would be foolish to count on them to do so. The only people who can save American democracy are us—the American people—at the ballot box in November.

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Photo: A disgruntled criminal defendant on trial in Lower Manhattan, April 2024. Credit: Getty Images.