Tag: donald-trump

Resisting the Right: A Handbook

Published on by thekingsnecktie2 Comments

Writing this blog for the past seven years (but who’s counting?) has been a profound experience for me, and kept me from losing my mind during the madness of the Trump era and beyond. Nota bene: That madness is far from over. In fact, we’re heading into one of the most fraught phases of this ongoing existential crisis for American democracy.

Case in point, this week Trump called for Russia to attack our NATO allies, which prompted  headlines reading: “Biden is old.”

To that end, the blog also led me to write a book contemplating the worst case scenario of a return to power by The Former Guy and/or the Republican Party, which are now one in the same—a kind of handbook for resistance as we face down the very real threat of American fascism. That book, RESISTING THE RIGHT, to be published by OR Books, is now available for pre-order (click link here), and will ship early next month.

RESISTING THE RIGHT does not resign itself to defeatism or the alleged inevitability of a right wing triumph. Far from it. Rather, it lays out the state of the current crisis, how we came to this pretty pass, and what we can do to prevent the arrival of the autocracy that Trump promises. As a matter of simple prudence, it then looks ahead, not only to how to survive and resist a second Trump regime, but how to overcome it and reclaim participatory democracy in the USA. In the process, it contemplates not just restoring the status quo ante Trump, but ways we can actually make this country better, and build a true democracy that thus far has been largely aspirational for many.

November 5, 2024 is just nine short months away. It’s not hyperbole to say that if things go badly, it may be the last free and fair election we ever see. It’s up to us to prevent that, and to gird ourselves for what comes after. Like the man says, work for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

Here’s an excerpt from RESISTING THE RIGHT’S first chapter.

HOW TO TELL WHEN YOUR HOUSE IS ON F–KING FIRE

Historians have it easy compared to fortune tellers. With the luxury of time and hindsight, it’s relatively simple to connect the dots of what is past; why do we even hand out academic degrees for the people who do that? It’s harder to grasp the contours of events while they are unfolding—the task of journalists—and even harder to predict what will happen next—the task of prophets. But sometimes one finds oneself in such a state of eyepopping emergency that only the somnolent or willfully blind, or the gleeful perpetrators of that very emergency, can deny it.

We Americans are in such a moment right now.

The two-party system under which the United States has operated since roughly 1854 has its shortcomings, but for almost 170 years it has at least provided political stability, if not the best possible public service to the full spectrum of our citizenry. Its most glaring flaw—and inherent danger—becomes apparent, however, when one of those two parties openly rejects representative democracy. Over the past 55 years, and rapidly accelerating in the last seven, the Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of belief in democracy, representative or otherwise, engaging instead in an overt assault on the fundamental principles of the American experiment.

This assault is unprecedented in this country by a major political party, and one aimed at permanent control of these United States. Not two years ago, the undisputed leader of the erstwhile Grand Old Party fomented a violent self-coup in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Far from repudiating that attack, the party has since embraced it, defending it as “legitimate political discourse,” lionizing its perpetrators, and alternately downplaying its violence or insisting it was a false flag operation—sometimes both at once.  More importantly, the party has also shielded the senior leaders of that autogolpe and used every available lever to thwart efforts at accountability, including aggressive manipulation of the courts and of Congress. When that has failed, it has turned to brazen defiance.

Even before Trump, the GOP was already engaged in a methodical, decades-long, and highly successful campaign to game the mechanisms of the electoral system to its advantage, through gerrymandering, voter suppression, obstructionist abuse of parliamentary procedure, and a flood of money, among other methods. But now that campaign has reached a chilling new level, as the party has successfully convinced a majority of its members, about 70%—about 30% of the electorate—that the last presidential election was stolen from its candidate. In the process, it has deliberately undermined public faith in the integrity of the election system, with terrifying implications for future votes.

To justify all this, the Republican Party has mounted a propaganda campaign that has swept up tens of millions of Americans who believe that all these measures are necessary, even heroic, in order to “take our country back.” Many of them have stated that they are unwilling to stop there, and would support violence to achieve their ends, if necessary.

As I write these words, the GOP is bluntly announcing that it will not accept the results of future elections unless it wins. Having failed at overturning an election in 2020, it has set about taking control of the electoral process upstream so that no such drama will be necessary in the future, a kind of pre-emptive putsch of an even more insidious order, enabling it to deliver victories to its candidates regardless of the will of the people. Under the Orwellian pretext of preserving “electoral integrity,” it is instituting restrictive new rules for voting, and intimidating election officials in order to replace them with Republican loyalists empowered to reject ballots, turn away voters, and otherwise skew the results. It is full of officials at all levels who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden is the rightful president and who refuse to commit in advance to respecting the results of their own elections. To that end, the party is very deliberately focusing on offices that control the vote itself—governors and secretaries of state in particular—as well as members of Congress who might have the final say in any disputes, and the judges who would adjudicate those disputes, including a Supreme Court where it already holds a 6-3 supermajority.

The Republican willingness to go to such extremes is driven by its own existential dilemma, which is a kind of terminal diagnosis. Even as the number of our fellow Americans who are comfortable with right wing radicalism remains alarming, demographics are trending heavily against them. The researcher David Atkins, who runs the qualitative research firm The Pollux Group, reports that “the country is becoming more diverse and more urban every day. Americans under 40 are overwhelmingly progressive. This is the present and future of America.” Unable to win the popular vote in a presidential election (Republicans have done so only once in the last eight elections), and with these trends moving inexorably against them, the GOP has only two options:

1) Change its platform to attract more voters, or

2) Cheat.

No one who has observed the GOP’s wanton lack of principle over the past decades ought to be surprised that it has chosen Door Number 2.

In a free society, reasonable people can disagree and advocate for their positions in the marketplace of ideas using legitimate political discourse that does not involve bear spray. But once free elections have been compromised, and the citizenry no longer has recourse to the vote in a credible way, that society is in a state of dire emergency. “A democracy can survive intense policy disagreements over taxes, government benefits, abortion, affirmative action and more, “ as The New York Times’s David Leonhardt writes. “But if the true winner of a major election is prevented from taking office, a country is not really a democracy anymore.”

BULLET-DODGING AS A WAY OF LIFE

Is it really that bad, you ask? After all, the 2022 midterms were widely seen as a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism, an announcement that Americans were tired of the circus, tired of the politics of grievance and divisiveness and incivility, tired of waking up every morning asking “What fresh hell?”

It is true that the electorate turned back Big Lie candidates up and down the ballot in almost every major race. Even Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist, told Fox News that “The MyPillow-ization of the GOP has been a disaster.” One might think such a result might even spur self-reflection within the Republican Party itself. But it did not.

Did anyone really believe that the epic thumping that the GOP took would cause it to come to its senses? As Tom Hall of the political blog The Back Row Manifesto asked, would Republicans really be “chastened into good governance and policies and tack to the center”? On the contrary: even as it was made abundantly clear that the American public by and large does not want Trumpist candidates, the seditionist faction of the GOP will exert even more power going forward, because the so-called “normie” branch of the party made a Faustian bargain with them from which it cannot extricate itself.

In a nation that clearly yearns for small “d’ democratic rule, a party that has thrown its lot in with the global autocratic movement represents a clear and present danger. Electoral defeats render such a party more dangerous, not less, because it knows it will continue to be defeated at the polls and must pursue an alternative strategy.

The much-welcome victory of democracy in the midterms, therefore, is far from the end of this threat. All those election deniers, White nationalists, and would-be theocrats are all still out there, along with a great many kindred spirits. Next time, they may not leave their fate to the will of the American people. The Republicans are like a gang of bank robbers who have brazenly boasted of their plans to knock over the local savings and loan. It does us no good to relax because they have not done it yet.

Even if they are somehow prevented from cheating or from gaming the system, the Republicans will almost certainly regain power sooner or later by simple law of averages.

David Atkins has written of what he calls “thermostatic behavior,” meaning the reliable urge among the American electorate to “throw the bums out.” In an elegant December 2021 piece for Washington Monthly, Atkins laid out in clinical prose how, in “layman’s terms, the electorate grows cranky and dissatisfied for reasons often out of government’s direct control (gas prices, a pandemic, economic fluctuations, and so on), and the party out of power gains an advantage accordingly. Voters of the dominant party become complacent even as the opposition grows angrier and more determined.”

In short, even in a fair system, history suggests that one way or another the Party of the Big Lie will eventually win sufficient power to take control of American governance—if not in 2024, then in 2028, or 2032. That they are willing to rig the system in order to do so, or even openly defy it, only increases their odds of success. What makes that eventuality so terrifying is that the Republican Party has made it clear that, if it does succeed in regaining power, it does not intend to surrender it ever again.

As Atkins writes: “Democrats would need to win every single election from here to prevent the destruction of democracy, while Republicans only need to win one. And the American system is set up so that Republicans will win sooner or later, whether fairly or by cheating . . . Blue America needs to start thinking about and planning for what ‘Break glass in case of emergency’ measures look like—because it’s more likely a matter of when, not if. It not only can happen here; it probably will happen here.”

In 2024, we may well see the GOP regain control of the White House and both houses of Congress. It already has control of the House, and appreciable command of the judiciary at all levels, including the US Supreme Court, with its supermajority of archconservative justices and their lifetime appointments—three of whom are only in their fifties. It also already controls a majority of governorships and state legislatures (including 23 “trifectas,” or full control of both chambers and the governorship), and in many cases, the crucial position of secretary of state as well.  Even as it is losing the demographic battle, its structural advantages in the electoral system allow it to maintain this edge and give it a real possibility of extending it. Perhaps that will occur legitimately, through the thermostatic effect and general American dumbfuckery, or perhaps through electoral suppression, chicanery, or sheer brute force. But when it does, barring internal reforms for which not even the most starry-eyed optimist could hold out hope, the GOP will do its damnedest to install permanent, unvarnished, White nationalist, Christian supremacist authoritarianism in America.

THE DEVIL—YOU KNOW

Should he win in 2024, Trump has made no secret of his plans to institute what can, without exaggeration, be called a dictatorship, and to rule in an unconstrained, vindictive manner that will make his first term look like a garden party. In fact he is campaigning on it, playing to the deep-seated right wing attraction to the so-called strongman, for whom such plans are a feature not a bug. Should he lose, he is sure to insist the election was fraudulent, further inflame his followers, and do still more damage to our democratic system.

The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb reminds us that Trump was no more the creator of the rancid stew of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, kleptomania, and general sadism that animates the contemporary GOP than he was the developer of the real estate properties, frozen steaks, Chinese-made neckties, and vodka on which he slapped his name as a private businessman. All were rife within American conservatism long before his arrival, and as Cobb writes, “there is no reason to believe that his absence would cause them to evaporate.”

When Trump launched his political career, he latched onto that toxic strain in American culture and it embraced him in return: not just a pre-existing menagerie of right wing radicals who have long been at war with the US government—Second Amendment nuts, sovereign citizen adherents, and neo-Nazis among them—but also garden variety suburban reactionaries who moved comfortably in polite society. Trump “promised to return his constituents to an imaginary past in which their jobs and daughters were safe from brown-skinned immigrants,” Masha Gessen has written, one “in which the threat of what Trump called ‘radical Islamic extremism’ was vanquished or had never existed, in which white people did not have to treat African Americans as equals, women didn’t meddle in politics, gay people didn’t advertise their sexual orientation, and transgender people didn’t exist.“

That promise was a fantasy and a lie, of course. As Cobb observes, “it has always been apparent that everything Trump offered the public came slathered in snake oil,” but “fixating on the salesman misses the point. The problem is, and always has been, the size of the audience rushing to buy what he’s been selling.”

Trump, as has been noted ad nauseam, was never the cause of the Republican descent into madness, only a symptom and accelerant. Did Donald Trump make us worse as a nation? Undoubtedly. But then again, he was never sui generis: we are the soil from which he sprang, and the ones who hoisted him to the heights which he attained. His racism, misogyny, apathy, sloth, and hubris reflected the worst of a country that liked to see only its best. A nation that put this man in power was not a nation that could remotely claim to be in good health. One that is considering putting him in that position again is even more unwell.

Trumpism has undeniably conquered the GOP and that sickness will carry on with or without him. Ten percent of Americans in favor of right wing autocracy is not heartwarming, but it is manageable. Thirty percent, which is roughly where we currently stand, is considerably more worrying.

The threat to the very heart of representative democracy in America could hardly be more dire. We are in the political equivalent of a housefire, and there can be no ignoring the flames licking up the walls and beams and rafters all around us. Perhaps we will get lucky and the fire will die out, but the laws of physics tell us that that is not likely…. particularly when there are enthusiastic arsonists pouring gasoline on the blaze.

SLEEPER CELL

Over our nearly 250 years as a sovereign state, Americans have come to take long-term political stability in this country for granted. We are lucky in that regard, and spoiled.

But autocratic elements have been in play in the US since the very founding of this country, varying from region to region and in prevalence and measure, largely aimed at vulnerable minority populations and women (not a minority), usually defined by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, political belief, and place of origin.

In an October 2022 piece for The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that “for most of this country’s history, America’s democratic institutions and procedures and ideals existed alongside forms of exclusion, domination and authoritarianism.” Dating back to the 1890s, “close to three generations of American elites lived with and largely accepted the existence of a political system that made a mockery of American ideals of self-government and the rule of law.” Black Americans who suffered under slavery and under Jim Crow, and then under various other forms of bigotry, discrimination, and oppression—including horrifically violent terrorism perpetrated both by state and non-state actors—have been waging a resistance movement in this nation for more than four centuries. Women, who got the right to vote barely a hundred years ago, were long barred from full participation in the work force, in the military, in athletics, and in numerous other aspects of American life. To this day, they earn only se venty cents on average for every dollar that men do. Gay people, trans people, Jews, Muslims, adherents of other faiths, atheists, immigrants . . . the list of marginalized and openly oppressed communities goes on.

In short, the American promise of “liberty and justice for all” has long been only aspirational….or less charitably, a hoax perpetrated by the privileged classes who had access to those things and did not much care that others did not. What is new in our current moment is the expansion of that autocracy to the broader culture, and to populations that heretofore have escaped its impact.

But the corollary to the long history of autocracy within the American experiment is that resistance to it is not a wheel in need of reinvention. We can draw on the experience and efforts of generations of brave and determined Americans who have fought oppression and injustice throughout our country’s history, and similar movements across the globe.

This is not to say that we should give up on trying to prevent an autocratic takeover; not by any means. But while we are working to stop that outcome, it would be foolhardy not to prepare contingency plans for the worst case scenario. Even if the United States manages to avoid the ascent of autocracy in the near term, we will almost certainly have to confront it sooner or later, so long as the Republican Party remains committed to its autocratic experiment, and a fanatical minority of tens of millions of Americans support it.

But let us be clear and precise in our terms.

In the Trump years, “the resistance” became a commonplace rubric for everyone opposed to that administration, from inveterate left-wingers to anti-Trump Republicans who, for decades prior, had been part of the GOP mainstream. But in September 2018, during the dark heart of the Trump era, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, published a landmark New York Times opinion piece called “We Are Not the Resistance” in which she argued that resistance is a “reactive state of mind,” one that can cause us to “set our sights too low and to restrict our field of vision to the next election cycle,” rather than keeping focused on the broader goal. “(T)he mind-set of ‘the resistance’ is slippery and dangerous,” she wrote. “There’s a reason marchers in the black freedom struggle sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ rather than chanting ‘We Shall Resist’.”

More broadly, then, Alexander argues that the entire view of the pro-democracy movement as “resistance” is backward. Her argument is for a much more far-reaching and sweeping kind of change, rather than the mere eviction of Trump and the reversion to a status quo ante that, while preferable, remains deeply flawed and similarly susceptible to the rise of similar threats in the future.

“A new nation is struggling to be born,” Alexander writes of the United States in the present moment, “a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters.” The fight against autocracy, therefore, is not a defensive one, but a pro-active one, to create a better world for all, and in it we have the numbers and human nature on our side, no matter how much our foes would like to convince us otherwise. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in December 2021, quoting Alexander (who was herself using the civil rights hero Vincent Harding’s metaphor), we are not the resistance at all, but rather, “the mighty river they are trying to dam.”

This handbook will examine the state of the current crisis, the events that brought us to this precarious point, the likely scenarios we can expect, and what can be done to forestall such a grim turn of events. It will contemplate possible permutations of Republican autocracy, and offer a range of contingencies in response across a broad spectrum of arenas: protest and civil disobedience, economics, the media, education, organized religion, medicine and public health, governmental institutions, the arts, and interpersonal relations. It will also consider the systemic long-term measures that can be taken to reclaim the republic and inoculate it against autocratic assault in the future.

We are a nation that, perhaps to a fault, prides itself on its fortitude. Now is the time to prove it. Most American—White ones, anyway—”have long had the luxury of relying on the mechanisms of official power to protect us from the sinister forces that would do us harm and undermine our free and open society. That is not the norm in most of the world, nor for large chunks of our less fortunate countrymen. As a nation, we now find ourselves in that harsher, more bare-knuckles realm.

We better begin acting like it.

********

Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, published by OR Books, is available now for pre-order, shipping in early March.

Who Needs Voter Suppression?

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

“Pure democracies are not the way to run a country,” former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Penna.) told Newsmax last November after voters in his home state and elsewhere protected abortion rights via ballot measures that made the rulers of a would-be Gilead hoppin’ ass mad.

File under: Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud.

But for once, the vile Mr. Santorum—last seen in a hissy fit after LGBTQ+ activist Dan Savage co-opted his surname for biological purposes—isn’t entirely wrong. When we leave governance to the will of the people, we open ourselves up to some bad decisions as well as good ones.

Case in point:

There have been polls of late showing Biden and Trump in a dead heat, and some showing Trump actually winning. One in particular—a credible one from NBC, just this week—is especially worrying, as it has Trump widening his lead slightly since the last NBC poll, taken in November.

Needless to say, it is absolute insanity that the American people would seriously consider putting this human shitstain on the underwear of mankind back in power. (Speaking of santorum.) But here we are.

And these polls are not a matter of the archaic and anti-democratic Electoral College either: they show Trump winning the popular vote in a head-to-head rematch. To be fair, there are also polls—like a recent one by Quinnipiac—showing Biden in the lead. But that it’s close at all is mind-boggling.

Of course, the polls can be wrong. Famously, they were dead wrong in 2016, but not in sanity’s favor. And to hang our hopes on that slim thread would be foolhardy to say the least.

Some of Trump’s support can be attributed to the calcification of American politics along tribal lines, not to mention a right wing propaganda machine that would make a certain Herr Goebbels doff his cap. But you can’t con a man who doesn’t want to be conned. The fact of the matter is that a disturbing percentage of our fellow Americans are cool with Trump’s return to power.

Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about the Republican effort to suppress the Democratic vote, and to seize control of the electoral process to ensure that the GOP wins even when it loses. But none of that really matters when sufficient numbers of our fellow Americans are perfectly happy to put Donald J. Trump back in office, the cost to democracy, to the United States’ standing in the world, to human lives, and to AAWOKI be damned.*

(*America As We Once Knew It.)

Who needs voter suppression when you can get people to vote for a tyrant of their own free will?

DEFYING GRAVITY

So WTF is wrong with America that we’re at this pretty pass?

The great Tom Nichols, who is both a columnist for The Atlantic and a professor emeritus at the US Naval War College, addressed this question just this week, in a piece called “The Weirdest Presidential Election in History.” It might as easily have been titled “The Scariest.”

Nichols wrote of “an unserious nation” facing “dire choices,” and marveled at “a reversal of the laws of political gravity, mostly because so many American voters are now ruled by vibes and feelings rather than facts.”

By any standard, Biden’s first term is perhaps as consequential and successful as Ronald Reagan’s first four years. With achievements including holding together a NATO coalition in the face of genocidal Russian aggression and an economic soft landing almost no one thought possible, Biden should be running far ahead of any Republican challenger—and light years beyond Trump.

But he ain’t.

The economy is booming, yet Americans stubbornly continue to believe it’s terrible, and that Trump would handle it better, even though when he was in charge he basically gave the store away to the rich on the backs of working and middle class people.

The economy, Nichols writes, “continues to torment (Americans) with its low inflation, low unemployment, declining mortgage rates, and high growth”—what the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last  calls a “mass economic delusion,” that seems beyond the powers of Democratic messengers to correct. Nichols adds that he also suspects “many Americans have not yet internalized the dangers of a second Trump term.” What worries me is that they never will.

It’s true that there is often a lag before good economic news translates into voter approval for a sitting president, and that may yet happen. But something more is in play here. Biden is not getting the benefit of the accomplishments of a normal POTUS because America has become so irrationally hyperpartisan and tribal—and so bludgeoned night and day and day and night by the right wing propaganda machine—that it overwhelms reality. Forget alternative facts—half of America is living in a permanent alternative reality, or what we not so affectionately know as Earth 2.

Trump has openly declared that he wants the economy to crash in order to help his fortunes. (Hey GOP voters: that really sounds like a guy who has your best interests at heart, right?) But he may not need that, because the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

And Joe has other problems too. Nichols:

(A) lot of Democrats, especially younger people, have turned on Biden because of the war in Gaza, This “President Superman” problem afflicts both parties, but if angry Arab and Muslim Americans put Michigan in play—another challenge for the fractious prodemocracy coalition the Democrats hope to create—then Biden’s loss to an anti-Muslim bigot would be among the greatest face-spiting nose removals in political history.

The Republicans, however, have completely departed Earth’s orbit and are now plunging headlong into the destructive black hole of Trump’s personal needs. In the past week, the GOP has moved along toward a Trump coronation, and they have been trying to help Trump’s later general-election chances by hamstringing solutions to the border crisis and holding up important foreign-aid packages—all while the military situation in Ukraine worsens and US and allied forces carry out strikes in Yemen.

House Republicans were even willing to tank an immigration bill that had been agreed upon by both parties and gave them just about all the hardline, heartless xenophobic BS they wanted, just because Trump told them to.

So after years of complaining that Democrats wouldn’t do anything about what Republicans claimed was an existential crisis at the southern border, the GOP itself prevented Congress from doing anything about it, just because they hope it will help Donald win back the White House. Wow.

Nichols again:

The House GOP’s obstruction, however, is beyond partisanship. Republicans are threatening to harm the country and endanger our allies merely to help Trump’s reelection chances, obeying a man under multiple indictments and whose track record as a party leader has been one of unbroken losses and humiliation.

Trump, of course, cares nothing for national policy. He has also clearly abandoned any pretenses about democracy, a position that might seem less than ideal heading into a general election, which is likely why Trump’s campaign has tried to ridicule concerns about its candidate’s commitment to the Constitution. But the former president’s footmen can’t help themselves, and they continue to trumpet their hopes for a dictatorship.

Luckily for the GOP, for a lot of their voters that’s a feature not a bug. On the Sunday morning talk shows recently, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ninth Circle of Hell)—auditioning for the VP spot on the Trump ticket—told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Trump ought to just defy the Supreme Court if it issues decisions he dislikes. And he did it in snide, condescending terms—including repeatedly saying “George,” like he meant “Vermin”—until “George” cut him off in mid-sentence and went to commercial.

Scuzzy as it is, Vance’s calculation that this sort of thing is exactly what the MAGA base wants may not be wrong. Because hardcore Trump loyalists don’t really want a democracy anyway, and their “mainstream” GOP enablers are happy to go along, while Low Information America apparently doesn’t care.

ROBIN HOOD IN REVERSE

Joe Biden is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” But when it comes to that alternative, plenty of our countrymen don’t seem to think a lifelong con man and pathological liar who has been found guilty of sexual assault and is under indictment on 91 separate criminal charges sounds too bad. So my faith in the judgment of our fellow Americans is not super high.

MAGA hardliners are one thing; they are impervious to reason. Republican cynics like Vance and Tim Scott of South Carolina and accommodationists like Rep. Nancy Mace of SC (to name but a few) are also beyond help. But what I am most worried about are ordinary Americans who are not otherwise predisposed to sign on for fascism, and who should be alarmed by the prospect of Trump’s return, but are not.

By way of saying he would be fine with a second Trump administration, the odious Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, went on CNBC and made a series of assertions that were howlingly wrong on a purely empirical basis. (Trump was right on immigration? On NATO? On tax reform? I guess it depends on your definition of “right,” and on whether or not you’re Stephen Miller, Vladimir Putin, or Ebeneezer Scrooge.) And the CNBC anchors went along with and even happily nodded in agreement.

But the fact that many of the ultra-rich support Trump should come as no surprise. the idea that anyone else thinks he ought to be president, or would be good for their pocketbook, is nucking futs.

The main achievement of Trump 1.0—not counting kidnapping and caging children and killing people by the hundreds of thousands in the pandemic—was a massive tax cut for the wealthy that added about $1.7 trillion to the deficit that conservatives claim to care so much about. (That’s trillion with a “t” that rhymes with “p” and that stands for “plutocracy.”)

The economic plan for Trump 2.0 is the same, financed with a tariff, which as Matthew Yglesias explains in his Slow Boring newsletter, would mean “raising taxes on the poor and the middle class in order to finance a tax cut for rich people. It’s cartoonishly evil.”

(“Cartoonishly Evil,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer points out, would make a hell of an accurate campaign slogan for Trump, should “Make America Great Again” wear out its welcome.)

Yet that fact, too, is getting precious little airplay in the media, and seems to have no effect on the Republican voters it would hurt most. As Ygleisas writes in another recent piece, “Donald Trump is running on a gigantic regressive tax increase and nobody seems to care.”

SOUNDS LIKE A WHISPER

This past Sunday, Tracy Chapman made a rare live appearance on the Grammys, singing her iconic hit “Fast Car”—which won a Grammy in 1988—alongside country star Luke Combs, whose cover of it hit the top of the C&W charts (well, #2) last summer. Yeah, it was weird, but also poignant. I wrote a whole blog about that phenomenon last July, in which I mused whether one day we would  turn on country radio and hear another of Tracy’s hits, from that same monster debut LP, “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution”:

Poor people gonna rise up and get their share

Poor people gonna rise up and take what’s theirs

Finally the tables are starting to turn…..

The irony is, Trump’s supporters see themselves as those aggrieved and victimized people, and thrill to the idea of rising up and taking “what’s theirs.”

Some of them are indeed poor—which is a bitter irony in itself, seeing as they support the worst plutocrat of them all—but many others are middle class and even more are wealthy, like the grotesque Mr. Dimon. And the people they intend to “take what’s theirs” back from are, you know, the coloreds and the women’s libbers and the fags and the snowflakes and all the others they hate and believe have usurped the birthright of “real Americans.” They want to “take what’s theirs” the same way our forefathers took this country from its original inhabitants and wiped them out in a genocide, so that now American conservatives can keep a straight face while they screech about “securing the border” to keep out “illegal immigrants” trying to come here “the wrong way.”

So as I wrote last summer, “if ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’ were to crack the country charts, I fear the ‘revolution’ in question would be the Capitol insurrection kind, with Confederate flags and AR-15s.”

As I wrote in the wake of Bob Kagan’s “sky is falling” piece of last November, a wakeup call is in order as regards the prospect of a second Trump administration, but self-defeating fatalism is not. The sky IS falling, but we can stop it, if we try…..or we can embrace the “Don’t Look Up” ethos and let the most openly criminal, overtly despotic president in American history come back to power after once trying to overthrow the government, not only with impunity but with reward.

The whole point of the Chicken Little story, after all, is that C.L. was right.

Yes, there is a lot of time left before this next November, but it will go by in a flash. And an October surprise in Trump’s favor—engineered, like Reagan/Tehran in ’80 or Nixon/Saigon in ‘68—is at least as likely as a turnaround that benefits Biden.

Many Republicans who currently support Trump have told pollsters that they would abandon him if he were to be convicted in one or more of his many trials. That surprises me: nothing thus far has dented their obeisance, so why should that? Do they really put that much stock in the wisdom of the justice system? Why not just disregard it, like every other institution and metric over which Trump has run roughshod? But whatever the reason, it offers some glimmer of hope for sanity in these United States.

Then again, the other way of looking at it, as NPR reported the story, is that “Most Republicans Would Vote For Trump Even If He’s Convicted Of A Crime.” Which is appalling. That poll found 70% of Republican voters in the “who cares?” category, against 27% who would be swayed. But in a tight race, losing that 27% could be fatal to the fascist cause.

That conviction scenario, of course, presumes that Trump will not succeed in running out the clock on his various legal troubles, which he has been pretty adept at doing thus far, with some assistance from the justice system itself. Today’s very welcome decision by a federal appeals court affirming that Donald is not a king is a step in the right direction toward stopping that, at least insofar as the January 6th case being prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith. Let’s hope SCOTUS declines to take the case—the easiest way for it to stay above the fray and salvage what’s left of its credibility—and the trial can proceed forthwith. One hopes that the spectacle of a presidential candidate on trial for some of the worst crimes imaginable by a public servant, even if not yet convicted of them, will change the electoral calculus.

No matter which poll you believe, the 2024 presidential election is going to be a close one—far too close for comfort. And tens of millions of Americans are, in various degrees, thrilled, comfortable, not particularly bothered, or ostrich-like in their unawareness that it may spell the end of participatory democracy in the US of A.

It’s become trite to quote Ben Franklin’s quip, as he left the 1789 Constitutional Convention, about America being a democracy only if we can keep it, but he wasn’t wrong. And increasingly, I’m not sure we can.

And if we put Trump back in office, we won’t deserve one.

********

Illustration: Lemmings.

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When You’re a Star, They Let You Do It

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This blog is almost seven years old. Begun in the early months of the Trump administration, it was both a modest effort to commune with like-minded souls during a national nightmare, and a solipsistic act of catharsis to try to keep myself sane as I watched that nightmare unfold.

In those days, I churned out 10,000 word rants weekly—sometimes more than weekly. Trump’s outrages and provocations came so fast, I could hardly keep up.

But these days, like many of us, I barely have the energy to set my hair on fire anymore. That fatigue is worrying, of course, because the most dangerous phase of the fascist threat is likely still ahead of us, and making us numb and resigned is a conscious part of what its perpetrators are up to.

MURDER, HE WROTE

Meanwhile the outrages continue, and in fact, have only gotten worse.  

Witness this past week, when Trump’s latest set of lawyers appeared in a federal appeals court and argued, in essence, that as US president Trump was actually a king who could do whatever he wanted—even murder his rivals—and cannot be held accountable in a court of law.

I’m not a professor of constitutional law, but I’m pretty sure that is exactly the opposite of what the foundational documents of American democracy prescribe. In fact, any kid who squeaked through seventh grade civics could tell you that. (I’m kidding! They don’t teach civics any more.)

Trump and his defenders surely don’t even believe this fairy tale themselves, because they would definitely clear their throats by way of complaint if the current US president claimed those same powers. They don’t think the president is above the law: what they think is that a Republican president is. (Or at least Donald—more on that in a bit.) But the fact that the lawyers representing the first former US president to be charged in a criminal trial would go before a panel of federal judges and make that claim with a straight face ought to scare the shit out of every living American. Particularly because there is a fanatical minority of tens of millions of living Americans who are just fine with it.

Republicans, reactionaries that they are, are fond of a Frommian surrender of freedom in exchange for (the illusion of) security, and have long admired the “strongman” model of authoritarian leadership, from Nixon’s imperial presidency to the Bush-era unitary executive theory. But never before has that impulse reached the depths of Trump’s “brazen dictator-on-Day-One” boast.

Trump claims that the criminal charges against him for conspiring to overturn a free and fair election should be dismissed on the grounds that his actions constituted official presidential duties. 

I’ll just let that sit there a moment.

By now we should be used to headsnapping Orwellian “logic” from MAGA Central (feel free to think of it as Kafkaesque, if you prefer), but this one may take the proverbial cake.

In fact, what Trump and his supporters believe should fall under the rubric of “official presidential duties” is Mississippi wide. (Again: does not apply to Joe Biden.) Last week, Judge Florence Pan, one of the US Circuit Court judges before whom this argument was made, asked one of Trump’s lawyers, D. John Sauer, if a president could be prosecuted for ordering SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival. Sauer tap danced like Savion Glover, but essentially said no, unless that president was first convicted in an impeachment.

(On one level the question is nonsensical. Who needs DEVGRU when Erik Prince and Blackwater would be happy to do that sort of thing for Trump for free? In fact, I am quite sure they are already working on it.)

This “impeachment as prerequisite” argument was new, and it’s a doozy, both in its logical absurdity, and the sheer chutzpah of Team Trump in trotting it out.

During his second impeachment—the one for trying to overthrow the government—Trump’s lawyers argued that the Senate was the wrong venue to address those charges, but don’t worry, he could always be held accountable in a criminal proceeding after he left office. (Republican Senators who voted to acquit him, like Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio, among others, made that same argument.) Now that precisely that legal effort is underway, Trump’s lawyers argue that he can’t be held accountable in a criminal proceeding precisely because he wasn’t convicted during his impeachment.

How stupid do they think we are?

Very stupid. And they are largely right.

As many have noted, this wholly invented concept of constitutional law on Sauer’s part would mean that a president could do anything he or she pleases, as long as they can retain the support of 34 compliant US senators. And of course, that would be easy to do, since that president could also legally order the murder of any senators who balked.

KAYE BALLARD, EVE ARDEN, AND DON

By now we should not be surprised that the highly litigious Mr. Trump is going to game and exploit and abuse the legal system in the most extreme ways possible, sanctimoniously demanding his own rights while demonstrating utter contempt for that same system when it tries to hold him to account. Still, the “I’m a god-king” argument was a new low.

This was also a week in which Trump and his myrmidons like Elise Stefanik trotted out the idea that the insurrectionists convicted and jailed for their actions on January 6th are somehow “hostages.” It was a week Trump went on an Insane Clown Posse-like jag about how magnets work. It was a week when his lawyers in a completely different trial demanded that he be allowed to make an incendiary campaign speech as part of their closing argument, and when the judge refused, he did so anyway.

Like a schoolboy claiming his dog ate his homework, those lawyers also asked the judge, Arthur Engoron, for an extension because Melania’s elderly mother had just died. When the judge denied that request, they responded with a peevish email stating: “Despite the fact that his Mother-in Law, who he was very close to, passed away late last night, President Trump will be speaking tomorrow.”

(Yes, I am sure that the famously warm and personable Donald Trump was super close with her. His eulogy: “Amalija was a beautiful woman. A New York 4, but a Ljubljana 8.”)

That trial in question was the civil one in New York City in which Trump and the Trump Organization are charged with fraud for illegally manipulating the valuations of their various properties. Trump attended that trial in person, because it appears to be the one he cares most about—because he stands to lose a third of a billion dollars. Judge Engoron has already determined that Don & Co are guilty; all that remains is for him to decide the extent of the financial penalty. Therefore, with his self-pitying diatribe, Trump clearly was not trying to sway the judge, whom he—yet again—insulted during those remarks. He was grandstanding for his voters and trying to shape the public narrative of himself as the victim of political persecution—but also a fighter!—and a martyr.

But in terms of that financial punishment, a bitter and worrying irony looms. One of the most infuriating and dangerous things about Trump has always been the extent to which he has lined his pockets—and compromised national security and the public welfare—by taking money from foreign entities. Bribes, in other words. Now, because he is about to be borderline bankrupted by that civil case in New York, as well as the crushing legal fees for his many other criminal and civil indictments, he will be even more susceptible to that kind of leverage going forward. Consider how that will play out if he becomes president again.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

In The Atlantic, David Graham wrote of that civil hearing that “at its core, the whole case is about Trump believing that he needn’t follow the same laws as other citizens.” Those rules, Graham wrote, “are for little guys, Trump seemed to believe,” and “Given how much Trump has gotten away with, it’s no wonder he thinks the rules don’t apply to him.”

No doubt. But it’s one thing for Donny to think that. It’s another for others—even his critics—to go along with it.

Also in The Atlantic, the great Adam Serwer proves once again why he is among the most incisive observers of our current political moment. Writing about attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment’s insurrection clause, Serwer notes the absurdity that so many pundits—on the left as well as the right—are willing to give Trump a pass on that matter, and their weak-kneed logic for so doing.

There is little factual dispute over whether Trump attempted to seize power by fraud—pressuring state and federal officials to alter the election results—and then force, in the form of sending a mob to coerce Congress into reversing the election results. The real question is whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s ban on candidates who have broken an oath to defend the Constitution by engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” should be enforced.

Serwer argues that those “who now want us to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment” are arguing for bowing to the will—or threats—of a minority that has inexplicably been given special privileges and power, which is to say, Trump voters. “This is not a standard applied to any other aspect of the American Constitution in any other circumstance. It is an entirely novel standard invented for the benefit of Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, the same Republicans who claim it’s “anti-democratic” to throw a popular insurrectionist off the ballot because of what they consider a ridiculous constitutional technicality are perfectly happy to have that same person ascend to the White House because of another ridiculous constitutional technicality, the Electoral College. (Or that we are subjected to the rule of the wildly anti-democratic US Senate. Or have popular legislation blocked by the filibuster. Or have our legislative bodies radically distorted by gerrymandering.)

Given that no one is suggesting that the Electoral College or the Supreme Court or the Senate can simply be ignored simply because they are antidemocratic or because many Americans don’t like them, the question is why the Fourteenth Amendment should be ignored. And here, the answer seems to be that Trump and Trump supporters retain a special power of constitutional nullification that no other American constituency possesses.

Serwer writes that those arguing against the Colorado and Maine decisions “are not simply arguing against Trump’s disqualification. They are arguing that neither the Constitution nor the law should apply to a figure popular enough to disregard them. This logic echoes Trump at his most base and grotesque.” And again, this argument is never applied to benefit any other politicians, Democrats especially. “Barack Obama is barred from running again, and no one of any consequence suggested, at the end of his second term, that he be allowed to ignore that prohibition simply because he might have been popular enough to win.”

Serwer goes on to quote the legal journalist Garrett Epps, who writes: “To create special rules for Donald Trump would be to perfect the assault he has mounted on American law.”

It is very much the same argument as the one that says we should not hold Trump to account in criminal court—or before that, impeach him—because it will make his supporters mad, or alternatively, only make them love him even more. Which are essentially the same thing. Trump and his squadrons of flying monkeys have long threatened violence if he is held to account. Yet incredibly, even some on the center and left cite MAGA World’s displeasure, and its perception of “unfairness,” as a reason not to apply the law to him:

For example, the liberal writer Jonathan Chait argues that disqualifying Trump “would be seen forever by tens of millions of Americans as a negation of democracy.” Similarly, the Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn has written that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.”

What Moyn describes is not democracy but a hostage situation.

If the fear of violence from one political faction is sufficient justification for disregarding the rule of law, then the rule of law cannot be said to exist.

Serwer acknowledges the backlash that will surely result if Trump is disqualified from the ballot in even one state, let alone several, and agrees that the best outcome for our democracy is his electoral defeat on an unquestioningly level playing field where there are no grounds for legitimate complaint. (Of course, Republicans will complain anyway, if not far worse—witness 2020.)

But those making the argument against disqualification should understand the breadth of the political argument they are making, which is that a political faction capable of credibly leveraging the threat of violence will be allowed to randomly and arbitrarily decide what the law is….

As the New York Times columnist David French writes, ‘Republics are not maintained by cowardice.’”

The disqualification issue may eventually prove to be much ado about nothing, in terms of practical impact on the election. Serwer writes that he does “not expect this Supreme Court, among the most partisan in memory, to follow the majority’s originalist pretensions and disqualify Trump….More disturbing is the reasoning from the commentariat in favor of keeping him on the ballot that amounts to a backhanded endorsement of Trump’s belief that he is above the law.”

“Insurrection?” he writes. “When you are a star, they let you do it.”

********

Photo: Trump gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 2007. It has since been repeatedly defaced, and the West Hollywood town council has called for its removal.

Credit: M. Tran/FilmMagic via Getty Images

Copy editing by the great Gina Patacca

Happy New Year Zero

Published on by thekingsnecktieLeave a comment

At the end of 2020, on New Year’s Eve, in fact, I put out an essay for this blog called “Buh-Bye, Annus Horribilis.” In it, I recalled how crappy the previous twelve months had been, from a global pandemic, to the murder of George Floyd, to Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the presidential election before the fact:

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

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

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

They sucked.  

How little I knew. Not being part of the John Eastman-Rudy Giuliani-Steve Bannon planning cell at the Willard Hotel, I had no idea that an even more mind-blowing event—an attempted coup d’état by an ousted president—loomed just on the far side of the Times Square ball drop and yet another godawful version of “Imagine” on live TV. As it turned out, imagination paled in comparison to the reality that awaited. 

THE GLASS IS HALF EMPTY (BECAUSE I DRANK IT)

Looking back, I went into that new year with a surprising amount of cheeriness, by my standards:

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

But my optimism was not entirely misplaced. As I noted at the time, there were some good things in 2020, some of which were directly related to those aforementioned tragedies. COVID gave the lie to the “paranoid style” anti-governmentalism that is prevalent on the right, showing that there are some crises so big that only communal efforts in the public sphere can address them. George Floyd’s murder prompted a long overdue (re-)awakening about the ongoing scourge of racial injustice in America. And Joe Biden’s victory provided evidence that some semblance of sanity still prevailed in the United States, for the moment. 

I have since written of my fears that the Biden administration will prove only a brief respite from the madness, if we are not diligent. Three years on from my Bronx cheer for 2020, that decisive moment is now barreling down upon us, as 2024 promises to be a year unlike any other in the lifetime of any living American.

In the next twelve months we will witness something that has never before happened in American history: the multiple criminal and civil trials of a former President of the United States, who is under indictment for 91 separate felonies (but who’s counting?). Fueled by the furor surrounding those trials, we can also look forward to what will surely be the ugliest presidential race in modern times. We must also brace for a possible victory in that race by an openly fascist candidate, one who has made no secret of his desire to install a right wing autocracy, where the top priority will be using all the levers of power to punish his enemies. 

Contrary to the self-defeating wave of pessimism currently prevalent on the left, and even the center, beating Trump in November is very much within our power. But even if we do, he will no doubt double down on his false claims that he wuz robbed, meaning we will still have to deal with a Big Lie movement embraced by tens of millions of our countrymen, a subset of which will be aggrieved, apoplectic white nationalists who feel entitled to use violence to overturn the will of the people. 

So we have that to look forward to. Which is nice.

In other words, buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, PART V

Apropos of the looming election, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last put things in perspective quite neatly this week:

Republicans are super excited to renominate a guy who:

  • Lost the popular vote twice;
  • Left office with the economy in a very bad place;
  • Attempted a violent coup;
  • Was twice impeached;
  • Is currently facing 91 criminal indictments; and
  • Was just removed from the ballot in one state because his candidacy has been ruled a violation of the 14th Amendment.

Looking at all of this, both Republican voters and Republican elites are pumped to get 

Trumped.

Meanwhile, Democrats have an incumbent president who:

  • Got more votes than anyone in American history;
  • Beat COVID;
  • Achieved a nearly-unprecedented economic soft landing;
  • Has kept unemployment under 4 percent and seen median household wealth increase by 37 percent; and
  • Is generally regarded has having handled geopolitical crises as well as any president in the modern era.

Yet Democratic elites and voters are desperate to get this guy off the ticket and replace him with some unspecified, unknown quantity.

It’s just interesting. Republicans have a manifestly unfit candidate and they continue to drive past all of the off-ramps offered to them. Democrats have a successful incumbent president and all they want to do is find an off-ramp.

(When I posted that on Facebook last week, I faced some pushback on the “beat COVID” piece. Fair point. Yes, saying that Biden beat Covid is an exaggeration. But to give credit for the vaccine to the guy who kept saying that the virus would disappear, who refused to tell people to wear masks, who suggested they inject bleach, is even more off base. Operation Warp Speed succeeded in spite of Trump, not because of him.)

The point is, we absolutely can beat Trump and turn back this wave of incipient American authoritarianism. But it will require all hands on deck, every shoulder to the wheel, and every other cliché in the book.

Americans are tired of hearing that “this is the most important election of our lifetimes.” But for the fifth election cycle in a row (2016, 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2024), it’s arguably so. It will also be the first US presidential election conducted with the added complication of one of the two candidates on trial for some of the worst crimes imaginable for a former head of state, and tens of millions of his followers—our fellow Americans—who either think he did nothing wrong, or don’t care, or are glad he did. Therefore, per above, even if we win, the struggle to reclaim and defend American democracy will only be beginning. 

I can’t really even fathom just how intense the next twelve months are going to be. 

So Happy New Year, everybody; I hope y’all had a good and restful holiday. We may drink a cup of kindness yet, but first, grave business lies ahead.