Trump tried to steal three elections

Today (January 13, 2021) the U.S. House of Representatives will impeach President Donald J. Trump for the second time. This has never happened before in the long history of constitutional government in the United States. Then, no administration, not even Nixon’s, has been as criminal, corrupt, and cruel as Trump’s. Nixon didn’t even imagine staging a coup. It was beyond the realm of possibilities for American politicians, even Nixon. But not for Trump.

The devastation wrought by Trump in four years spreads in every direction like the expanding waves of destruction-blast, heat, fire, radiation—that would be produced by a twenty-first century thermonuclear bomb. And the effects will be equally enduring.

Trump’s legacy could hardly be worse. He leaves us with Covid-19 on track to kill at least a half million Americans unless the Biden administration moves the rollout of vaccines from slow motion to warp speed for real. The Covid-19 catastrophe, the result of administration policies giving priority to profit, economic growth, electoral victory, and the “right” to behave selfishly and irresponsibly over saving lives, is Trump’s worst disaster but scarcely the only one.

Fire and storm have swept the country during his term, the devastation a symptom of a global environmental catastrophe that Republican free market fundamentalism fueled for decades and Trump has turbo-charged in the last four years by, among other things, pulling out of The Paris Agreement. Trump is responsible too for promoting pandemics of hate and economic inequality.

Finally, as the culmination of four years of lies and demagoguery, Trump convened and whipped up a violent mob bent on murder and mayhem and urged them to assault the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the Electoral College votes that would recognize Biden as president. The attempted coup, the first in U.S. history, failed. But it led even rock-hard conservative Republicans in Congress like Lynne Cheney to support the Democrats’ impeachment resolution for what she called the worst betrayal of the country by a president in U.S. history.

In the heat of the moment, in viewing the electrifying and horrifying videos of the attack, certain key points are being missed. The president, the mob, and the majority of Republican members of Congress had exactly the same objective: steal the election from Biden and hand it to Trump. Trump, the insurrectionists outside, and the GOP members of Congress inside trying to derail the count were animated by similar delusions of massive fraud, determined to ignore democratic rules and the Constitution. They used different means but pursued the same ends. A good allotment of the reprobation the rioters have been getting should be reserved for all those Republicans, from the halls of Congress to the grass-roots base, intent on overturning the democratic outcome of the election.

Another parallel: President Trump earned his second impeachment for fundamentally the same reason as the first. He tried to win an election by cheating, in the first case trying to strong-arm a foreign nation to help him, specifically by manufacturing dirt about Joe Biden to be used to slander the Democratic adversary in the electoral campaign.

One conclusion that can be drawn from recent events is the Republican Party, which for me has for some time been an anti-democratic, illegitimate party, has now shown conclusively to be just that on a national and international stage.

Donald Trump has thus, with the silent collusion of his fellow Republicans, cheated in three presidential elections, another Trumpian record. He pleaded for Russia to give him dirt on Hillary Clinton. Russian military intelligence quickly complied.

The shake down of Ukraine didn’t work. There was no dirt to be had and the Ukrainian leader did not provide fake dirt.

Now, having lost the election, Trump tried his last recourse, an actual coup.

In all these cases, Trump’s schemes betray the mindset of a con man. The Russians didn’t have any real dirt on Hillary, but the trick was to portray a bunch of insignificant emails into the appearance of a dangerous conspiracy with the purpose of creating severe political damage. Trump knew the whole Biden-Ukraine thing was a mirage, but the pressure on the Ukrainian president, which he almost succumbed to, was to hold a press conference to announce a formal investigation of Biden, an announcement meant to convey the message that if there’s smoke, there is fire. Trump knew he would lose the election, then that he had, but before and after the election he cast the impression that he could lose only if there was fraud. Throughout, Trump used the true and tried subterfuges of a con man.

One conclusion that can be drawn from recent events is the Republican Party, which for me has for some time been an anti-democratic, illegitimate party, has now shown conclusively to be just that on a national and international stage.

Its most faithful voters, who believed the tripe of massive voter fraud, are no one Democrats should seek to reconcile with. Show them the other cheek, they will hit it with brass knuckles.

The goal now should be defeat them politically, repeatedly and decisively. In the longer run the goal should be to delegitimize and marginalize them, and in the meantime hope they smash each other into smithereens or better, that they keep forming into circular firing squads and start shooting.

There is a dogma that we absolutely need a healthy Republican Party. I absolutely don’t need it. Have no use for it. As the Indian Tonto said to the Lone Ranger who had said they were in trouble being surrounded by braves, “Who is we, white man?”

The Republican Party is the party of organized selfishness, theorized and rationalized by its captive intellectuals and a few free-range ones like the sainted Ayn Rand. Selfishness at the individual level, often racialized—I won’t pay taxes to feed the children of “those people.” Selfishness at the corporate level. No, we won’t raise your pay to a living wage. No, you cannot organize a union, or we will fire you. Selfishness at the international level. No, we won’t stop spewing greenhouse gases just so your little island won’t disappear, so your deserts won’t boil, your rivers evaporate, your polar bears drown. America first!

We just want low, low taxes, the right to exploit our workers without unions or regulations interfering, the freedom to fire, discriminate and pollute on whim and will. Why does the government want to mess with our freedoms?

It’s a party full of Christians who wouldn’t know the Sermon on the Mount or the parable of the eye of the needle if you smashed them in the head with them.

I wish this were a caricature of the GOP, but it is not. Look closely, clearly, critically. You will see it is no caricature.

Of course, I don’t want a one-party state either. That’s a formula for tyranny. My ideal would be three parties, one composed by the middle of the road Biden Democrats and the other by the progressive Democrats a la AOC and Bernie Sanders. My ideal for the Republicans is for them to become like the Liberal Party in the UK, part and parcel of the system and always out of power. As for hard-right Republicans, let them live happily shooting their guns and praying in Wyoming, Idaho, the Dakotas, Alabama, and other parts of the republic of rural idiocy.

As for the ultra-right, right now they are the biggest threat to democracy and the rule of law. If, from now on they come for democracy, armed and angry as on January 6, they should be met with overwhelming force. Theirs would not be a demonstration to be controlled by non-lethal force. It would be round 2 of a violent insurrection. As such it should be met with lethal force, live ammunition, as a defense of democracy and as a warning to future seditionists.