Of Generals and Generalissimos

A Washington Post piece out this week, titled “As Election Nears, Pentagon Leaders’ Goal of Staying Out of Elections Is Tested,” provides a muddled and misleading look at both President Trump’s efforts to involve the U.S. military in his re-election campaign and urgent issues around his possible plans to use the military in the event of losing the November election.  

While the president’s willingness to essentially burnish his strongman credentials by promulgating an image of himself as endorsed by Pentagon brass is indeed really, really bad, the idea that he might use the military to “clinch another term” is light years worse.  A clearer way of describing a president who uses the military to “clinch another term” is a president who “stages a coup”; if the article were about any other country, this is very likely the phrasing that would have been used.  But by creating the impression that including images of Pentagon brass in campaign videos and staging a coup are simply varieties of norm-breaking, it fails to capture the utter wildness and unacceptably anti-democratic concept of an American president holding on to power by force.  And by discussing isolated instances of Democrats pressing the boundaries of using military imagery in their own political productions, the article provides a misleading frame in which both parties are supposedly putting undue pressures on the Pentagon. To suggest that the president attempting to force the U.S. military to participate in a coup d’etat “underscores the potential for the military to be thrust once more into the partisan fray,” as the lead paragraph suggests, pushes banal, both-sides-do-it phrases like “partisan fray” far past the breaking point. 

To be fair, the variety of presidential norm-breaking involving the military to date that the article describes is dizzying.  The Post notes that “the president treated troop events like campaign rallies, diverted military funds for his border wall project and used the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes to launch his ban on travel from Muslim-majority nations.”  But the larger point of Trump’s norm-breaking is left unstated: like authoritarian leaders around the world, he has sought to boost his power by surrounding himself with the images and rhetoric of military might, while also naturalizing the idea that the military is simply an extension of his political will.  This, not some abstract concept of norm-breaking, is the bridge between his militaristic self-propaganda and a president who might contemplate staging a coup by means of military force to stay in office.

While the article describes the Pentagon’s efforts to avoid being drawn into electoral politics, the overriding need for this resistance in the first place is obviously Donald Trump’s illicit willingness to use the military for political aims, such as when he oversaw the deployment of National Guard soldiers to Washington, D.C. as part of an effort to portray social justice protests as acts of insurrection that threatened the very existence of American government.  The issue is not simply that the Pentagon needs to avoid being drawn into taking a side — the U.S. military absolutely needs to communicate to politicians and the public that it understands its non-involvement in electoral politics.  The chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, communicated the right thing in an interview with National Public Radio, saying, “I would tell you that in my mind, if there’s a disputed election — it’s not in my mind, it’s in the law — if there’s a disputed election, that’ll be handled by Congress and the courts.  There’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero, there is no role there.” It is more than reasonable for Democrats to receive further assurances from top military commanders that this non-role is widely understood.

It’s unfortunate that the Post piece provides such a fragmented view of the situation, as the president’s refusal to consent to a peaceful transfer of power means that his possible use of the military to retain office should be a subject of serious examination, discussion, and condemnation — not to produce panic over whatever schemes he may be putting together, but to ensure that the public is fully informed of the dangers of this presidency and that the U.S. military leadership fully understands that any moves to support Trump’s effort to disrupt the election would subject them to the harshest legal and career repercussions available. This president has shown that there are no limits to what he will do to maintain power, from committing treason by accepting Russian election assistance, to lying about a once-in-a-century pandemic he was too incompetent to handle. Re-affirming the absolute subservience of the military to the Constitution and the American people might seem like overkill in normal times, but in 2020 it’s called covering your bases.

Russian Bear Hug

The urgency of the upcoming election, the continued daily political maelstrom, and the reality that the fight for American democracy will remain fraught and vicious even should there be a Democratic sweep in November have made it hard to imagine ever having time to assess the mayhem and conflict of the past four years.  But an article from Mother Jones’ David Corn has re-focused me on a political thread whose consequence has seemed as small as its coverage has been large: Russia’s efforts to subvert the 2016 election and its ongoing attempt at a repeat in 2020, all with the complicity if not outright assistance of Donald Trump.

Corn discusses an interview with former Trump national security advisor H.R. McMaster two weeks ago that would have caused a potentially presidency-ending crisis in earlier times; in particular, Corn points to McMaster’s remarks that the president currently “is aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to interfere in the 2020 election.  Corn asserts that this is indistinguishable from McMaster stating that the president is “acting like a traitor,” which I think is a fair assessment.  After all, a president who denies the existence of a foreign attack, fires national security officials who seek to highlight it, and works to keep the public in the dark about such an attack is committing treason under any reasonable meaning of the word.  And as Corn goes on to describe, the president’s effort has been abetted by Republican senators, who, despite publishing a report acknowledging current Russian subversion efforts, have failed to hold a single hearing on the matter.

This is not simply a case of Democrats failing to make any effort to hold Trump accountable for treasonous behavior.  Corn notes efforts by elected officials like Connecticut Senator Phil Murphy and Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden to publicize the Russian campaign and the Trump administration’s efforts to ignore it.  Murphy has also asserted that U.S. intelligence agencies have essentially become part of Trump’s campaign by downplaying Russian efforts and overstating those by China and other countries.  

But as Corn notes, shockers like McMaster’s interview comments are hardly front page news for major media outlets.  Beyond this, the issue of Trump’s treasonous behavior is hardly a theme of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.  At a basic level, it seems that the 2020 tale of Trump-Russia complicity has fallen into the same vortex of public disregard as the original 2016 story; Republicans don’t care about it, and Democratic rank-and-file aren’t calling on their elected representatives to press the matter.  

The million dollar question is why this vortex exists in the first place.  It’s reasonable to say that in 2020, the pandemic, economic meltdown, and escalating presidential insanity have inevitably pushed all other issues to the margins, even something as significant as treason.  Yet simply reading David Corn’s article is enough to drive home the unforgivable betrayal by the president and the GOP in the matter of Russian’s attempts to subvert our elections.  Why is this not a more prominent issue in American politics and in the presidential election?  Or, as Corn writes, “As McMaster tells it, there is a turncoat in the White House. Other than the pandemic, what could be a greater threat to the United States and more deserving of continuous coverage and dread?”

There is indeed no greater threat; yet why this lack of “continuous coverage and dread” should exist emerges as a central mystery alongside Corn’s rhetorical question.  Certainly there are many possible, overlapping explanations: the public’s perception that there was never any actual collusion between Russia and Trump in 2016, leading to the assumption that the current story is nothing to be overly concerned about; an accompanying exhaustion of belief that this issue matters following the seeming dud of the Mueller investigation and the failed impeachment effort on related grounds of treason; steadfast denials by the Trump White House that they have done anything wrong; and a general sense of abstraction in both the concept of treason and the extent to which Trump actually has benefitted from his malign behavior.

I think these all play some role — but a few more ominous ones have had more of an impact.  The first is that not only the president, but the great majority of Republican senators and congresspeople, have made themselves party to denying Russian efforts to subvert American elections.  Having made this fateful decision, they can hardly change to opposition or interrogation now.  A second, equally ominous reason, flows from the first: many Republican politicians simply don’t see anything wrong with receiving foreign assistance, even from an obvious adversary like Russia, so long as it allows them to defeat an even worse enemy: Democrats (Adam Serwer has written persuasively on this angle).  And a third factor works to validate the first two — most Republican voters apparently don’t care that their elected officials have made themselves complicit in the president’s aiding and abetting of Russian interference, so long as it helps them beat the Democratic Party.

The thing about treason is that it’s not important if individual citizens get particularly worked up about it.  What matters much more is that there is a collective, societal understanding that treasonous behavior is so far beyond the pale that it is, at a minimum, politically disqualifying.  In that sense, it doesn’t matter if it seems abstract, so long as it is also universally recognized as really bad.  What is so horrifying about our situation is that a sufficient number of Americans, largely in the GOP, have decided that treason either doesn’t exist or doesn’t exist so long as it’s done to benefit their side, as to render questionable the basic concept of treason in the first place.  And I wonder if a complementary mindset hasn’t taken hold of most Democrats: if the GOP is so bad, does treason even make them that much worse?  

I think part of the reason the Democratic Party has never more aggressively made a bigger deal of the president’s treason, apart from the political reality that pressing the point won’t really change many votes, is out of a tacit recognition of this bitter divide over whether treason is even a thing, and the disturbing questions it raises about how divided the American people truly are.  Pressing the point may lead to possibilities many don’t want to contemplate.

I think a variety of this recognition also guides the media to shy away from pressing the point even in the face of renewed complicity between Trump and the Russians.  If it turns out that Trump is a traitor but only to half the country, that we can’t even agree that it’s bad for the president to look the other way when another country interferes in our elections, are we really a single nation any longer?  Even the prospect of such a world could fill the steeliest journalist with a sense of nausea and fear.

The problem for all of us is that treason and foreign subversion are actually real and deadly serious matters.  Russia isn’t interfering in America’s elections to make Trump stronger, but to make America weaker.  This is why, despite the horror of the American divide over whether treason is even possible anymore, GOP complicity in the president’s conniving with Russia is indeed a big deal; is, in fact, behavior that should disqualify those complicit from any position of public trust.  No matter how much they might think so, loyalty to the GOP is not the same as loyalty to the United States.  Right now, Republican politicians may think there is safety in numbers, in acting as an unquestioning herd, but will this unity survive the coming years of revelations, and continued scrutiny of their actions?  How well will it bear up as the party continues to lose elections and as its self-serving kneecapping of democracy alienates and enrages a larger and larger majority of Americans?  At some point, a greater recognition of the party’s outright treason may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, shatters the party’s standing by providing the ultimate clarity as to whether the party can even be counted on to stand for America.

So while Democrats may feel a sense of futility right now, duty and political canniness both point in the same direction: never giving up on the cause of defending the U.S. from foreign depredations, and calling out a party that sells out the country in the hope of election victories it is no longer certain it can achieve on its own.

After Foiled Michigan Militia Plot, Democrats Can't Let Up on Tying Right-Wing Violence To Trump

The FBI’s announcement last week that it had arrested more than a dozen people in connection with terror plots in Michigan, including a scheme to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, provides perhaps the starkest evidence to date that President Trump has encouraged and abetted a surge of white nationalist terrorism in the United States.  The president has done so by deliberately downplaying the threat from right-wing terrorists, including white nationalists; by refusing to credibly denounce them; and by repeatedly promoting violence against political opponents, immigrants, and the press.  Beyond this, the placement of far-right and white nationalist values at the center of national policy — including the Muslim ban, the demonization of Latin American immigrants, and the targeting of civil rights protestors as insurrectionists — has created a permissive atmosphere for more extreme and violent manifestations of such beliefs.  The Trump administration’s unwillingness to admit or effectively confront this movement at the federal level has been accompanied by a deliberate misinformation effort about the dangers posed by antifa and anarchists; most notably, President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have worked overtime to falsely portray such groups as an existential threat to the United States.

In an opinion piece published shortly after the indictments were announced, Governor Whitmer drew a direct line from the president’s rhetoric and the kidnapping plot:

When our leaders encourage domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit. And when a sitting president stands on a national stage refusing to condemn white supremacists and hate groups, as President Trump did when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate, he is complicit. Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry. As a call to action.

Shining a spotlight on the complicity of President Trump, and other right-wing Republicans who echo his inflammatory language, is exactly the right approach for Whitmer and other Democrats to take.  The urgency for doing so is all the greater now that the president seems to see inciting violence and chaos around the November election as his only route to retaining power.  When right-wing violence occurs or plots to commit violence come to light, pointing out the clear links to the president and the GOP provides vital clarification for the public that these terrorists and vigilantes are hardly coming out of nowhere; they are being tacitly and even overtly encouraged by the rhetoric of right-wing politicians like the president.

The key here is that a strong majority of voters are already appalled and incensed by right-wing violence, and citizens should realize it is in their collective interest to punish those politicians who incite it or fail to draw a clear line against its perpetrators.  And as I’ve said before, refusing to accept violence as a political tool, and delegitimizing instances of it, is now a strategic necessity for the Democratic Party.  There is simply no democracy and no competing with the Republicans if the GOP is able to bring violence into the competition; we are at a dangerous point where the Republicans are beginning to explore if they might get away with it.  At its most extreme, there cannot be free and fair elections when one party openly, or even tacitly, encourages armed gunman to intimidate or commit acts of violence against voters from the other party.  That we are at some point along a sinister spectrum towards that point is alarming, but it also leaves the Democrats no choice but to make the GOP pay as deep a political price as they can by pointing out that party’s role in the rise of actual and prospective right-wing violence.  In this case, making political hay out of right-wing violence fully aligns with doing the right thing for the sake of public safety and defense of our democracy.

But it’s definitely not enough for Democrats to just say the right things in this perilous time; they need to make sure they do the right things as well, as much as their power allows.  If there is a rising threat of right-wing violence that may crest on or after the election, then Democrats in Congress must use their oversight powers to ensure that the FBI is doing its duty in disrupting plots like the one in Michigan.  It’s also clearly time for governors to start dusting off the anti-militia statutes on state books, and acting more aggressively to deter and take apart armed vigilante groups that seek cover behind laughable misreadings of the Constitution.  Above all else, we need to remember that these armed fanatics are operating out of weakness, not strength, and are trying to hide the unpopularity of their retrograde views behind the barrel of a gun wrapped in the American flag.  Most Americans see them for what they are — cowards and losers who defile not only the ideals of patriotism and citizenship, but the basics of mutual respect and decency that bind any society together.

At VP Debate, Pence's Godliness Act Turned Grotesque

I am guessing that both Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris were guided by a general strategy of doing no harm to their respective candidacies last night, but it ended up being a better night for the Biden campaign than for the GOP ticket.   Although Pence avoided any disastrous moments, and in fact stuck stubbornly to a script that made use of his ability to lie with an appearance of sincerity and dispassion, his steadfast dedication to going past his allotted time and interrupting Harris added to the Republican ticket’s approaching wipeout with women voters.  He wasn’t nearly as aggressive as Trump was with Biden, but his willingness to disrespect the Democrats’ VP candidate was a losing move.

Two issues in particular struck me last night; both involve areas where Democrats are playing defense when they should be on offense.  The first was Harris’ evasion of how closely the Biden climate plan hews to the Green New Deal, mirroring Biden’s denial that he supported the Green New Deal last week.  Where the environment and climate change are concerned, Democrats should never, and I mean never, be on the defensive.  For four years, the Trump administration has not only neglected climate issues, it has actively sought to exacerbate them by ignoring facts and coddling fossil fuel companies.  Mike Pence’s bland and baldly false statements that “climate change is happening” while declining to accept human causation, while saying the administration follows the science, was a good reminder that while Trump may be uniquely awful, the standard GOP party line that Pence parroted on climate change is monstrous and unacceptable.  

My other moment of illumination came when Pence referred to himself as “pro-life.”  As with many politicians, Pence deploys the term as a badge of probity and morality; uttered in the context of his administration’s failure to save hundreds of thousands of American lives, the phrase rang more hollow than ever.  Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was triggered as well, tweeting, “Just to be clear: there is nothing “pro-life” about denying people comprehensive sexual education, making birth control harder to access, forcing others to give birth against their will, and stripping them of healthcare and food assistance afterwards.”  Such direct attacks on the GOP mantle of false godliness and hypocrisy are needed to expose their truly irreligious attitudes on matter of life and death.

The Lingering Absurdity of Asking Donald Trump If He Denounces White Supremacists

When moderator Chris Wallace gave Donald Trump an easy opportunity at last Tuesday’s presidential debate to denounce white supremacists, the president declined to do so.  Instead, he said that the white nationalist Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.”  Over the past week, a consensus has emerged among political pundits and other commentators that this was the low point of the night for Trump, in which he whiffed an obvious opportunity to say the right thing, and in doing so demonstrated once again that he essentially doesn’t see any reason to criticize white supremacists.  It was like he was given a do-over of his post-Charlottesville remarks, and failed once again.

But I’ve seen little to no commentary on how basically absurd it is to pose this question to Donald Trump in the first place.  If he had indeed done what pretty much any other presidential candidate would have done, and had declared his opposition to white supremacism, it would have been completely meaningless, because it would be a lie.  Whether or not Donald Trump “denounces” white supremacists doesn’t change one bit the fact that he himself is a white supremacist who has attempted during his four years in office to turn the national government into an instrument and bastion of white supremacism.  For Chris Wallace to pose the question, as if the answer would be meaningful, ignores this reality.  Donald Trump no more opposes white supremacists than he opposes himself.  

We are way past the point where anyone should be asking the president whether he will denounce white supremacists.  He will not do so, and if he does, it would be a lie.  Asking this question in fact suggests that whether Donald Trump might or might not support white supremacism depends to some extent on his answer to the question.  Asking this question provides a lifeline to Donald Trump to obscure his actual intentions and policies from the American people.

We received a vivid demonstration of how misguided and misleading such a question is when Donald Trump spoke at a rally in Minnesota the day after the debate.  He attacked refugees, and falsely accused Somali-American Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar not only of voter fraud, but as someone who has no place in U.S. government, saying, “Then she tells us how to run our country.  Can you believe it?”  Reacting to the president’s vile words, Ronald Brownstein tweeted that, “Again his message to his voters is that people of color, big cities, liberals are interlopers in the real America-their White Christian America. Anyone still in his coalition can have no illusions about the racism embedded in its core.”  And NPR’s Steve Inskeep noted the through-line between these comments and his Proud Boys remarks at the debate, tweeting that, “This goes much, much farther than the Proud Boys remark. And it’s an ordinary sequence for the president. Plays off his core message.”

Perhaps asking the president to denounce white supremacists back in 2017 made sense, after the dark Charlottesville spectacle but before the president had provided us with literally years of overwhelming evidence of placing a white supremacist mindset at the center of his presidency.  Though it may be illuminating for some when he refuses to denounces white supremacists now, the question itself provides him with a fig leaf of plausible deniability that he does not deserve.  

Sickness Is the Health of the State

The days since we learned that the president has covid-19 have been a dizzying mix of unnerving, enraging. . . and unexpectedly invigorating.  As predictable as Donald Trump’s illness is, I think many of us had been taken in by the image of invulnerability he has worked so hard to convey as he’s barnstormed the country like a maskless anti-hero.  He had dodged the coronavirus for so long that his apparent invulnerability seemed like just another bizarre layer of this sick joke of a presidency.  There was also of course the fact that he was at the center of a bubble of protection afforded no other U.S. citizen — but based on flawed tests and a deranged antipathy to masks, the bubble seems to have backfired, transforming the seemingly invulnerable White House into a hothouse of infection.

As folks like Jared Sexton and Jason Stanley have been telling us for years now, the president’s authoritarian approach to politics means that the idea of strength is at the center of his rhetoric and image-making.  Yet not only did the president get sick from a virus he’s spent much of this year downplaying, he got truly, visibly sick, in a way that the camera captured and that he could not hide. But this has not stopped the president from trying to control his image, leading to efforts at state propaganda over the weekend that rightly left many Americans feeling nauseated and aghast that this could be happening in America.

The fact that many of us have some memory or awareness of similar strategies employed by ailing Soviet leaders made the propaganda all the more unsettling, and ridiculous.  We were treated to photos of the president allegedly working at the hospital during the course of a day, though a quick analysis revealed that the photos allegedly capturing hours of work were taken ten minutes apart, and included a shot of the president signing his name to a blank piece of paper.  Then there was the absurd, brief drive around Walter Reed to wave at Proud Boys and other cheering admirers.  Above all else, though, there were the spin doctors, aka Trump’s actual doctors, in particular Dr. Sean Conley, who in the hallowed tradition of Trump’s previous physicians talked up his amazing resilience, and talked down or omitted his serious challenges on the low oxygen/high fever/pneumonia front.  Above all else, the damning, discrediting reality of the situation had to be denied — that the president, aged, obese, and physically unfit, was battling a deadly virus that through his misrule has ravaged the nation and left more than 200,000 dead.

These efforts were all necessary because, as Greg Sargent writes, “The physical invincibility of the leader is a standard authoritarian trope.”  For such a leader, illness is truly the enemy.  Sargent went on to correctly predict what would come next: “Trump and his propagandists will try to spin his triumph over Covid (if it happens) into a symbol of the infallibility of his handling of it as president.”  And so Trump’s spokespeople and allies are already hard at work at the first part of the effort, arguing that the president has defeated the virus in a sort of hand-to-hand combat, and has by extension defeated China (assumedly as the originator of the virus).  They have also suggested, grotesquely but predictably, that Donald Trump is now better positioned to lead the nation because he has experienced the virus firsthand.  All of this, of course, is to cover for the inescapable fact of the president’s failure to protect both the country and now himself from the pandemic.

To further the portrayal of a president triumphant over the enemy, the administration orchestrated a set piece of authoritarian imagery upon Donald Trump’s return to the White House.  In a 90-second sequence brutally dissected by The Bulwark’s Tim Miller , the president removed his mask and saluted the departing Marine 1 for an abnormally long and agonizing time, all the while clearly short of breath and physically discombobulated.  Seeking to project strength, he sweated weakness and weirdness.  He came across as a pathetic man playing the role of pretend strongman. 

This piece of fascist theater was accompanied by a short video the president also released upon his return to the White House.  His repeated injunctions to not let the virus “dominate” our lives and that it is nothing to fear have rightly generated outrage and condemnation, but other comments within the video haven’t gotten nearly enough attention.  I had to transcribe the words for myself to make sure I wasn’t mishearing them:

I could have left two days ago.  Two days ago I felt great, better than I have in a long time.  I said just recently better than 20 years ago.  Don’t let it dominate, don’t let it take over your lives.  We’re going back, we’re going back to work, we’re going to be out front, as your leader I had to do that I knew there’s danger to it but I had to do it I stood out front I led, nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did and I know there’s a risk a danger but that’s OK and now I’m better and maybe I’m immune I don’t know but don’t let it dominate your lives.

I don’t think it’s possible to interpret this as anything other than a declaration that Donald Trump more or less intentionally got sick in order to take the virus on, mano a mano, on behalf of the nation, to suffer and triumph on our behalf in order to show the way forward, Jesus Christ and Rambo rolled into one. Donald Trump has said many deranged things during his presidency, but I submit that this videotaped spiel is the apex of all the pudding-brained assertions he had gawped out before.  It is sick; it is stupid; it is revealing of a diseased mind and an authoritarian spirit.  Amazingly, though, it ramifies even beyond this: in its utter self-serving stupidity, it shows a bottomless contempt for the American people, and constitutes an insult to our collective intelligence that, even if this were somehow the only malign thing he had ever uttered, would be enough to assure his place as the most unfit president in our history.

The insult and contempt leveled at the public has in fact been the real story of the president’s covid illness.  The easily disproved lies about the president’s health; the message that Americans don’t deserve information about their leaders; the president’s renewed falsehoods, based on his still-unresolved illness while receiving literally the best medical care in the world, that Americans should not be scared of getting this deadly disease; the grotesque proposition that he has purposely gotten sick in order to personally defeat the virus, and in so doing has proven that Joe Biden is weak because he refuses to tear off his mask and freebase virus like a real man — collectively, these messages convey that Trump and his administration think that we’re a nation of fools and marks.

I think Donald Trump’s last remaining paths to re-election were destroyed this weekend by this very display of contempt for America’s collective intelligence and common sense.  Trump revealed himself as a fool, a moron, and a weakling in ways that cannot be undone.  But whatever hope may be on the horizon, there is no escaping the horror and the sadness that this obvious sociopath has been supported by so many of us for so long, and that it has taken the needless deaths of thousands to at last turn the tide against him.

Death Match 2020

Donald Trump’s coronavirus illness and hospitalization have seemed to many of us like a comeuppance the president deserves, a reaping of the viral seeds he himself has helped sow across the country, with more than 200,000 Americans now dead and many thousands more debilitated by the disease due to his incompetence.  But while it’s natural to feel a sense of righteousness at the president becoming the victim of his own retrograde attitudes and murderous polices, to feel that a sort of rough justice has been administered by the universe and even a dark pleasure at his suffering, we need to make a conscious effort to resist these temptations lest they distract us from the full scope of our crisis.

Donald Trump’s offenses are against our democracy and the American people, and so our democracy and citizens must be the masters of Donald Trump’s fate, not the coronavirus, his own stupidity — or even fate itself.  Donald Trump deserves judgment at the ballot box and by our systems of justice, particularly because he has done so much to attack our government and our collective well-being.  His attempts to undermine us demand that this country flex its collective muscles and refute everything he has done and everything he stands for, in the November election and going forward.  An early death for this corrupt and evil man is too easy an escape for someone who we need to make an example of, both for our sake and for future generations.  

Rooting for Donald Trump not to recover is too close for comfort to the authoritarian impulse to impose political decisions by force.  The last thing we need is for Donald Trump to evade the judgment of voters in November — a judgment that will now be even more damning in light of his own self-inflicted illness, his crowing anti-achievement of incompetence.  To borrow a line from the president, Death itself needs to stand back and stand by, indefinitely; the American people get first dibs on this monster.

The spectacle of the president battling the coronavirus once against threatens to distract us from the one fact I don’t want anyone to ever lose sight of: Donald Trump may be a uniquely malevolent president, but the threat he presents is inseparable from the anti-democratic Republican Party that supports him with everything it’s got, and that shares his basic authoritarian ideals.  That the Republican Party has become the Trump-Republican Party means that we need to beat the GOP across the board, and that the threat it poses to our lives and livelihoods won’t disappear when the president is no longer in office.

The essential indistinguishability of the president and his party on crucial matters of policy and politics couldn’t have been clearer at the levels of symbol and substance in the apparent superspreader event that may well be the source of the president’s own illness: the Rose Garden ceremony and related events last week at which President Trump announced his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. As The Washington Post summarizes, “Striking images of last weekend’s event, where influential Republicans and lawmakers mingled without masks, seemingly played on a loop on cable television, fueling critics who called the party reckless and enablers of superspreader events.”  Multiple attendees have subsequently tested positive for the coronavirus, including Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, campaign manager Bill Stepien, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.  

As others have smartly written, the spectacle of Republican leadership catching a virus at an event celebrating the possible ascension of a justice who would very likely strike a death blow against Obamacare and health coverage for millions of Americans, after so many of them failed to protect the country against this virus, encapsulates the GOP’s incompetence and unfitness for power in one go.  The sense one gets that they believe themselves immune to the virus, as they go about hugging and yapping into each others’s unmasked faces, adds a true “last days at Versailles” quality to the whole event.   It is not just that their own incompetence and arrogance has endangered themselves - they also put in danger everyone they came into contact with, including ordinary Americans who have the misfortune to work for them.

So there should be no letting down of the guard in light of the president’s illness.  In the event of his unlikely but possible death before election day, it would still be necessary to vote the Republican Party out of power.  And no matter what direction his health turns, the GOP will continue its project to subvert the 2020 election, whether by attempting to discredit mail-in-ballots that might favor Democrats, closing down polling places in urban areas, and scrubbing likely Democratic voters from voting rolls.  It is more important than ever to remember that Trump, while posing a crisis in and of himself, is part of a larger authoritarian threat that will not go away when he is no longer in office.

In fact, we may well see an escalation of current efforts to essentially steal the election to compensate for the hit Trump’s support will take in the wake of his illness and all it says about his incompetence.  After this, there really is no way he can win, or for the GOP to stave off national- and state-level defeats of historic proportions, without Republicans fully going to war with American democracy itself.

No Sympathy For the Coronavirus-Bedeviled

If the president finds himself facing a sympathy deficit among the public as he moves from photo op to photo op in his Walter Reed luxury suite, we don’t need to look much further than his catastrophic presidency that has inflicted mass death on the United States, coupled with his own utter lack of sympathy towards the victims of the coronavirus pandemic.  But if we do look a little further, a very illness that would ordinarily provoke a nation’s sympathy has itself been an object lesson in why millions in this country are largely unburdened by the president’s coronaviral plight.  The Trump administration has from the beginning dissembled and propagandized around the president’s illness.  Their lies in fact now appear to encompass even the meaning of “the beginning” — the president tweeted early Friday morning that he had tested positive for the virus, yet comments from his doctors this weekend suggested that he actually tested positive as early as Wednesday.  If true, this would mean that the president proceeded with his normal schedule for two days, possibly infecting dozens or hundreds of people through his malignant carelessness.  

And since he’s been in the hospital, his doctors — clearly under instruction from the president or his advisors to hide the severity of his illness — have offered misleading and confusing information, such as when and whether he’s been on supplemental oxygen.  Meanwhile, at odds with their positive prognosis, his chief of staff yesterday told the press that, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care.  We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”  Compounding the confusion of the mixed medical messages have been the bizarre photos and videos released of the invalid president allegedly hard at work in his medical quarters, including a shot of Trump apparently signing his name to a blank piece of paper.  Needless to say, a demonstration that the president needs to practice his own signature is not the reassuring image he and his advisors think it is.

These efforts to lie to and manipulate the public about the president’s health are more of the same from an administration that has for years shown contempt for the majority of Americans who did not vote for the president and do not support his presidency.  They are of a piece with the authoritarian tendencies that have led Trump to lie about everything from the size of the crowds at his inauguration to whether he tried to coerce Ukraine into a plot to destroy Joe Biden’s candidacy.

So now, in illness, he still cannot stop reminding us that he does not see himself as our president but as a sort of supreme leader, never to be questioned no matter how absurd his pronouncements, even as some in the media and on the right argue for the unquestionable need for all to feel sympathy for our president.  This is asking a lot, and for many of us, it really is too much, when even the illness that is supposed to arouse our sympathy is handled with the same mendacity and illiberal spirit as is so much else in this administration.  Even as his life is in mortal danger, the president’s contempt for democracy and the American people is, to borrow a phrase from Ivanka Trump, relentless.

Covidiocy

With the stunning news last night that Donald Trump has tested positive for the coronavirus, the president is now the most potent exhibit in the case alleging his incompetence, malice, and cruelty in his mishandling of the coronavirus.  A man who downplayed the reality of the virus out of concerns it would damage his re-election prospects, and so assured the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans, is now the victim of his own murderous policies and arrogant disregard of the virus’ danger.  No one in the United States made it as likely that Donald Trump would eventually get the coronavirus as Donald Trump himself.  He literally has only himself to blame.

Not only has his misrule led to unforgivable mass death, he has now compounded the dangers of our moment by getting sick not only after repeatedly flouting recommendations by his own medical advisors around mask wearing, crowd size, and the like, but after months of failing to advocate basic policies that would have limited the spread of covid-19 around the nation.  As abhorrent a president as he is, it endangers the entire country for a president to be ill, for the nation to appear weak to foreign adversaries, and to introduce yet more tension around the onrushing election.  But if our sense and reality of crisis has been heightened by his illness, never forget that the common thread of our national crisis is always Donald Trump himself.

More than ever, the president is now exposed as an idiot, a conman, and an incompetent.  The disease that supposedly isn’t at all serious, and will go away on its own, has now found an easy home in his obese and physically unfit person.  This will clearly come as unbelievable news to many of his supporters, who have been led to doubt the gravity and even existence of the coronavirus.  I look forward to many on the right twisting this development into a Democratic conspiracy, and to begin to conceive of Trump even more as a Christ-like figure, suffering for our sins, taking on the pains of the world to redeem us all.  And if the president survives this experience, I fully expect him to use his own recovery as further evidence that the coronavirus is no worse than the flu, and so implicate himself further in the mass death sweeping America.

It is hard to see how this diagnosis doesn’t further the implosion of Trump’s re-election prospects.  After ensuring that millions of Americans have been sickened by the coronavirus, his incompetence has now sickened even him.  His illness will garner little sympathy from those who already oppose him, and will confuse and shock many of his supporters.  He has gone from would-be strongman to pathetic straw man in one savage blow.

Trump Versus Trump

Given all the talk of what a shit show and an unprecedented disaster it was, when that was always the obvious outcome, I am guessing that many Americans had a lingering faith that the the ritual of a presidential debate would somehow set limits on Trump’s depravity.  Maybe a lot of us expected that Trump would at least fake it.

Instead, what we got was a sort of summation of the last four years of our national life, stripped down to a stage set and three actors.  The president lied, blustered, bullied, interrupted, and essentially made it clear that he saw no purpose to the commonly accepted idea of a presidential debate - that the candidates would make the case for why they and their ideas deserve the support of voters.  Instead, he seized it as a forum to enact the bullying dominance rituals which he believes connote strength and appeal to voters who wish to see an authoritarian strongman in the White House.  His constant interruptions made it impossible to have any sort of linear conversation, just as his presence in our national life has distorted all discussions about our pressing needs, from an effective coronavirus strategy to fighting global warming. Joe Biden and moderator Chris Wallace stood in for the traumatized American people, occasionally speechless at his antics and frequently the intended victims of his narcissistic rage.

It was also as clear as ever that one of Trump’s basic political strategies is to try to drag everyone down to his level.  Political commentators have described this as a way to discredit both other politicians and democracy in general — if everyone else is also bad and corrupt, you may as well support the bastard who seems to have your back.  You could see this in the way he attacked Wallace and repeatedly tried to provoke Joe Biden to respond at the same schoolyard taunt-level on which he operates.  

It’s great for the country that there’s such a general consensus that this debate was very bad for Trump, but the enormous attention being paid (correctly) to the president’s refusal to condemn white supremacists when given the chance by Wallace reminds us of a crisis that transcends Trump.  Not only has the president already shown himself to be a white supremacist president for the past four years, but the larger GOP endorses his white nationalist policies like suppressing the votes of African-Americans and abusing Latin American immigrants.  It’s not nearly enough to call Trump our, and actually counter-productive to suggest that he’s some sort of outlier in his party.

That said, his shout out to the Proud Boys to “stand by” was an abomination.  Presidential validation of this white nationalist group is no abstract thing for those of us who live in Portland.  Members of this paramilitary organization have engaged in violence in this city on multiple occasions, and we will bear the brunt of it if and when members emboldened by the president’s endorsement spring into fascistic action.  Trump tried to score points against Biden for the former VP’s supposed failure to order Oregon’s governor to send in the National Guard against antifa protestors, but he actually got it half right — Biden should be encouraging Oregon to send out the National Guard, but against the illegal white supremacist militias that threaten violence against American citizens.

After Trump used the debate stage to amplify his self-serving conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots, essentially suggesting that the election is already corrupted and any outcome in which he isn’t the winner must be invalidated by the Supreme Court, it feels like a corner may have been turned in how the media is conceiving of this race.  It’s not really Trump versus Biden, but Trump versus the election, as Rachel Maddow put it.  Better yet, it’s Trump running against our democracy, as none other than Hillary Clinton tweeted.  No one could have made this case against Trump any better than he did himself last night.

Shine a Spotlight on GOP's Court Obsession

Like I said the other day, there are encouraging signs that Donald Trump’s apparently unstoppable placement of a conservative justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg has lit a fire under many Democrats to pursue a revitalization of American democracy, in which court expansion, abolition of the electoral college, voting rights protections, and statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico are all on the table.  And as Paul Waldman points out, polls show that significantly more Democrats than Republicans say that RBG’s passing makes it much more important that their candidate win the presidency than previously, reversing the traditional greater interest among Republicans in court appointments and their overall political importance.  But as Waldman goes on to discuss, this greater awareness is coming just at the point when it’s seemingly more or less too late for it to matter; with a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Democrats can expect to see the Court upend a whole host of legislation, affecting everything from the economy and women’s rights to protection of the environment and our ability to have our votes counted.

But while Democratic voters carry some responsibility for not prioritizing court issues more over the past few decades, and without discounting the Republican norm-breaking and corruption that has allowed them to appoint a majority of conservative justices, far more responsibility must rest on the Democratic leadership of the last 20 years who, in important ways, are the ones who lost this pressing fight.  In particular, the failure of the Democrats to use the GOP’s corrupt blockade of Merrick Garland’s nomination as an opportunity to turn the tables on the GOP must now be seen as much as a catastrophic miss for Democrats as a decisive win for Republicans.  The GOP’s prioritization of both the Supreme Court and the federal courts has been in part an admission that the party is not popular enough to win a long-term majority in this country, and the Democrats have long had a wide-open path to describing the GOP’s focus on the courts as an illegitimate way to impose its will on a majority of voters who otherwise reject the Republican Party.  The Democrats have also given a pass on publicizing more openly the retrograde conservative legal philosophies that, to all appearances, start with the anti-woman, anti-worker, and anti-democratic end goals of the Republican Party, and reverse-engineer legal doctrines that can justify them.

Obviously, there’s a tiny bit of tension between Democratic politicos pointing to the ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and declaring that the GOP now has a veto on progressive legislation for the next 30 or 300 years, and their appeals to Americans to vote for the Democratic Party to accomplish good things for the American people.  The Democratic Party must find a way to negate the right-wing dominance of the Supreme Court, not just if it wants to accomplish anything but simply if it wants to make basic sense as a party.

The Democrats’ failure to prioritize the courts as a political issue is inextricable from the party’s unwillingness to properly name the growing anti-democratic, minority rule end game of the GOP, and to fully assert its own role as America’s majority party.  Again, the statistic that needs to be drilled into everyone’s head: Democrats have won the majority of votes in all but one presidential election since 1992.  Despite GOP gerrymandering, they have managed to capture back the House.  And though they don’t control the Senate, millions more people voted for Democratic senators.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this basic failure to make the most of the undeniable fact of the party’s majority status since reading a 2018 interview with historian Rick Perlstein, in which he talks about Democratic leaders holding on to traumas from defeats of the 1960’s and 1970’s far past the point where it makes any sense:

The Democratic Party doesn’t even know how to take yes for an answer. They can’t even accept the idea that they are a majority party. There’s this great line, “He who seems most kingly is the king.” Unless you act like a leader, people aren’t going to treat you like a leader.”

Not to reduce the complexities of the Democratic coalition and American politics overly much, but this observation really resonates.  And not only have the Democrats not generally acted with the confidence of their majority and the popularity of their policies, they have failed to address head-on the currents of racism that have increasingly fueled the GOP political machine.  Even as the Republican Party repeatedly and openly engaged in openly bigoted behavior, such as gerrymandering and voter suppression that targeted minority voters, the Democrats failed to put front and center the GOP’s racism, anti-majority aims, and basic lack of popular backing.

But there is no choice now, not when the GOP’s slipping share of the voting public has led it into the undisguised authoritarianism and white supremacism of Donald Trump.  Not only is the Democratic Party on the right side of morality and history, their other, decisive advantage in this fight is that many more people actually support the Democrats.  Not to promote this fact at every opportunity would be a sort of political madness.  To bring it back to the Supreme Court and the GOP’s broader packing of the federal judiciary with right-wing ideologues — in the name of democracy, Democrats should go on the offensive now, not when the courts start blocking progressive legislation.  On abortion, protect Roe with legislation to pre-empt Supreme Court efforts to undo it, as many have pushed for, and make similar pre-emptive legislative efforts on other fronts.  Set the terms of the debate to privilege common sense and majority rule, so that when conservative judges start calling on crackpot theories to strike down popular laws, the ground has been set for a legitimate questioning of the bases on which the judges have ruled, and for a reform of the courts via expansion so that fair-minded judges can be appointed.  Keep in front of the public consciousness the prior appointment of so many judges by the corrupt Donald Trump, as a reminder that balance needs to be restored.

In other words, present a consistent, coherent narrative of how and why conservative judges rule the way they do, in order to educate the public and build support for reforms. Particularly as Donald Trump and the GOP face a wipe-out in November, yet press ahead with the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett as if they had an overwhelming electoral mandate, the Democrats can all the more easily describe the reality of a GOP so corrupt that it thinks the losing party should appoint all the justices.  The GOP is trying to scam the majority out of the power that rightly belongs to it.

Proud and Prejudice

As Oregon state troopers, Multnomah County sheriff’s deputies, and Portland police officers deploy today in response to a Proud Boys rally in north Portland, the big question is whether the state will begin using all the legal tools at its disposal to defend Portland residents against these far-right extremists whose seek to intimidate and terrorize city residents.  Governor Kate Brown has invoked emergency powers to centralize the law enforcement response, and some 15 Democratic elected officials in the state have released a statement criticizing the rally.  The letter’s reference to state laws against private militias suggests that Oregon officials are finally beginning to take the threat of right-wing militias as seriously as they should:

Oregon law prohibits paramilitary activity. Organizers of and likely participants in the September 26 event have openly discussed tactical operations and military-style formations that lead us to believe that they are operating as an unauthorized private militia. Many of them are crossing state lines in an attempt to cause chaos and disrupt the peace. One regular at far-right rallies wrote this week on social media, 'We have a unit large enough now that we have specialized teams inside our unit. Combat and support.' Another wrote last month, 'Like we do in other states, tactical ambushes at night while backing up the police are key.’

Significantly, the law prohibits both the use and the intent to use firearms or explosives; the ability to prove intent would seem to be the key to whether the state could use this law before actual acts of violence occur. Additionally, the Oregon constitution states that “the Military shall be kept in strict subordination to the civil power,” which suggests that private militias not under government control would violate the constitution or any laws that enforce this concept.

The rally organizers claim to be gathering to “end domestic terrorism,” which to them is embodied in the anti-racist protestors who have demonstrated in downtown Portland and other parts of the city for more than 100 days in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.  But their white supremacist rhetoric, weaponry of war, and prior record point to a different, obvious purpose: to intimidate Portlanders who oppose them by threats of violence, and to engage in violence.  They are an illegal armed militia.  Law enforcement needs to treat them like one. It is disturbing to see that the superintendent of state troopers was initially reluctant to send state police as part of the state response to the protest.  He cited Portland’s ban on using one type of tear gas against protestors as his reason, but you have to wonder what sort of signal it sends to white nationalist extremists when a high-ranking law enforcement official shows a lack of enthusiasm for a state-level response to such groups.

While law enforcement has legitimate and pressing reasons to avoid escalating situations involving armed groups, one would hope that the fact that the heavy weaponry and propensity to violence of the Proud Boys does not effectively nullify application of anti-paramilitary laws.  And if the current state laws are not sufficient to prosecute those who clearly use threats of gun violence to advance their agenda, then Oregon Democrats need to pass some new and improved ones. They will likely not be joined by their Republican colleagues, whose response to the Proud Boys rally has been at best muddled and at worst atrocious. The GOP minority leaders in the House and Senate released a statement denouncing “violence committed by any individual or group, no matter their perceived political affiliation.” GOP Representative Bill Post, though, was “less measured,” in the words of Willamette Week; he falsely asserted that the groups at the rally have no record of violence in Portland, and accused Governor Brown of not defending the city against antifa. (U.S. Attorney for Oregon Billy “not Billy Dee” Williams has a similarly Trump-inflected reaction, describing the violence of anti-police violence protests in Portland as the reason why Proud Boys have now descended on the city: “As a direct consequence of this criminal behavior and the media attention it generates, this community must now deal with the threat of even more outsiders traveling to Portland to participate in what they've been watching on social media and television for weeks.” Post and Williams demonstrate once again that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to get a Republican official to directly condemn violent right-wing extremists.)

But the inherently violent tactics and murderous ends of white supremacist paramilitary groups alone make any attempts to find equivalence with anti-racist protestors, even antifa, a false and pernicious one.  Groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer are the modern-day descendants of white terrorist groups like the KKK, only garbed in transparent attempts to legitimize themselves as militias.  They are in fact anti-militias, serving not the public defense but a violent, sectarian white supremacist vision that constitutes a deep offense against American government and the American people.

Given their paramilitary nature and clear history of seeking violence, it makes no sense for counter-protestors to show up to the Proud Boys rally.  If the goal is to illuminate the presence of these white nationalist vigilantes, then that goal has already been accomplished.  This rally is already national news.  Rather than advancing a sense of how dangerous such groups are, direct confrontation with them invites a sense of equivalency, of two factions of the right and the left battling it out.  Groups like the Proud Boys must be opposed by state and federal law enforcement, and all efforts need to be placed on our elected officials to turn this necessary strategy into a reality.  They are not enemies of antifa, as they would like to claim, but enemies of the United States of America.  Seeking confrontation with men carrying machine guns who are looking for an excuse to commit mass murder would be bonkers.

We can’t lose sight of the fact that groups like the Proud Boys are not simply responding to the existence of Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations involving antifa.  They are also responding to calls from President Trump for white vigilante violence, such as when the president excused the actions of the right-wing teen who killed two demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisconsin a few weeks ago.  As the election approaches, we will likely see bolder and more frequent actions by right-wing groups, and state officials not just in Oregon but across the country need to establish a strategy to foil their attempts at intimidation and mayhem.  This is not just a state issue; it’s a national one, with implications for the November elections.

Trump and GOP Demonstrate That Minority Rule Easily Evolves Into Rule By the Gun

If there is one positive thing that has come from the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it is that even mainstream Democrats can no longer look away from how the Republican Party has fought for decades now to secure itself in power against a rising Democratic majority.  An understanding that American democracy itself must be revitalized and expanded seems to have a good chance of becoming a central tenet for the party, from expanding the size of the Supreme Court, to federal laws banning gerrymandering and guaranteeing that every American’s vote will be counted, to extending statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, to doing away with the electoral college.

Democrats need to ensure that every American is fully conscious of the shocking facts that the GOP has won the popular vote in only one presidential election since 1992; that the Republican majority in the Senate represents many millions less votes than Democratic senators received; and that presidents who have lost the popular vote will have appointed the conservative majority on the Supreme Court (assuming Trump’s latest pick is confirmed).  Making the case that the Republican Party is wrecking American democracy in its effort to hold power despite being increasingly unable to win majority votes nationally and in many states should be central to the Democrats message at all levels of government.

But the case the Democrats must make goes beyond a vital but abstract defense of majority rule.  The particular minority that the GOP defends, and the character of the majority it seeks to thwart, are the heart of the story.  The Republican Party is fighting to maintain power for white Americans, and to restrict the power of non-white Americans.  In plain language, the Republican Party has dedicated itself to maintaining a system of white supremacy in this country.  These are the terms of our ongoing conflict, and the Democrats cannot be afraid to describe it as such.  

As writers like Jamelle Bouie have described, the Republican Party has tried to invert this reality, by constantly asserting that all their actions come down to trying to protect the will of the voters — such as when they point to their Senate majority and Trump’s presidency as proof they have majority support to appoint a new Supreme Court justice.  But of course the GOP majority does not represent a majority of voters, and Trump was elected by the electoral college, not the popular vote.  In this respect, alongside anti-democratic, iron-fisted efforts to suppress the Democratic vote, part of the GOP’s strategy has been to run an epic scam against the American majority, brazenly asserting that their ability to win votes in elections they’ve gamed in their favor truly represented the majority.  Small wonder that the party cottoned so quickly to the greatest conman of our time after he won the presidency.

Against this GOP strategy of claiming that its hold on power means that the power must be legitimate, the Democrats cannot avoid pressing an argument over broader democratic legitimacy.  But as encouraging as it is to see a broader pro-democracy agenda quickly beginning to gain traction, Democrats can’t lose sight of how quickly in turn the GOP’s efforts to maintain power despite the support of a minority of voters has slid not only into open corruption, but into threats of and actual violence.  The line between minority rule and outright authoritarianism is turning out not only to be paper thin, but increasingly meaningless.

The fact that President Trump is taking the lead on both the corruption and violence fronts should not blind us to the fact that he does so with apparently unflinching support from the vast majority of Republican elected officials — and Republican voters.  And nowhere is this corruption and violence more apparent than in his attacks on the November election.  Over the past few days, I have seen more and more commentators wake up to the fact that Donald Trump simply does not intend to abide by the results of the election if they are not in his favor.  This realization has come both from good reporting that has ferreted out new details of efforts to hold power no matter the vote, and from the president’s own open pronouncements.  On Tuesday, the president refused to answer whether he would assent to a peaceful transfer of power; as bad as this is, Greg Sargent makes the case that the president is already engaging in activities meant to ensure that he holds onto power despite likely adverse election results.  Perhaps most critically, the president is doing so by working to discredit the validity of mail-in voting, both as a concept and in individual states where GOP lawyers are working to ensure that a maximal number of likely-Biden ballots are disqualified.  The end goal, as Sargent and others have pointed out, is to ensure that the president can claim victory election night if he appears to be ahead, even if all ballots have not yet been counted.  Too many have referred to this as Trump’s war on mail-in voting, when it’s simply a war on voting.

Other machinations are already underway as well, including Republican efforts to determine if Republican-held legislatures can vote to award their electoral votes to Trump even if all the ballots have not been counted or Biden is leading in their states.  Alongside Trump’s other clear efforts to undermine the election, some observers are starting to refer to these various efforts as a Republican coup that is already in progress.

But even this summary fails to capture the full extent of how greatly the president and the GOP’s efforts to retain power have blurred the line between manipulating the mechanisms of democratic government in bad faith, and operating outside them in illegitimate ways.  For years now, the president has encouraged violence against political opponents and the press.  Even as right-wing nationalists and racists have been emboldened by his rhetoric, the Department of Homeland Security has sought to play down the threat posed by these extremists — even after they’ve engaged in multiple acts of violence around the country.  And after civil rights protests broke out nationwide following the murder of George Floyd, the president deployed federal agents to violently suppress demonstrations, and also encouraged militia types to fight back in the name of law and order.  Inciting such violence has been a key part of his election strategy, both to promote a sense of chaos in the streets and to strengthen his image as a strong leader who can turn back the liberal civil rights tide by any means necessary.  Now, as the election fast approaches, the president has begun suggesting that Republicans will need to guard against fraud at polling places — another open attempt to intimidate voters through physical force, as we have already seen happen during early voting in Virginia.

So while it is greatly encouraging that the Democrats have finally begun to grasp en masse that they are in a battle with Republicans to defend democracy in this country, and are articulating a grander vision for American democracy, that does not address the immediate danger — which is not a question simply of how to overcome minority rule, but how to overcome a minority party that now resorts to corruption and violence to hold onto power.  A long-term strategy to expand democratic rule is necessary, but so is a related, immediate strategy to counter current GOP behavior that without exaggeration can be termed as authoritarian and anti-American.

This is a dangerous and unprecedented situation for all of us, yet there still seems to be inadequate attention paid to how to counter a lawless GOP now as it moves to corrupt and steal the election.  I admit upfront that I don’t have any amazing raft of proposals — but then again, I’m not an elected Democrat!  But whatever concrete steps the Democrats surely need to take — including, crucially, exerting whatever moral suasion they can on media outlets to do their democratic duty and treat this coup in the making as THE story of the election, as observers like Will Stancil and Amanda Marcotte have contended — their approach must involve describing in plain language to the American people how very radical, and unacceptable, the GOP’s open embrace of not just corruption but violence actually is.  On top of this, they need to describe unambiguously that the Republican goal is to maintain an authoritarian system of white supremacy. Republicans will surely try to paint the Democrats as radical, as they talk of expanding the court and other democracy-strengthening policies, but the president’s increasing willingness to speak of made-up plots involving millions of ballots, and to egg on white-supremacist militias and other right-wing wackos to violence against their fellow Americans, all in the name of a deranged vision of white nationalism, must be used as a cudgel to de-legitimize and defeat both Donald Trump and the GOP.  If the president can incite violence without consequence, then our politics will fall apart.  You cannot have one party that uses violence as a political weapon, and another that is brutalized and even murdered.  And this, I believe, is a point that might sway even some substantial number of Republicans to turn against the president.

DOJ Looks to Criminalize Elected Democrats

We learned last week that Attorney General William Barr encouraged Justice Department prosecutors to consider sedition charges against anti-racist protestors who commit violence — a clear attempt to ratchet up the Trump administration’s campaign not only to portray, but to treat, civil rights protestors as enemies of the United States.  But equally horrifying are the reports that the attorney general also directed Justice Department officials to explores such charges against elected officials in cities like Seattle and Portland where such protests have taken place, on grounds that they did not take sufficient actions against demonstrators.  Barr appears to have been particularly interested in punishing Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan for allowing the existence of a protest zone free of police in the Capitol Hill area of the city; the reporting on Portland has not identified which particular officials were in the administration’s crosshairs, though President Trump has repeatedly pursued a verbal vendetta against Mayor Ted Wheeler.

Any prosecutions of politicians on such grounds need to be described as exactly what they are: the corrupt use of the Justice Department to criminalize political opponents of the president for purely partisan ends. There really is no way to overstate how shocking such Justice Department discussions are, or how great a perversion of democratic government they represent.  That the government has to date not proceeded with such corrupt prosecutions of elected Democrats is cold comfort.  This is a preview of the authoritarian nightmare that would be unleashed in a second Trump administration, where Democrats would be prosecuted as criminals if they disagree with the president on policy.  Once again, we see that Trump and Barr’s talk of law and order is just the opposite: a desire to pervert the law, and American government, into a weapon to use against political opponents.

The fact that multiple Justice Department employees were willing to talk to reporters about these discussions is a small silver lining, but opens the door to a related issue: the need for the Trump administration to receive the assistance of many, many lower-ranking federal officials and employees in the implementation of openly corrupt policies.  In the case of criminalizing elected officials for their political choices, there is no conceivable definition of legal ethics that should not result in the disbarring of any Justice Department lawyers who were to participate in such cases.  Those enabling the Trump administration in this and other acts of lawlessness and authoritarianism need to fear the professional consequences of their complicity in anti-democratic acts.

William Barr in particular is no longer hiding his true inclinations or goals.  The free press is the enemy; protestors are the enemy; and now, apparently, elected Democrats are the enemy.  His ideas and his language are from the far-right fringes of American politics; there is no need for officials who serve the American people and the constitution to follow him down this openly authoritarian path.

The Department of Justice's Declaration of Absurdity

Two can play at this game. If Bill Barr’s Justice Department can declare the City of Portland to be “permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction,” then the City of Portland can declare the Trump administration to be permitting state-sponsored racism, mass death due to the covid pandemic, economic ruin for millions of Americans, and the advancement of authoritarian rule at the behest of a corrupt and lawless president. If the Trump administration insists on putting the media spotlight on Portland for nakedly partisan purpose, then Portland city officials should use that spotlight to describe as thoroughly as possible the crimes and failures of this administration, which are orders of magnitude greater than anything they can think to accuse Portland of.