Impeachment Is About the Future, Not the Past

As much as House prosectors hearken back to the intentions and fears of America’s founding fathers as they argue for the conviction of Donald Trump, this impeachment trial is very much about the immediate and urgent conflicts of American politics.  With most GOP senators unwilling to turn on the president, the trial has become a judgment on the fitness of the Republican Party to hold power in this country.  In refusing to take seriously the need to hold the president to account for actions that culminated in the Capitol attack, recalcitrant GOP senators are telling America, and their supporters, that violence is an acceptable way to contest power in this country.

The Capitol attack is so resonant for understanding American politics, and the devolution of the Republican Party, not only because it represents the GOP’s increasing willingness to court violence to achieve political ends, but also because this violence is merely the most extreme of a continuum of anti-democratic activities that the party has embraced going back decades.  From gerrymandering districts and limiting voting sites in Democratic precincts, to overtly racist purging of voter rolls, to propagating the Big Lie that the Democrats actually lost the November election, the GOP has largely decided that the key to its future is disenfranchising Democratic voters and casting doubt on the legitimacy of any Democratic victories.

As I wrote last week, this means that Democrats have a responsibility to make this trial about the Republicans who supported the president as much as the president himself.  After all, without the mass backing of GOP federal officials, the president would have had far more difficulty sustaining his inciting lie that Democrats stole the presidency.  He would have appeared much more as a madman, and less like the authoritarian leader the GOP seems to crave.

The purpose of doing so is to make sure that accountability for GOP politicians’ complicity will ultimately be obtained at the ballot box.  Greg Sargent is exactly right when he notes that “Democrats need to make it as politically uncomfortable for Republicans as possible to acquit — and to extract a political price for it among the suburban moderates whom the GOP continues to alienate with its ongoing QAnon-ification.”  But beyond tying the GOP to Trump’s illicit actions, the Democrats must also work to communicate to the public that anti-democratic animus marks the whole of the GOP, even with Trump out of office.

So far, it seems that the Democrats have decided against implicating the GOP via the trial; as Sargent and Paul Waldman write in a piece out today, “The role in this whole saga of the GOP’s ongoing radicalization, and its increasing comfort with anti-democratic tactics, openly authoritarian conduct and even political violence, is largely going unmentioned,” though he adds that, “Whether they are saying so or not, the case the House managers are making most definitely does implicate much of the Republican Party.”  So while this may be a missed opportunity for Democrats, I would argue that it’s not a blown opportunity.  Somewhat counter-intuitively, opportunity will present itself to Democrats in the likely refusal of most GOP senators to vote for conviction.  At that point, Democrats can easily make the logical case that the GOP condones Trump’s violence, and use this as an entry point to foreground the Republican Party’s increasing lawlessness.  The impeachment of Donald Trump will be a crucial political milestone and electoral millstone around the neck of the GOP, even if the Senate fails to convict, because Democrats can forever point to that failure as the ultimate evidence of GOP sympathy with the president’s means and ends.

The audience for House prosecutors truly is the American public, not unpersuadable Republican senators.  The Democrats need to educate as many voters as possible that the GOP has turned its back on American democracy; just as importantly, though, it needs to mobilize Democratic voters in particular to stay engaged in politics in the coming years, to rise to the moment of this authoritarian threat. This Democratic base will be crucial both in blunting GOP efforts to further suppress voting rights in the wake of the 2020 election, and to advance democratic reforms that ensure every American’s vote matters and is counted.

Democrats must not underestimate how much material they have to work with to condemn the GOP in the eyes of the public.  To build on a point I made above — going forward, Democrats can make the case that all prior and ongoing GOP efforts to subvert elections are on a continuum with the violence we witnessed at the Capitol on January 6.  Measures like gerrymandering and voter ID laws that disproportionately disenfranchise minorities bear not just an anti-democratic stain, but a kinship with the violence that is the ultimate recourse of people who refuse to accept the will of the majority and that every American gets an equal voice in this country.  Likewise, all future acts of violence by right-wing extremists can be tied back to the Capitol insurrection and viewed as echoes of that awful attack — and more, can be tied back to Republicans’ inability to take the obvious step of convicting the president for the violence he incited against our country, and to the argument that the GOP sees right-wing insurgents as its allies, and not the enemies of America that normal Americans see them as.

A Telling Moment in the Capitol Assault

As the Senate trial of Donald Trump gets underway, I wanted to note yet another reason for his impeachment that may or may not get its proper due in the Democrats’ prosecution of their case. A few weeks ago, shortly before the House voted to impeach Donald Trump for “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made an argument for a strong, separate reason for Trump’s impeachment: his hours-long refusal to call off his supporters from their Capitol assault, or to authorize additional federal forces to intervene. Marshall notes a chilling but essential fact: “He refused because he liked what he was seeing.”

As I’ve written before, the spectacle of politicians calling on Donald Trump to call off his supporters captured the true horror of the moment.  These calls reflected immediate, widespread acknowledgment that the attackers constituted an insurrectionist army headed by Trump, and Trump’s eventual decision to make a feeble attempt to rein them in was the president’s tacit acknowledgment of his generalship.  But, as Marshall indirectly reminds us, Trump was simultaneously still the U.S. commander-in-chief, upon whom the country relied to authorize its own defense.  This was obviously not a tenable reality — you can’t be the defender and destroyer of a country at the same time — but thinking about Trump’s dual role that day, as acknowledged even by his political supporters, helps provide another dimension to the depravity of his actions.  There is even a sort of dark paradox when you look at it in this light — the moment he acknowledged being de facto head of an insurrectionist assault, his role as commander-in-chief of the United States was no longer comprehensible, and the fact that the nation had to wait for his say-so to get proper reinforcements into action, while necessary from the perspective of our constitutional order, made zero sense from the perspective of logic or common sense. In inciting insurrection, he ceased to be our president.

Right-Wing Extremists' "Civil War" Talk Is a Cover for Terrorism

There’s been an inevitable and necessary discussion about what words to use to describe recent political developments in the United States.  Is Donald Trump a fascist or an authoritarian?  Did he attempt a coup, an autogolpe, or an insurrection?  Should the people who attacked the Capitol be termed rioters, insurrectionists, or domestic terrorists?  Words shape our sense of reality, and given our recent experiences, it’s probably a sign of health that reporters and others are so heavily interrogating the language they use to describe these events.

It’s not a word, but a phrase and an idea, that’s caught my own attention in the last couple weeks: the notion that certain right-wing extremist groups are preparing for, or are trying to foment, a “civil war.”  Before Donald Trump, and certainly before the Capitol assault, this idea held a certain abstract or even unreal quality that I think let it pass unexamined.  The idea seemed so fantastical that it was on a spectrum with hearing about people preparing for the Rapture.

But with the sight of camouflaged men with machine guns storming the Capitol and hunting around for politicians to lynch, and the Department of Homeland Security issuing a warning about further extremist violence inspired by “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives,” I’m starting to think that describing extremists’ interest in “civil war” has begun to perform a somewhat, or even deeply, misleading function.  A movement that attacks civilians and government buildings to achieve political ends is engaging in terrorism, not classical warfare.   A movement that seeks to assassinate political leaders has not prepared for civil war, but for domestic terrorism.  

After the attack on the Capitol, it’s fair to infer a larger point about what these groups mean when they use the phrase “civil war.”  They are not talking about engaging in firefights with opposing armies or groups.  After all, one of the things they hate about liberals is their supposed desire to rid America of guns.  Nor are they talking about a suicidal stand against a U.S. military equipped with tanks, high-tech fighter-bombers, and submarines armed with ballistic missiles.  Instead, what they fantasize about when they talk about a civil war is more along the lines of a mass slaughter against unarmed adversaries: not a civil war, but a one-sided killing spree.  Given the white supremacism at the center of many of these groups, it’s hardly going too far to say there’s a genocidal aspect to their ideas of civil war — a chance to cleanse the nation of the racially impure.

The concept of these groups “preparing for” civil war is particularly pernicious.  When you’re the only side preparing for war, that means you’re actually preparing for the slaughter of unarmed civilians.  Associating their actions in any way with those of soldiers, or even legitimate “militias” like the state national guards, strikes me as deeply misleading as to their ideologies and intentions, in a way that serves to hide their true ends.  Civil war is an awful thing — but what these groups desire is far worse even than that, and the term suggests an entire society bent on violence, when in truth these right-wing extremists are in a league of their own, psychos longing to murder innocents.

Impeach the GOP, Part III

Last week, I tried to make a case for recognizing the Republican Party’s descent towards a politics of violence, and the need for the Democrats to force a maximum price on the GOP for this devolution as necessary to defending our embattled democracy.  Particularly since the January 6 assault on the Capitol, I’ve been shadowed by a sense that much of what I write sounds like the synopsis for a dystopian political thriller; despite all the gathering evidence, I still feel some sense of shock (not to mention outrage) when I try to accurately describe the derangement of the GOP, and the dangerous time our country is in.

But it seems that even my most cynical-seeming musings are having a tough time keeping up with our quickly-evolving reality.  Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has a post arguing that, “After early efforts to deflect blame or even blame Antifa for the Capitol insurrection, Republicans are shifting to the view that it was understandable, even justified and may need to happen again to secure Republican ends.”  In other words, the GOP is turning openly pro-insurrection.  Marshall describes the GOP’s ongoing route to radicalization:

Each decision not to draw a line on the path of political extremism exerts a concomitant force pulling the GOP still deeper into the politics of extremism and threatened violence. This ratcheting effect is too little appreciated. Each episode of enabling and deflecting draws the institutional GOP deeper into the clutches of insurrectionist politics.

I think Marshall is right about the inexorable logic of Republican politicians’ behavior.  The party is, in an accelerating fashion, effectively working to legitimize violence as a political tool — which is indistinguishable from embracing an attack on our democratic politics.  In a sinister fashion, the GOP’s willingness to retroactively bless the attack on the Capitol is accompanied by a growing sense of menace posed by Republican congresspersons to their colleagues across the aisle.  Late last week, Nancy Pelosi House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters that, “the enemy is within the House of Representatives,” adding that, “we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.”  This follows reports that extremists GOP representative Lauren Boebert tweeted Pelosi’s location while the insurrection was underway; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter smackdown of Ted Cruz in which she asserted that his actions almost resulted in her murder on January 6; and efforts to determine whether GOP elected officials gave tours of the Capitol to insurrectionists or were otherwise party to the breach of the building.

The idea that the Republicans have put themselves in a bind of their own making helps press home that the Democrats have no choice but to address this threat: it is not going away on its own, but only by the Democrats actively countering and undoing it.  On top of this current “ratcheting effect,” as Marshall describes it, deep long-term incentives remain in place for the Republican Party to try to undo democratic competition in favor of an anti-democratic politics of menace, enhanced voter suppression, and a general attack on the legitimacy of free and fair elections (particularly when GOP candidates lose).  The Republican Party has great incentive to keep promoting lies that charge up its base — even when those lies also help radicalize and incite members of the far-right to violence — because so many of the basics of the GOP platform are unappealing to voters.  From cutting Social Security and Medicare to opposing health care expansion and minimum wage increases, the GOP has at its center a plutocratic agenda that it is able to carry forward by appealing to many of the victims of that very agenda through increasingly extreme appeals to white nationalism and white supremacy — a basic dynamic described and documented by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their recent book, Let Them Eat Tweets.  By Hacker and Pierson’s reckoning, increasing economic inequality will continue to supercharge the GOP’s incentives to amp up their appeals to Americans’ prejudices and resentments, whether racial or cultural.  And even if you don’t buy their emphasis on economic inequality being the driving force behind the GOP’s increasing authoritarianism, it also seems undeniable at this point that many millions of Republican voters simply do not care if GOP economic policies hurt them, so long as the party pursues an agenda of sadism and punitive measures against non-white Americans; that is, so long as the GOP maintains an agenda of white supremacy.

What seems especially striking in this moment, apart from the GOP’s descent into authoritarian derangement, is its politicians’ calculation that they can survive whatever backlash their actions provoke on the part of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters.  In many ways up to now, of course, this calculation has been broadly validated, as the GOP’s work to insulate itself from unpopularity has produced huge dividends, whether via the gerrymandering of states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, or a right wing-dominated Supreme Court that has already protected them from pesky things like limits on corporate campaign donations.  

But I think the Republican calculation of being able to avoid backlash is starting to look less like cynically canny politics, and more akin to a bad bet placed by a hedge fund on GameStop stock, now that it has crossed the line into outright violence.  On the one hand, the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, in the name of a stolen vote asserted not only by Donald Trump but a significant portion of GOP members of Congress, retroactively clarifies the anti-democratic nature of previous anti-voter efforts by the Republican Party.  There is now an undeniable continuum between non-violent efforts to suppress Americans’ votes, and violent efforts to throw out those Americans’ votes when they aren’t in favor of the GOP.  We can see now that these attempts to game the system have never been just politics as usual, but the early signs of an attack on our democracy itself that have gradually led to the embrace of violence to retain power.

In the coming days, the single most effective way to communicate to the American people the GOP’s tragic turn, and to confront its move into anti-democratic animus, will be the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.  I made this case last week, and I am glad to see that others are also on board with using it to highlight the GOP’s perfidy, including in the likely event that nearly all GOP senators vote not to convict the former president.  Over at the Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman write that, “If Republicans are going to vote to acquit Trump, they should be made to defend him after being fully confronted with his extraordinary dereliction and malevolence. They should face a full account of how the lies their party sustained for weeks about the election inspired the violence.”  As the GOP moves to break American democracy, Democrats should aggressively and creatively use the tools of our democracy — beginning with impeachment - to hold to account not just a lawless and violent president, but an increasingly lawless and violent party.

Impeach the GOP, Part II

It was dubious when it started a few weeks ago, but I think we can all now safely laugh away any references to a “civil war” within the Republican Party between those who continue to embrace Trump and Trumpism, and those who want to break from the former president and his racist, plutocratic politics and persona.  This CNN article by Stephen Collinson gives an excellent overview of the many ways in which whatever resistance to keeping Trump front and center in GOP politics has now melted away to insignificant pockets.

The most striking evidence of the triumph of Trump’s will was the decision by 45 GOP senators to essentially vote against proceeding with an impeachment trial of the former president, accompanied by a forceful campaign to paint any effort to hold the president accountable as a deranged, leftist, divisive plot by Democrats to shirk the nation’s real business.  Given that the accountability Democrats are seeking is for Trump’s incitement of an attempted violent insurrection against the U.S. government, most GOP senators (as well as the overwhelming number of representatives who voted against impeachment) have now given their tacit approval to violence as a means for Republican politicians to gain and maintain power.  The GOP’s comfort with violence as a political tool can likewise be gauged by congressional Republicans’ acceptance of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert into the House caucus, even though both have engaged in violent rhetoric towards political opponents.  

More ominously, in continuing to accept President Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him, GOP elected officials are continuing to incite insurrection by far-right groups who equate a stolen election with a call to battle (not to mention poisoning the minds of millions of rank-and-file GOP voters with hatred of the Democrats, and helping radicalize some untold number of these voters to join the ranks of the violent insurrectionists).  Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security released a bulletin “to alert the public about a growing risk of attacks by ‘ideologically-motivated violent extremists’ agitated about President Biden’s inauguration and ‘perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.’”  In fact, these “false narratives” and “perceived grievances” are being promulgated by the congressional GOP, making the party responsible for inciting white nationalist terrorists.  This should be the top story in American politics right now.

As I wrote a couple days ago, faced with an opposition party that, in refusing to accept the results of elections and approving of violence as a mean to achieve political ends, the Democrats can no longer behave as if the GOP is a normal, democratic political party.  In failing to protect the republic from a treasonous president, and propagating lies that inspire that president’s most violent supporters while radicalizing many others, the GOP has robbed itself of democratic legitimacy — and the Democrats should en masse start talking, and acting, this way.

First and foremost, the Democrats must insist that there will be no “moving on” from the horrors of January 6 without full accountability for all the perpetrators, including the president, the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol - and those in Congress who refuse to take responsibility for their role in inciting the events of that day (not to mention not forcefully opposing, or in some cases, openly supporting, Trump’s various other machinations to overturn the election results).  As has been widely reported by now, the nation came very close to seeing members of Congress assassinated, and the peaceful transition of power not just interrupted but broken.  While the attack was underway, President Trump watched with apparent glee, for hours unwilling to authorize the deployment of forces necessary to drive back the rioters, acting for all intents and purposes not as the commander-in-chief of the United States, but as the leader of a treasonous rebellion against our country.  So, no, the United States will not “give the man a break,” as the hapless Nicki Haley pleaded yesterday.  

But more than this, the Democrats should not give the Republican Party a break, not for one second, so long as the GOP continues to embrace and promote Trumpist conspiracies, and to wink at political violence as long as it’s done in the name of Republicans.  Not only should the Democrats convert the impeachment trial into an exposé on the complicity of congressional Republicans in the assault on the Capitol, they should also make sure it covers GOP complicity in the Big Lie that the election was stolen, and in the president’s multi-pronged efforts to get the election results thrown out prior to the violent attempt to get his way.

Longer term, so long as the GOP continues to embrace Trump’s legacy of white supremacism, violence, cronyism, and xenophobia, the Democrats should make clear to the American people, as much as possible, the full, deranged meaning of this dark commitment.  Jeet Heer describes how this could work:

Instead of calling on Republicans to move past Trump, the Democrats could tar the GOP for its continued Trumpism. With Congress under Democratic control, continued investigations into Trump’s misdeeds are a priority. Trump’s corruption could be kept in public view and Republicans could be forced to defend it.

Trump will almost certainly remain a power in the GOP, either as a kingmaker or, quite possibly, as the 2024 presidential nominee. Given this possibility, the best move for the Democrats is to hammer away at the fact that the GOP is the party of Trump. Trump remains massively unpopular with the general public and there is no reason not to use that unpopularity as a political weapon.

The CNN article I noted above makes the crucial point that Republican politicians’ desire to keep Trump-loyal voters energized and within the party fold is a huge element in why they are choosing to hew closely to Trump even though he’s out of office.  But the number of Trump voters will not be growing over time, only shrinking; whites continues to decrease as a proportion of the population, and it is highly likely that Democrats can win back a good number of those Latino and African-American voters who voted for Trump and the GOP in the last election (particularly if the Democrats are unafraid to foreground the GOP’s basic identity as a white supremacist party).  From this perspective, the idea of “tar[ring] the GOP for its continued Trumpism,” as Heer puts it, becomes a way of energizing all those millions of Americans who don’t fit within the GOP’s twisted idea of who “real” Americans are. 

This, in turn, helps address the concern among some Democrats that turning away from an emphasis on bipartisanship, and opening themselves to GOP accusations of divisiveness, will end up exciting the GOP base into even greater opposition.  The fact of the matter is that the GOP base is already riled up; the point now is to rile up a larger, Democratic base that can overwhelm the numbers and enthusiasm of the Republicans.  This is how democracy works, particularly in our fraught time, when there are fewer and fewer independent voters, local politics reflects national divisions, and ticket splitting is increasingly rare.  As an example of this blunt talk, look no further than this recent appearance by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Chris Hayes’ show, in which she said, “Republican members of Congress don’t want consequences for white supremacy or insurrection against the United States because their political strategy is to embrace white supremacists and the scepter of the Confederacy to get power in the first place.”  Imagine if all elected Democrats took up this unsparing line of attack, and collectively offered the GOP no respite from its alliance with such malevolent figures and currents of American history.

The clincher is that talking about the GOP’s turn to white supremacist, Trumpian politics also segues easily into talking about all the things that the GOP refuses to do, but that the Democrats have placed at the center of their politics: reducing economic inequality, advancing equal rights for all Americans, securing health care for Americans, protecting the environment, and keeping Americans safe from threats like violent white nationalists.

Impeach the GOP

After four long years, there’s an understandable desire among millions of Democrats and other opponents of Trumpism to believe that we are through our time of crisis, but we all need to free ourselves of any traces of this mindset.  Donald Trump spent nearly the entirety of the post-election interregnum attempting to overthrow the election results, with either the active or tacit support of most Republicans in Congress.  With their assistance, he propagated a lie that Democrats had stolen the election from him — a lie that constituted the fuel of the Capitol assault, and the consequences of which will remain with us for years, as the majority of Republican voters now believe that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president.  Though Trump may have given the speech that lit the fuse on January 6, plenty of Republican elected officials had amplified his attacks on American democracy before then.

As Zeynep Tufecki writes, though, as horrendous as it was, the physical attack on the Capitol was not the worst event of the day, but rather “what happened just a few hours later on the floor. After all that mayhem, the legislators were escorted back to the chamber under heavily armed escort, and a stunning 139 representatives—66 percent of the House GOP caucus—along with eight GOP senators, promptly voted to overturn the election, just as the mob and the president had demanded.”  What the insurrectionists had failed to do by force, the GOP attempted to do by abuse of their office.  And as Tufecki reminds us, these politicians who attempted to overthrow the U.S. government by more cunning means still remain in office.  In other words, even if Trump is gone, his spirit remains very much alive in the Republican Party (multiple state GOP parties have now endorsed the lie that the election was stolen, including here in Oregon).  Yet, as she writes, “There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election.”

It is true that some Democrats want to hold their Republican peers responsible for their actions that day.  A few, like Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, have called for the expulsion of all Republicans who voted to overturn the election.  Others have focused on a smaller band of prominent ringleaders, like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and the representatives who spoke at the January 6 Trump rally.

But if most Democrats wanted to avoid facing the culpability of two-thirds of the GOP House caucus and 8 GOP senators who acted on the lie that also led to the insurrectionist attack, this will not be possible once the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is underway.  I see no logically or morally consistent argument for Trump’s conviction that doesn’t also serve as a damning accusation against the Republicans who voted to reject the electoral college tally.  The Democrats’ case that Donald Trump incited the Capitol attacks cannot be made without asserting that he laid the groundwork with his lies about a stolen election.  And if Donald Trump is not fit for office because of such lies, then neither are those members of Congress who acted on them by voting to reject the election results.  The assault on the Capitol and their votes later that day were two sides of a single insurrectionist coin.

Republicans are fully aware that any effort to hold Trump accountable for his anti-democratic actions lies perilously close to an effort to hold them accountable for their own anti-democratic actions.  This is especially the case as we learn more details about the complicity of individual Republican congressmen in Trump’s schemes to overturn the election results.  To convict Trump would be tantamount to convicting themselves of their active or tacit support of his months-long disinformation campaign against American democracy.  This, combined with their unwillingness to anger the still-loyal Trump base, means that there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that more than one or two Republican senators will vote to convict him, no matter how damning the evidence.

This CNN article points to one of the main GOP strategies to disarming the conviction effort: asserting that conviction after a president has left office is unconstitutional.  This way, they can vote to acquit Trump on false technical grounds while pretending not to be excusing his attempts to overthrow the election.  Simultaneously, the GOP is also adopting a broader strategy of pretending that President Biden and the Democrats are viciously seeking to divide the country, whether by passing laws that Republicans don’t agree with or by pursuing impeachment as an act of vengeance.  From this perspective, the crime is not that Trump incited a coup attempt, but that Democrats are trying to hold him accountable for doing so.

In other words, the Republican Party has signaled it will fight tooth and nail to prevent holding Trump accountable.  But as I noted, why wouldn’t they, since so many are fundamentally guilty of the same incitement and disinformation of which the president is accused?  Given this bad faith, lawless attitude so early into the Biden presidency, I really don’t see a way forward for Democrats but to seek to hold the GOP to account for its role in fomenting insurrection against our government.  We are at the point that continuing to act as if the GOP is a good faith, normal democratic party lends it a credibility it no longer deserves.

In terms of the impeachment, Democrats should go all in on something they should have done with the first, unsuccessful impeachment effort — structure the proceeding not just as a case against the president, but also against GOP senators who participated in his fraud against the American people and refuse to hold the president accountable.  Only 8 Republican senators voted to overturn the electoral college results, but nearly all of them were silent or actively complicit in his attempts to denounce the election results.  As much as possible, Democrats should make it clear that a vote to acquit Donald Trump is a vote in favor of violent insurrection.  This has the virtue of being true, and would also send the unmistakable message that those who refuse to condemn political violence need to be considered its abettors.  If it’s impossible to sway all but a handful of Republican senators anyway, why not make it clear to the American people that a vote to acquit Trump is a vote in favor of lawlessness, authoritarianism, and violence?

If the GOP is going to continue down its radical path, and to spread lies and propaganda about Democratic voters and the legitimacy of our elections, Democrats may as well put GOP authoritarianism front and center in the national dialogue.  Bipartisanship is a meaningless ideal when one of the two major parties won’t even accept election results any more, or the legitimacy of any Democratic victory.

This is all the more urgent since, as political observers like Ron Brownstein argue, the forces and incentives that have pushed the GOP to this dark place are likely only to increase, not decrease, in the coming years.  At The Atlantic, Brownstein writes that:

[T]he breadth of anxiety inside the GOP coalition about the fundamental demographic, economic, and cultural changes remaking America strongly suggest that these party tendencies won’t disappear when Trump leaves the White House. If anything, they could intensify as those changes accelerate and as the incoming Biden administration—which has given prominent roles to people of color, LGBTQ people, and women—embodies all of them.

[. . .] Trump’s redefinition of the GOP as a vehicle for the white Americans most uneasy about racial and cultural change has alienated many previously Republican-leaning white suburban voters, even in previously Republican-leaning states—as this week’s Georgia losses painfully demonstrated to the party again. That means, to win elections, virtually all Republicans now need superheated turnout from the Trump base: white, non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical Christian voters. And that means Republicans of all stripes will feel pressure to continue portraying Democrats not merely as misguided or wrong, but as an existential threat to GOP voters’ lives—even as Wednesday’s riot captures how those alarms are exacerbating the greatest strains on the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.

There is a superficial but false equivalence between GOP efforts to demonize the Democratic Party, and a Democratic effort to unambiguously treat the GOP as an authoritarian threat to America democracy.  It’s understandable that some Democrats would want to do what they can to de-escalate tensions, but there can’t be any accommodation with politicians who incite insurrection.  The attack on the Capitol, and its incitement through the Big Lie of a stolen election, represented a red line that, once crossed, cannot be forgiven, not without fundamentally compromising the Democrats’ own commitment to democracy.  Democrats should feel confident that their cause is based in truth, justice, and the rule of law; they should also know that unless they maintain our system of laws and a discourse based in facts, there will be no democracy, or Democratic Party.

Donald Trump’s incitement of violence, his alliance with far-right extremists, and the Republican Party’s broad willingness to participate in the lies that give aid and comfort to such extremism should be treated as politically disqualifying.  With the passage of time, the president’s decision to ally himself with the violent white nationalists who took part in the Capitol attack will only grow more radioactive for his legacy, and for the party that enabled him.  As Americans come to realize the president has unleashed a white supremacist insurrection against American government and society, Democrats must be sure to aim public anger and revulsion at those who offered aid and comfort this terroristic movement. The GOP has tied itself to a losing, amoral cause, and the Democrats should use impeachment to hammer this home, and to put the GOP’s cowardice and disgrace on display for all the nation to see.

The International Wrecking Crew

As the country continue to put together a full picture of the events of January 6, and grapples with the undeniable existence of far-right groups and ideologies aimed at overthrowing the U.S. government, an additional perspective needs to be added to the mix: the fact that such far-right extremism is growing across much of the western world.  Indeed, as this New York Times report makes clear, the assault on the Capitol was viewed with glee and is being studied for lessons by various European extremists.  German neo-Nazis and other extremists cheered on their American counterparts from afar; and January 6 has them dreaming of a violent future, seeing the assault “as a teaching moment — about how to move forward and pursue their goal of overturning democratic governments in more concerted and concrete ways.”

The United States was not the first country to have its seat of government assaulted by far-right extremists in recent years; last August, far-right protestors tried to break into the German parliament building, the Reichstag.  As Cas Mudde writes at The Guardian, “In the past decades rightwing politicians and pundits have opportunistically pandered to the far-right electorate by defining them as ‘the real people’ and declaring this loud minority to be an allegedly victimized silent majority.”  As in the United States, this willingness by major political parties to rhetorically split nations into the authentic populace and a grab bag of moochers, liberals, and immigrants has provided plentiful fuel to movements that take such de-humanizing, zero-sum thinking to its eliminationist conclusions.

Americans should be aware of this international perspective as an urgent reminder that how the United States handles this crisis will very likely influence the fates of democracies around the world.  When neo-Nazis storm the American Capitol, German neo-Nazis celebrate, and are energized to pursue their depraved goals of overthrowing their own democracy.

But understanding the international phenomenon of right-wing extremism also provides corroborating evidence that the Republicans’ far-right turn is actively encouraging violent white nationalist and other forms of far-right extremism in the United States.  And this, in turn, offers a damning perspective on the GOP’s general refusal to come to grips with the seriousness of the Capitol assault.  The party rejects any connection between the attack on the Capitol in the name of overturning the election results, and the votes by 140 of its representatives and 8 of its senators later the same day to . . . overturn the election results.  In other words, some two-third of Republican representatives voted to sustain a lie that incited the most extreme reaches of the American populace to commit violence in the name of that lie.  The GOP has made itself an inciter of armed insurrection aimed at toppling American democracy; that right-wing militants across Europe are celebrating the attacks gives an additional, damning measure of the Republican Party’s descent into authoritarian madness.

Against Insurrection

Perhaps the single most disorienting aspect of the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol has been the lack of a decisive message from America’s leaders that the perpetrators will be brought to justice.  A prime reason for this is that this message would normally come from the president; in this case, as Donald Trump helped incite the attack, we are left in the harrowing situation in which the president is neither willing nor able to rally the nation to its own defense.  Compare this to the nearest analogue, the terrorist attacks September 11, when President Bush very quickly announced to the American public and the world that the United States would be moving quickly against those responsible.

Instead, we are witness to a spectacle of fortification, of both Washington, D.C. and the various state capitols, that communicates both grave danger and a fundamental passivity in its face.  We are effectively being told that we Americans need to be afraid, when the message very much should be that it is the violent insurrectionists who should be afraid.  It is as if war had been declared on the United States by a hostile country, but the United States declined to declare war in turn.

Still, there has not been complete silence from our leaders.  Many Democrats have spoken passionately about the need for justice, and to investigate exactly what happened on January and in its lead-up.  The House impeached the president for his role in the attacks. And the FBI director has warned the insurrectionists that the FBI is coming for them.

But given the gravity of this event, we need President Biden, as soon as he’s sworn in, to not only make it clear that the full force of American justice will be brought against the insurrectionists, but that the government will act to disrupt and dissolve any white nationalist, neo-Nazi, or QAnon organizations who were involved in its planning, or who are plotting future attacks.  Though the death toll was a tiny fraction of 9/11, this assault was just as, if not more, serious and consequential.  The idea that there are thousands or even millions of Americans who have been emboldened or radicalized under Trump to take up arms against their own government is no less a danger to the United States than a handful of terrorists in 2001 who got lucky with lax U.S. airline security and a president who ignored the multiple warnings of an imminent attack. Biden has a responsibility to explain this reality to the American people.

Decisive action by Biden is also called for because of how this attack was given aid and comfort by the lies of election theft spread not only by Donald Trump, but affirmed by many in the Republican Party — including the 100+ representatives and 7 senators who voted to reject the results of the November election.  Because of this willingness of the GOP to risk incitement of violence, the stakes are even higher — Biden must make it clear that there will never be a scenario in which violence can successfully overthrow the American government.

It is not enough to leave this fight to the workings of the criminal justice system; the assault on the Capitol was a political attack as much as a violent, criminal one, and requires a political response from the president.

No Mercy for Members of Military Who Took Part in Capitol Assault

The January 6 assault on the Capitol was a true American horror show, with a ghastly cast of characters encompassing neo-Nazis, white supremacists, QAnon adherents, insurrectionary Trump voters, and members of law enforcement.  But arguably the most horrifying participants of all were current and former members of the U.S. military.  At least nine former members have been arrested so far, while authorities are investigating the involvement of at least 25 active duty and retired personnel.

Over at The Nation, Jeer Heer argues that the particular responsibilities and skills of the armed forces require intervention by the military’s code of justice, and that this should be applied to both active and retired members of the military:

[F]ormer soldiers should be regarded in a special light if they engage in political violence. As soldiers, members of the armed wing of the state, they received special training. For them to use this training against civilian politicians strikes at the heart of democracy. It’s a betrayal of the fundamental principle that the military has to be subservient to the people. It’s a rejection of the soldier’s oath to the Constitution. There is good reason for that oath to be lifelong and not bound by the period of active service.

By having military tribunals handle former soldiers who attempt a coup, a deterrent is set up for the entire military. Further, the military will be forced in this way to deal with its own internal problems and to weed out potential insurgents. Cleaning up the military and making sure it has not been infected with seditionists will be a major task in the coming years. Forcing the military to deal with rogue soldiers, both current and retired, is a way of hastening this crucial cleanup operation.

Heer is dead-on in pointing out how important it is to keep the military free of insurrectionists; he reminds us that one bright spot of the Trump years has been the military’s solid resistance to being sucked into the president’s undermining of democracy.  And ensuring that even retired military personnel cannot escape military justice helps shine a spotlight on the gravity of their crimes. Indeed, this approach is being articulated by some in Congress; Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego (a veteran himself) said that, "I think we should throw the book at them, to the furthest extent possible. If you're off active duty, I want to figure out a way we can bring you back and charge you”; Gallego also noted that convicted veterans should lose their retirement benefits.

But apart from the critical goal of maintaining the military’s subordination to the democratic order, investigating and punishing treasonous soldiers would also convey to American society the gravity of the attack on the Capitol, and the fundamentally traitorous nature of the insurrectionary forces the president has incited to action.  As a highly regarded institution, the military has the credibility to remind Americans that there are no grey areas when it comes to attempts to overthrow American democracy.  At the same time, highlighting that malign actors can exist even in the military will help remind the public that our institutions must be actively maintained and critiqued, never taken for granted.

There is also a clear need for the military to get its house in order on the extremism front. Reporting indicates that the Pentagon’s efforts to extirpate white nationalists and other extremists from its ranks have not been sufficiently consistent or thorough, leading in part to the spectacle of the FBI running background checks on the Nation Guard soldiers being deployed to Washington to guard the inauguration. It is in fact mind-boggling that the military has not considered this a more serious issue up to now; presidential leadership and congressional oversight will both be required to ensure that military maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward extremism in its personnel.

Amid Impeachment Vote, The Thrill of the Perfect Description

Listening to activist-turned-Representative Cori Bush call Donald Trump “the white supremacist-in-chief” as she casts a vote to impeach him, you can hear the battle against white supremacism well and truly joined.  Democrats must not relent in depicting the Capitol assault as inseparable from an ongoing white supremacist insurrection, and which itself was an astonishing display of white impunity.  

Having long been fond of this nickname for Trump, The Hot Screen endorses its perfect deployment by Bush.  Many Republicans boo’d in response to her remarks, which tells me they hit home.

As thrilling as her “white supremacist-in-chief” jab is when Bush says that “we have a mandate to legislate in defense of black lives.”  This white supremacist insurrection is a threat most directly to our African-American and other minority citizens, and our government must act to protect them from domestic terrorists and their political enablers, swiftly and relentlessly.

Capitol Attack Is Just One Part Of Larger Insurrection Incited By Trump

House Democrats, joined by 10 Republicans, have rightly voted to impeach Donald Trump on a charge of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.”  But while impeachment supporters point to the January 6 attack on the Capitol as the basis for the charge, neither they nor the public should lose sight of the fact that the incitement of violence of which the president is guilty goes past that one act, and indeed continues into the present.  Donald Trump has also apparently incited a larger violent insurrection against the United States; a new federal joint intelligence bulletin states that the attack on the Capitol itself is now expected to be a “significant driver of violence” for armed militia groups and racist extremists who are targeting the presidential inauguration next week.”  In other words, the president lit a fuse that led to one explosion, and that explosion is now anticipated to lead to further cascades of violence.

In a week’s time, this violent insurrection will be wholly autonomous from the cause of “stopping the steal” and keeping President Trump in office.  The attack on the Capitol may well turn out to have been the tip of the iceberg of a wave of terrorism.  All the more reason to punish Trump after he’s out of office.  Indeed, as former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayem writes, ensuring that justice is imposed on a post-presidential Donald Trump may be essential to combatting the white nationalist terrorism he has helped unleash.

Critics Underplay Role of Impeachment as a Defensive Weapon While Trump Remains President

In this fraught and volatile insurrectionist interregnum, I’ve heard some false choices being built into discussions of whether the president should be impeached, and, a much longer shot, tried and convicted in the Senate.  It seems there is almost universal agreement that even if the House impeaches the president (which as of this evening seem imminent), there won’t be enough time to hold a Senate trial — even impeachment supporters are acknowledging this basic fact.

But to then argue that impeachment is pointless and possibly counter-productive for Democrats sets aside the urgency of this moment, and views the remaining days of Trump’s presidency as if matters will remain more or less static, with the coup attempt is over and done with.  This is wrong-headed. Democrats are leading an impeachment charge first and foremost because the president presents an immediate threat to the country; the supreme goal so long as Trump stays in office is to deter him from further attacks on the American government.  Impeachment at this point is only about punishment insofar as punishment serves to deter the president from getting more people killed. Even if impeachment does not result in removal within his remaining days in office, as the Democratic leadership itself admits, it is obviously a very symbolically potent Congressional weapon that signals to the president, his party, and the public that Donald Trump’s behavior requires removal from office, that the eyes of the nation are upon him, and that the nation will not stand for further attacks. It also sends a message to the armed insurrectionists that the American people are coming for their leader, and that we don’t fear the rage this might provoke.

A brief but important side note: It’s crucial to remember that we are only having a discussion about impeachment and its purported ineffetiveness because sufficiently large numbers of Republicans in the House and Senate have stared into the void of a murderous, deranged president willing to commit violence to stay in office, and yawned.  If the GOP had instead done its duty, congressional Republicans could very likely have persuaded Trump’s cabinet to remove him from office via the 25th amendment.  Instead, congressional Republicans chose to stand down.  Many have now chosen to slur Democratic impeachment efforts as somehow the true destabilizer of the next several days, when if fact its the Republicans’ dereliction of duty that leaves Democrats with no better options.  The GOP itself took the best (i.e., quickest) option off the table.

It also seems many people are mistakenly behaving as if a Democratic decision to impeach right now somehow commits them to a Senate trial that will derail the opening weeks of the Biden presidency, in the midst of already-existing public health and economic emergencies.  The reality is that, if Trump leaves office without inciting further attacks on America, the Democrats are hardly trapped into continuing with the impeachment effort, which is being driven first and foremost right now by the need to stop Trump right now.  After his presidency ends, it will still be important to act against him, both as punishment and to deter similar behavior by future presidents.  But at that point, if it makes more sense to do so by means other than conviction in an impeachment trial, then so be it.  Nothing is set in stone.  For instance, some have pointed out that if the goal is to stop Trump from running for future office, passing a law based on his insurrectionist activities would do as well as an impeachment conviction.  And given the choices of a criminal prosecution that delivers Trump some serious jail time and a symbolic conviction that leaves him free, I don’t think I’m alone in preferring the former (it would also be galling if overemphasis on an impeachment trial undermined accountability for the president via the legal system).

Contentions that impeaching Trump will undermine the early Biden administration are also overly rooted in the unstated assumption that as time passes, the collective horror over the Capitol assault will diminish.  The opposite is far more likely; it’s much more probable that in the coming days and weeks, we will learn far more horrifying details of the president’s culpability (and coordination with other malevolent actors) that will sharpen mass outrage about January 6.  It is also quite likely that by the time he leaves office, we will have witnessed more violence or attempted violence on the part of Trump-supporting insurrectionists.  Such information and actions will stoke the fires for punishment.  To reiterate: once Trump leaves office, the Democrats and others will be free to focus on his proper punishment, free of existential worries about the damage he can still do as president.  Indeed, true justice will require a much fuller accounting of the extent of his coup plot, which will hardly be complete even with the various revelations likely to arrive during the next week.

Blatant Disregard

It may seem like a small thing next to the assault on the Capitol, but the refusal of some Republican congresspeople to wear masks while cooped up and under siege with fellow lawmakers strikes me as sociopathic, not to mention hard to comprehend.  In a life-and-death situation, they still lacked basic empathy with their peers on the other side of the aisle?  They couldn’t acknowledge the reality of coronavirus in a moment of shared peril?  While it’s a far cry from committing sedition, it’s on the same continuum of disregard for the mutual dependence and respect at the heart of any democratic society.  And the news that 75-year-old Democratic Representative Bonnie Coleman has tested positive for the coronavirus reminds us that, yes, being cooped up in closed rooms for hours on end can be covid spread events, particularly when some people refuse to wear masks.  A good reminder, amidst the GOP’s descent into insurrectionism, that before these guys made war on America, they were already making war on science and reason.

Late note: Shortly after I wrote this, I read of Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal’s postive covid-19 test following the Capitol lockdown. Her Twitter thread announcing this fact minces no words in condemning the behavior of the Republic congresspeople who refused to wear masks. Jayapal’s interview by Rebecca Traister about the congresswoman’s experience during the assault, and the way forward from here, is harrowing but inspiring reading.

The Three-Headed Insurrectionist Snake

To help sort through the overload of information about last week’s coup attempt, I’m finding it useful to think of it as involving three overlapping elements: an attack on our democracy by President Trump, an attack by congressional Republicans, and an attack by an insurrectionist mob that included neo-Nazis, white nationalists, QAnon supporters, and other members of the violent far right.

The president had been engaging in an attempted coup for weeks before the physical assault on the Capitol, centered around the lie that he won the November election, and he pursued through various attempts to throw out or manufacture an alternative set of election results.  The insufficiency of this effort finally led him to incite an actual attack on Congress that might block the certification of the electoral college results or massacre his political adversaries.

Alongside that effort, congressional Republicans participated in the president’s attempted coup by echoing or at least assenting to his lies about the election, and so working to create an alternate reality that would convince millions of Republican voters that they had been robbed of their presidential choice.  These efforts finally led 6 senators and 139 representatives from the GOP to vote against the validity of the 2020 election — a legislative coup attempt that instantiated the president’s attempt to overturn the election result, and which was the legislative parallel to the physical assault on the Capitol.

The third strand of the coup attempt was the physical assault on the Capitol, inspired and inflamed by the president’s claims of a stolen election, and carried out not only by conspiratorially-minded rank-and-file Republicans, but also by far-right extremists interested in decapitating the American government and perhaps instigating a civil war.

One reason to parse out these three strands, apart from helping to better grasp a complicated and fast-moving reality, is that each requires its own particular response.  You could say that over the past few days, I’ve been reading furiously, and writing a bit, about how to respond to the culpability of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in making war on the United States.  But I wanted to at least highlight the third element of the story for a moment, the far-right extremists who committed the actual assault on the Capitol.   One of Trump’s primary crimes has been to progressively embolden and unleash these violent actors, but many have rushed to point out that this extremism has been gestating and growing for many years without nearly sufficient attention by either the federal government or by law enforcement.  And we are seeing signs that these extremists have been tremendously emboldened by their attack, which at least initially resulted in justified feelings of impunity. Now the FBI is warning of possible right-wing attacks leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration this week.  It appears that Trump, in his final days, has uncorked an insurrectionist movement long in the making, and that presents an immediate threat to the United States in and of itself, apart from the president’s illicit attempts to hold on to power.

But though they constitute an autonomous, and ongoing, threat to the United States, these violent actors can be influenced by the political decisions made in the coming days.  There are strong arguments that punishing Trump now will take some of the wind out of their sails; at the Washington Post, Kathleen Belew and Elizabeth Neumann argue that removing the “inciter-in-chief” is a necessary element of fighting seriously against this menace.  They also note that, “A united Republican response removing the individual most responsible for the incitement and empowerment of violent extremism would send a swift message that the United States will not tolerate supporting terrorism in any form — even when it comes from within their own party.”  Such a response, of course, has not been forthcoming — so that even as thousands of armed men plot murder and mayhem under the blessing of the president, the Republican Party refuses to take even the most basic, patriotic steps to defend the American people and our government.

After Coup Attempt, Punishing Trump Is Non-Negotiable for Democrats

Earlier today, Jeet Heer observed that, “Saying that impeaching Trump will hamper Biden's agenda is saying that holding Trump accountable and stopping future Trumps is not part of Biden's agenda. It should be.”  I couldn’t agree more — and I think Heer’s comment points up a dangerous reluctance among some Democrats to fully appreciate that the attack on America launched by Trump, complicit Republicans, and violent far-right groups is not an inconvenience, but an unavoidable fight that must be engaged now, without delay.

Indeed, as I wrote yesterday, it’s foolish to act as if the coup attempt is actually over; it should be considered ongoing as long as Donald Trump remains in office, still fully vested with the awesome powers of the presidency and ever closer to the reality of post-presidential powerlessness and doom.  I have no doubt that at this moment, the president is scheming to stay in office past January 20th.  To think otherwise is to fail to recognize the seriousness of his crimes against the nation or his aggrieved, psychotic, and unrepentant character.

I don’t think it’s overblown to say that this is as if another country had declared war on the United States just before Biden’s inauguration, and the new president declared that defending the United States should not be part of his agenda as it would prove a distraction.  This would obviously be absurd, but it’s no more absurd than worrying about having to spend time and energy on this attempted coup against American democracy.  There simply is no choice; it’s too important to let fall by the wayside.

Rather than bemoaning the inescapability of addressing the coup attempt or viewing it as a waste of limited political capital, I think Democrats underestimate the way that holding accountable Trump and other elected complicit in the coup attempt actually complements existing aspects of the Democratic agenda.  I am thinking in the first place of the pro-democracy moves and legislation that were necessary even before the coup attempt, and that are even more urgent now, such as a restoration of the Voting Rights Act, limits on partisan gerrymandering, and statehood for Washington, D.C.  And so long as the Biden administration goes full throttle on implementing a response to the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic fallout, simultaneously keeping some focus on the coup participants would serve to remind Americans that our covid-economic crisis is due in great part to a president who devoted his time to overthrowing America’s democratic order rather than doing his job.

A final consideration — I think we can be fairly certain that still more damning revelations are still to come about the extent and seriousness of the coup attempt, including both the physical attack on the Capitol and the president’s broader attempt to undo the November election results. Democrats who downplay prioritizing impeachment, or otherwise punishing the president for his transgressions, run the risk of being blindsided by new information that stokes the growing rage of millions of Americans, and being put in a position of having responded inadequately to a lawless president.