We Can Thank Trump for Waking Us, Not Just the Alt-Right

For the past several years I have felt like I was back in college. As a history major, I didn’t learn anywhere near as much about American history, racism, fascism and politics as I have learned over the last six years.

It became clear right away that having a sympathetic figure in the White House emboldened the alt-Right, as demonstrated by the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, but that event in turn woke the rest of us up to the existence of those previously closeted forces in our country. You can draw a straight line from that rally to the events of January 6, 2021.

I remember how Barack Obama’s election in 2008 represented to many the arrival of a “post-racial America,” but now we realize that it simply awakened the sleeping giant of racism, which entered its fullness with the election of Donald Trump just 8 years later.

Those forces are in the minority, but they are highly energized and, thanks to the courts, they have enough military grade weapons to intimidate the rest of us into submission. But will they?

This “course” we’re all taking has a reading list. Books that I’ve read and recommend include: How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley; Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine Albright; Too Much and Never Enough, by Mary Trump; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson; Rage and Fear, both by Bob Woodward; Disloyal, by Michael Cohen; A Warning, by Anonymous; and The 1619 Project, by Nikole Hannah-Jones. I could also cite countless articles in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Guardian.  (When you click on the links for those books, you'll see recommendations of books similar to them, many of which I have also read.) 

So, what have I learned from this course of study? For starters, I gained a far more complete understanding of slavery and racism in America and how both were embedded in the U.S. Constitution. As I learned from The 1619 Project, one motivation for our revolutionary war was to preserve slavery. (See last week's blog post for details.)  I learned how the 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery, provided for inmate slavery, which was utilized by former slaveholders to continue slavery by leasing convicts who were imprisoned for petty or fabricated crimes in Southern jurisdictions. (The 13th Amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”)

I have learned how Trump and his minions have followed the fascist playbook. For most of my life I was puzzled by how middle and lower-income Americans would vote against their own interests, but now I realize that emotional interests can trump financial interests, and that fear of immigrants and persons of color and fear of socialism (undefined, and equated with communism) are proven tools utilized by fascists. The manipulation of working class Americans by Trump (who boasted that he loves “poorly educated” voters) is a textbook case in point.

I also learned from Hannah-Jones’ book that fascist inspiration was a 2-way street.  Hitler’s American Model, by James Q. Whitman, describes how Hitler got inspiration from the Jim Crow racism in 20th Century America.

A 2021 book, When People Want Punishment: Retributive Justice and the Puzzle of Authoritarian Popularity, by Lily L Tsai, addresses this very dynamic. Although China is her case study, the final chapter brings the topic home to our domestic situation.

It’s looking as if we may have passed the “tipping point” when it comes to reversing the effects of climate change. Have we also passed the tipping point when it comes to saving democracy? As you and I have learned in this “course,” the U.S. Constitution allows for state legislatures, so many of which are ruled by Republican election deniers thanks to gerrymandering, to overrule the will of the people.

The U.S. Constitution does not dictate how states choose the slate of presidential electors. This has changed over time, but most states — except Nebraska and Maine — send a slate of electors, all of whom are committed to the candidate who got the most votes, no matter how close the vote count was. The U.S. Constitution does not care how a state’s constitution or statutes determine how its slate is constituted.

There’s a real possibility that those Republican-controlled state legislatures may ignore their state’s popular vote and send the electors of their choice to the Electoral College in 2024. That’s a development we all should fear.

 

 

The Insurrectionists Are Themselves Victims — Of Donald Trump’s Big Lies

  I have no doubt that the men and women who stormed the Capitol on January 6th — which is Epiphany on the Christian calendar — consider themselves patriots who would die for their country.

What would you do, dear reader, if you truly believed what they believe — namely, that your candidate actually won in a landslide election but was defrauded of his victory by a vast conspiracy to destroy America, democracy, freedom and everything you hold dear? 

Whether or not Donald Trump himself is delusional, he has succeeded, with great help from right-wing radio hosts and Fox News television hosts — not to mention Q-Anon, New America News, Newsmax and the rest of Trump World — in deluding 75 million Americans as well. I don’t doubt the intentions of the insurrectionists, given what they believe to be true. It’s just sad and disturbing that so many have clung to those lies, and the bravest of them have gone to war “for their country,” only to have died, been injured, lost their jobs, and may be going to prison, when their real crime was that they believed what the worst president in American history was telling them.

For deluding millions of his fellow citizens, Donald Trump is the one who should be punished, and should certainly not be allowed to run for president in 2024, which is why we should hope that he will be convicted by the Senate after he is impeached by the House of Representatives.

Hopefully, January 6th was an epiphany of another sort for many Trump supporters, but they have shown themselves to have that essential characteristic of cult members — that is, the inability to be swayed by facts, reason and logic, or to have the experience of an epiphany.

When capitalized, Epiphany refers to the date when the three wisemen (or Magi) arrived to celebrate the birth of Jesus.  When not capitalized, epiphany is defined by Webster as “an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple or striking; an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure; a revealing scene or moment.”

From what we hear on the news, the insurrectionists think they lost the battle but not the war on January 6th, and are ready to do battle again in the coming days and weeks and actually believe that with enough bloodshed they can rescue America from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the radical leftists who fraudulently tried to steal the presidency from the best president America has ever had — Donald J. Trump.

We should not underestimate the willingness of these “true believers” to go to war for Donald Trump again and again until they achieve victory. Indeed, one of the hand-made signs seen on January 6th said, “I’ll Die for Trump.”

How does one contain such a movement?  The de-platforming of Trump by Twitter, Facebook, et. al,, and the silencing of Parler by Amazon Web Services, only plays into the narrative that Big Tech is biased against conservatives. That could serve simply to reinforce the need for military-style action against the government. This could get really bad.

It has been reported that Walmart and other big donors have announced they will no longer contribute to the Congressmen and Senators who challenged the Electoral College votes on January 6th. That may influence politicians, but we need to balance that against the death threats which Mike Pence, Lindsay Graham and other long-time sycophants of Trump got when they turned against him or failed to do his bidding. I’m sure there are many Republicans who no longer fear being “primaried” by Donald Trump as much as they fear being killed (along with their wives and children) by Trump supporters.

We can be comforted but only a little by the fact that President Trump’s job approval sank this week to its historic low of 33%, but we should be more concerned that after recent events one-third of Americans still believe he’s doing a fine job.

In other words, January 6th was an epiphany to some, but not to enough, Americans.

There are going to be many more revelations in the coming months. For starters, there will be hundreds of arrests, trials, convictions and prison sentences for the insurrectionists, including those who organized and incited them. (I find it amusing that Trump would choose Rudy Giuliani to represent him in a Senate trial, given that Giuliani himself incited violence at the same rally on January 6th. Consider it further evidence of how Trump believes his own delusion about his innocence.)

I’m glad that Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.3 billion defamation suit against former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, because the legal process will give the lie to the claim that the ballot-counting machines were rigged to change Trump votes to Biden votes.  (Remember again, however, that cult members are not swayed by facts or logic. To them it will be “fake news.”)

In February or March we can expect indictments of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization by the Manhattan D.A. and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Also, Trump’s biggest creditor, Deutsche Bank, well known for laundering Russian money, has closed Trump’s banking accounts in response to the January 6th insurrection, suggesting that they will not be particularly agreeable with Trump when his millions of dollars of loans come due in the coming months and years. Done right, these developments will do a lot to disprove Trump’s original deception—that he is a successful and brilliant businessman. Of course, Trump’s remaining sycophants will spin a conspiracy theory to explain how he is being wrongly portrayed and victimized by whoever, and most of Trump supporters will believe it, because they’ll believe anything that he and his sycophants say.

In other words, we can’t expect the spell cast by Donald Trump over a third of Americans to unravel anytime soon. Wish the Republic well, and let’s hope that the intelligence services and law enforcement agencies work together better in the future than they did leading up to January 6th’s rally and insurrection.

That’s the macro problem. There’s also a micro problem — how do you and I reconcile with our friends and family who, to put it honestly, lost their minds under the spell of a self-obsessed, psychopathic president who probably sucked them in by his shared racist mentality?  I don’t have an easy answer for that, but I wish I did, because Rita and I have a few of them.

Although it makes perfect sense that Trump does not want to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration and that Biden is happy with that, it does raise a concern for me — and likely for the Secret Service — that this makes the inaugural setting a possible target for those Trump supporters who remain intent on completing their mission to kill off Trump’s enemies, including his newest enemy, Mike Pence, who will be on that stage.

One scenario I painted now seems less likely — that Trump would resign early enough for president Pence to pardon him.

 

The Trump Era Is Summed up by the phrase "Enemy of the People"

I have to share these opening paragraphs from tonight's "Reliable Sources" email newsletter. (Subscribe here.) 

Enemy of the people

 

If someone managed to sleep through the Trump years, and asked me what they'd missed, I'd start with "enemy of the people." Why? Because Trump's demonization of the media explains almost everything. He convinced his fans that the people covering him were lying. He advised them to trust certain Fox shows and ignore practically everything else. He said he was in a "running war with the media" on his very first weekend in office, and never stopped.

 

Many times, in many influential corners of the mainstream media, there was an impulse to ignore Trump's attacks. To deprive him of oxygen. But here's the counter-argument: Americans are drinking from a poisoned well of information. It's what caused some of the fractures in America and exacerbated so many of the others. And the poison is advertised as an antidote! Whataboutism, cherry-picked controversies, cover-ups of Trump's corruption – all of it flows 24/7 from a parallel universe of news, a universe that is largely predicated on criticism of legacy news outlets. All of it relates back to Trump's endless campaign against the people who report the news. The people he labeled as the "enemy."

 

Trump said it more and more every year, between 2017 and 2020, according to Factba.se data. And his base believed it. Disdain for the media glued his base together. That's why, in my view, "enemy of the people" is the No. 1 thing to understand about the past four years. It needs to be factored into every story about governmental action and inaction, every analysis of American politics, even after President-elect Biden is sworn in...

 

 

A "cult president"

 

David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, wrote this about Suffolk and USA Today's newest poll: "What does it mean to be a 'cult president' — one whose supporters will believe and trust him no matter what any other government officials, academics, journalists, politicians, and 'professional' experts say? Donald Trump could at the very least be characterized as one of the few presidents with a cult of personality and a cult-like following."

 

"A whopping 78 percent of Republicans do NOT believe that Joe Biden was legitimately elected president," Paleologos wrote. In the poll, he wrote, "we ask a question about which television and news sources are trusted the most. Among those who trust Fox News, 16% said that Biden was elected legitimately and 83% said he was not. If you combine the next seven news sources including PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC, 93% said Biden was legitimately elected and 6% said he was not."

 

Biden was elected legitimately. The widespread belief that he was not – that a vast conspiracy rigged the election against Trump – is evidence of radicalization among the Fox-GOP base. Conservative columnist and CNN contributor Matt Lewis tweeted on Monday, "As a lifelong conservative, I am still surprised by how many people I thought were like me have revealed themselves to be right-wing AUTHORITARIANS."

Cute video worth watching: "The 12 Stains of Trump's Mess"

 https://youtu.be/G6h8pJCNhzE

Dems Need to Realize That People in Trump’s Base Are Simply Unreachable

Perhaps you’ve harbored the thought that if only you could show Trump supporters this or that story or this or that flaw in the president that they might vote against him or just stay home in November.  Forget it.  They’re unreachable.

If we’ve learned anything about them, it’s that there is nothing Trump can do or say that will change their minds. If what is already known and recognized about the man isn’t enough to sway his supporters, there is nothing Trump — or Biden — can say or do that will make any difference.

This became clear to me from the many pro-Trump emails, letters, phone calls and texts that I received as a result of my previous “Talking Turkey” columns. I want you to see this for yourself, so I have compiled 36 pro-Trump emails into a 13-page PDF that you can download and read.

A reader alerted me to the term “Cult 45” to refer to his supporters. (Trump is the 45th president.)  Googling the term, I found this in an Eric Zorn column in the Chicago Tribune on Nov. 11, 2019, which suggested the term go mainstream: "A Monmouth University survey asked 401 respondents who approve of the president's job performance, "Can you think of anything that Trump could do, or fail to do, in his term as president that would make you disapprove of the job he is doing?" Sixty-two percent answered no, nothing their dear leader could do or not do would shake their faith in him."

It’s common to speak of people on both sides of the political divide as being in a “bubble,” where they simply are unaware of the facts or pseudo facts fueling the other side of the political divide.  I’ve concluded that it’s more like an “iron dome,” a term coined to describe the anti-missile defense system protecting Israel from its neighbors.

Trump supporters have provided many videos to convince me that I’m wrong about Trump, and they’re worth watching. They reveal the strategy for expanding his base.

Central to their strategy is painting mainstream media as the enemy of the people. One video says simply, “DON’T WATCH THE NEWS!”  The argument is that anything negative about Trump must be a politically motivated lie, no matter how rooted it is in facts. The key is for people get all their news from Fox News, One America Network and Trump’s own tweets. (He has 79 million Twitter followers. FYI, Barack Obama has the most, 117 million, and Michelle has 15 million)

Turn-out in November will be huge for Trump, driven by fear mongering about socialism, gun confiscation and killing of newborn babies if Democrats win. A big political attack will be “Spygate,” re-banded as “Obamagate,” and it will be built up to a frenzy inside the iron dome he has created by isolating his base from fact-checked journalism.

Trump, however, will motivate turnout by Democrats too, and turnout will determine the winner. A huge concern for Trump is mail-in voting like we have here in Colorado, which makes voting easier.  Easier voting means bigger turnout, which historically has favored Democrats. It probably contributed to Colorado "going blue."