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 ‘Big Lie’ Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving — for a Man With No Shame

By JIM SMITH

We learned last week that Donald Trump conned his small-donor followers out of $250 million on the pretext that the money would be used by an “election integrity committee” to fund challenges to Joe Biden’s election, when in fact no such committee existed and none of the money was even used for ballot recounts. It went to his hotels, the Jan. 6th rally, and mostly to his political campaign. His donors are, simply, suckers, reminding me of how he said that he loves uneducated voters and his “deplorables.” (Yes, although he attacked Hillary Clinton for using that term, he used it himself to describe his rightwing and racist followers.)

Whether or not he intended to use it long-term, when Trump saw the fundraising potential of the Big Lie, he decided to double down on it. Money, however, is not the only way the Big Lie has paid off for him.

Because his supporters believe anything Trump tells them and have been inoculated to dismiss any fact-checking as “fake news” paid for by the likes of George Soros, the Big Lie has generated the kind of misguided enthusiasm that could propel the Trump Party (formerly the GOP) to victory. The Democrats don’t yet have as much get-out-the-vote enthusiasm, and turnout is what wins any election. Besides, will getting the most votes even matter?

Steve Bannon brilliantly conceived a precinct strategy built upon the Big Lie and has already showed impressive success in getting Trump’s true believers to take over grass roots Republican precinct committees and school boards and to win nominations for the Secretaries of State who run elections.

The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative (and Catholic) majority is dismantling abortion rights and the separation of church and state. Five of those six were nominated by presidents who did not win the popular vote.

The Trump Party is following the playbook of fascist movements in the past, convincing supporters that any fact-checking by mainstream media is part of the conspiracy against their beliefs because those media are owned by the “radical socialist Democrats.”

The latest strategy is to include a mention of Snopes and Factcheck.org within their emails, warning readers that they “will tell you this is not true, but don’t believe them!”

How can that many Americans be so easily conned into believing what the rest of us know to be obvious untruths?

Have we passed the tipping point in the rightwing takeover of our country? We’ll know that for sure if the Trump Party takes control of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and wins Secretary of State races in battleground states. That’s all that’s required to steal the 2024 presidential election. After all, the US Constitution does allow for state legislatures to go against the popular vote and send their own electors to the Electoral College.

If they pull that off, Americans will be “up in arms” figuratively, but they will be outgunned literally by the storm troopers armed with AR-15 rifles, so I suspect it won’t matter. Death threats and the threat of violence are highly effective political tools.

Consider the following item from Heather Cox Richardson:

Today, June 20, 2022, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Missouri, disgraced former governor Eric Greitens, released an advertisement threatening those Republicans he considers too moderate, the so-called Republicans In Name Only… In the ad, Greitens is armed with a shotgun and flanked by military personnel as they burst into a house. “Today, we’re going RINO hunting,” he says. “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked with the stripes of cowardice,” he continues. “Join the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

Of course, it’s the Trumpers who are the true RINOs.  The above excerpt is a tacit acknowledgement that only the non-Trump Republicans can save us, but will they? On June 6, 1954, Boston attorney Joseph Welch brought down Sen. Joseph McCarthy with his televised line, “Have you no decency, sir?” When will other Republicans join Rep. Liz Cheney and speak out?  When will they defy the death threats, stand up and say, “Have you no shame, sir?”

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My thanks to the readers who support this column through my GoFundMe campaign at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com

 

If They Loved America, Wouldn’t Anti-Trump Republicans Speak Out?

  I’m reminded by the silence of mainstream Republicans of a quote often attributed to Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

I hesitate to use the word “mainstream” because it appears that the Republican Party is now the party of Trump and that the values (or lack of them) of Donald Trump have been adopted by the Republican mainstream. The rest of us should be frightened.

Thom Hartmann, the radio host and newsletter writer I admire for his articulate coverage of the decline of American democracy under the spell of Donald Trump, wrote a particularly cogent newsletter this Monday.

In the headline, Hartmann asks, “Is the Anti-Democracy Movement Reaching a Tipping Point in the US and Around the World?”

In it he notes: “Ukraine and Taiwan represent possible tipping points for democracy internationally, while Republicans passing laws that allow politicians to ignore the results of elections… could be a tipping point here.”

Hartmann notes that “virtually the entire Republican Party has rejected supporting democracy at home and supporting democratic governments abroad.”

This is no small matter. It is becoming clear that our Constitution is being used against us, and I see no way to avoid the death spiral of democratic rule in America.

Yes, the filibuster, which allows a minority of Senators to frustrate the majority, could be eliminated by a majority vote of Senators, because it is a Senate rule, not embedded in the Constitution. To their shame, two Democratic Senators prevented that from happening so that a voting rights bill they claim to support could pass without any Republican votes.

But even if the filibuster were eliminated, it does not change the structural issue built into the Constitution which gives the same vote in the Senate to Wyoming with fewer than 600,000 residents as it gives to California with over 39 million residents.  And the District of Columbia, which has more residents than Wyoming, has not one vote in the Senate (or in the House of Representatives).

Because our electoral system is under so much discussion since the former president started claiming his election was stolen through massive fraud — the Big Lie, as we call it — we are becoming more and more aware of how fragile our democratic republic is, and I’m not hopeful that there will be a happy ending, even if we see Trump and his cronies go to jail, as they should, for the many crimes that are coming to light thanks to the diligent work of the Jan. 6th committee and multiple prosecutors in New York and now Georgia.

My Republican mother and father, for whom integrity, civility and respect for the law were paramount (and instilled in us children), would be astounded at how our country is being brought down by the opposite traits of a single man who boasted that he could murder someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote.

The trendlines are all going in the wrong direction. Income inequality is on the rise, with the 10 richest billionaires doubling their wealth during the pandemic, while the government had to print money just to keep the bottom 99% above water. Non-partisan election officials are being terrorized by death threats and their jobs taken over by right-wing partisans. Legislatures are passing laws restricting ballot access and preparing to declare fraud if they don’t like the next presidential vote and send their own slate to the Electoral College. Tucker Carlson is convincing his viewers that we should support Russia instead of Ukraine. Where does this madness end?

As a wealthy white American, I have little to lose as long as I keep quiet in Trump’s new America, but it’s not an America I wish to live in.

 

A stark warning from Martin Baron about threats to truth, science, and democracy

By JIM SMITH

Martin Baron is the former Executive Editor of The Washington Post and a highly respected journalist. On April 21st, he delivered a grim warning to an audience at MIT about the avalanche of lies and falsehoods permeating right-wing media outlets, posing a direct threat to democracy and civil society. 

His comments mirror my own (or vice versa) so I’m going to devote this month’s column to quoting his lecture, reprinting in edited form the following article by Peter Dizikes of the MIT News Office:

Baron focused many of his remarks on lies and misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the 2020 presidential election. “The path we are on today is an invitation to ruin,” said Baron, while delivering MIT’s annual spring Compton Lecture.

Baron, who served as executive editor of The Washington Post from 2013 to 2021, before retiring, focused many of his remarks on lies and misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the 2020 presidential election. Propagation of those kinds of lies, he emphasized, not only undermines public health and governance in the near term, but undercuts our collective use of facts to help organize society.

“The truth is, we may not survive another crisis in public health if we don’t come up with answers,” Baron said. “And we may not survive another crisis in our democracy like the one we’ve faced.”

Champion of independence

Baron has been one of America’s highest profile newsroom leaders for the last two decades. He began his journalism career at the Miami Herald in 1976 and worked for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times before returning to the Herald as executive editor in 2000. He then served as executive editor of The Boston Globe for over a decade before moving to the Post.

Baron was portrayed by Liev Schreiber in the 2015 film “Spotlight,” winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film depicts the work of the Globe’s investigative reporting team, published in 2002, which revealed decades of covered-up abuse cases in the Catholic Church.

At Thursday’s event, Baron was introduced by MIT President L. Rafael Reif , who called the veteran editor a “champion of the independent press and its essential role in American democracy.” He added: “Marty’s distinguished career is a study in integrity, determination, and grace under pressure.”

Sustaining enlightenment

Baron began his talk with some broad historical brushstrokes, emphasizing the 18th-century Enlightenment as the time when a commitment to empiricism and rational inquiry helped form contemporary society. “Not one of you would be here without the values that informed that period,” he said.

That said, Baron added, today “verifiable fact, objective reality, is now under determined, deliberate, cynical, and malevolent assault. I can think of no greater threat to our system of governance, or to the public good.”

As a principal example, Baron cited the stream of lies disputing that former President Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

“We know that Joe Biden won,” Baron said. “There is a mountain of evidence proving that he did. There is no credible evidence that he didn’t. There were multiple recounts, there were audits, some of them even real ones. There were court challenges to official results that failed one after another, and judges at every level cited lack of evidence.  And yet, as of last December, one-third of the American public, and a stunning 71 percent of Republicans, believe the election was stolen.”

When it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, Baron observed, we are suffering from a similar wave of falsehoods.

“We know that vaccines work,” Baron said. “For decades, they have rid the world of devastating illness and death. And yet a substantial portion of the public believes vaccines will sicken and even kill you. Nothing could be more threatening to the public’s health than to deceive people about which medicines are safe and effective, and which are quackery, with potentially fatal outcomes. Here at MIT you know that as well as anyone.”

As a result of such large-scale lying, Baron said, the U.S. is losing its ability to properly govern itself.

“Ours is a country that rightly encourages vigorous debate about the problems we face and the policies required to address them,” Baron said. “That is liberty. That is democracy. That is what has distinguished our country in the eyes of people throughout the world.”

However, he added: “What happens when the underpinnings of that democracy are eroded? What happens when instead of debating policies, we find ourselves debating the most basic facts? What happens when we can’t even agree on what constitutes a fact? What happens when all those elements we rely upon for determining what is a fact — expertise, education, experience, and evidence — are routinely devalued, dismissed, and denied? That’s where we are today.”

Decline in confidence

As Baron emphasized, this is not simply a media or governance issue. He noted that there is a widespread decline in public confidence toward both the media and the medical professions, among many other institutions oriented around empirical reality.

“We in the press and you who are in science are in the same leaky, rickety boat,” Baron said.

Observing that there is “a systematic effort to sabotage independent sources of fact,” Baron noted that “the mission of these saboteurs … is not the pursuit of truth. They seek something else: power. Political, personal, and commercial power.”

Baron also listed a series of empirical questions about facticity, knowledge, and communication that he believes are worth pursuing, as one part of a larger societal effort to fight back against falsehoods and the accumulation of power they may abet.

“To get us back to a society firmly rooted in objective reality, I believe we will have to come up with answers to some urgent questions,” Baron said. “Here are a few. What makes the human mind susceptible to falsehoods from nonexperts and resistant to evidence-based facts from people with expertise? How can we better signal to the public that knowledge is not static? … How can we get the public to better understand and weigh the risks they face in daily life?”

He added: “How do we better signal that there is a distinction between scientific facts and policy decisions?…  How can reality-based professionals disseminate information in a manner that is more persuasive to more people?”

Impact on ordinary people

During the question-and-answer portion of the event, Baron further discussed the pursuit of truth in journalism, which he characterized as a process of searching for facts while questioning one’s own assumptions.

“It’s not so much maintaining a middle ground, it’s maintaining an independent ground,” Baron said. “Objectivity is a method. You want to make sure that your own preconceptions don’t get in the way of an objective search for the facts.”

[End of article about Baron’s lecture]

From Jim Smith:

It seems obvious to me that one single individual is responsible for this situation, and that is Donald Trump. The Big Lie about the 2020 election only gained a following because he started it. It is his single worst legacy, and one that could bring America down. Shame on him.

  

Talking Turkey: America, Alone Among Democracies, Is ‘Autocratizing’

By JIM SMITH

The chart below is extracted from one compiled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with figures for all the 100+ nations invited to President Biden’s recent “Summit for Democracy.” This version is limited to the major “liberal democracies,” designated as “free” by Freedom House.

While democracy and freedom of expression is declining in the majority of liberal democracies, only Israel scored lower than the United States, which was the only liberal democracy tagged as “autocratizing,” meaning that it is moving toward an autocracy. In columns 2 and 4, the lower the score, the less democratic the country is and the less freedom of expression it has. We don’t rank well.

Sadly, this is not news to me, nor probably to most of my readers. The passage of voter suppression laws in Republican-controlled states has gotten a lot of press, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. You’ve also read, here and elsewhere, of the master plan to overturn any election of a Democratic presidential candidate in 2024 by having key states declare their voting results “fraudulent” to justify sending a Republican slate to the Electoral College — in other words, succeeding where they failed on Jan. 6th. If they succeed in 2024, we’ll probably fall off the list of liberal democracies altogether.

Should that legal maneuver (which, it should be noted, the Constitution allows) fail, insurrection is Plan B. It is actually being planned by the heavily armed militia types within the so-called Republican Party. Their support within the rank and file, however, is what’s so shocking. A CNN poll in October showed that over three-quarters of those who identify as Republicans think Joe Biden was fraudulently elected. Although the militia types are a small percentage of those Republicans, having that kind of widespread support makes “hitting the streets” easier to justify. If, as is possible, the Supreme Court rules in mid-2022 that Americans have an unrestricted right to carry a gun anywhere in the country, that could make a repeat of Jan. 6th even more deadly. (D.C.’s gun laws reduced that likelihood last January.)

According to a scary msn.com article (click here to read it) 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns in 2021 and are on track to buy 20 million more. “If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican, southern and rural.” There is “a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary.”

On the subject of climate change, we debate where the tipping point is — the point at which climate disaster is irreversible. Some think we have already passed it, given, for example, the loss of summer ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Well, we may have passed the tipping point of civil war/insurrection. This is not hyperbole. If mask mandates and vaccine mandates trigger death threats and armed violence, the pronouncements of Tucker Carlson and others that our democracy has been stolen can lead the armed wackos who believe that lie to make the lie come true through armed rebellion. The 2022 mid-terms could be a major tipping point. If the Republicans gain control of one or both houses of Congress, it will indicate that enough of America has fallen for the big lies and the lesser lies and there may be no turning back. Follow that with the election of Donald Trump of Tucker Carlson in 2024, and we can likely kiss the American Experiment goodbye.

Here are clickable links to two related columns that I read while researching this column:

¨  Column by Christy E. Lopez in the Washington Post: Beware the extremist, dangerous and unconstitutional ‘constitutional sheriffs’

¨  Column by Dana Milbrank in the Washington Post: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says

 

A Reader Asks: Why Do I Keep Writing About Donald Trump? He’s Gone!

Good question. The answer is that his spirit lingers among those I call Trumpers. Cult-45 is very real, and the disgraced ex-president holds his diminished fan base like no other cult leader in our history.

The real culprits in nurturing Cult-45 are Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham at Fox News plus those two far right networks supporting Trump’s “Big Lie,” One America News Network (OAN) and Newsmax, although I have never watched those. However, the audience for these conspiracy mongers and promoters are Trump’s base, and there’s no better term for them than Trumpers. (Can you make such a term from those other names?  Tuckerers?)

We know Trump’s base, loud though it may be, is diminished by the size of the crowds at his rally, but I see its reduction myself in readers who were Trump supporters in 2020 but don’t identify themselves with him any more.  “Not all Republicans support Trump, including me,” more than a few readers have told me. “Stop attacking all Republicans,” they beg, and I concur. Not all Republicans, thank God, are Trumpers. Many want the Party to move on from him and are as upset as the rest of us that the majority of the party rank-and-file, according to polls, have been convinced by Trump’s Big Lie and still like him. That’s the power of a cult.

A friend driving north from Castle Rock on I-25 last week told me that she saw some flag waving Trumpers on an overpass, a couple of them displaying banners that read “Trump Won.” Really? These cult followers are really deep into it. They, not Trump, are the target of our anger and disgust — but they also reflect for us all how one insecure, monomaniacal and psychopathic man has infected a statistically significant percentage of the population with democracy-destroying beliefs that our electoral system is corrupt. It is not.

Equally disturbing, however, is the fact that because a large percentage of the Republican rank and file still likes Donald Trump, the Republican members of Congress feel that telling the truth about Trump could cost them something they hold more dear than the flag they pretend allegiance to — their own political survival.

But Republicans alone can’t win elections without their disaffected members and, more importantly, independent voters. Here in Colorado, the biggest voter registration is “unaffiliated.” It’s they who win elections in most races, and having only 80% of the Republican Party without a majority of independents will not do it for Trumpers except in the very reddest of districts.  The rest of the electorate is appalled at what incumbent supporters of Trump have done. Painting the Jan. 6th insurrection as “noisy tourists” does not bode well for their all-important survival. At least it shouldn’t, and if those Republicans, especially Lauren Bobert, win re-election over a good, centrist Democratic candidate, our country is going to look a lot like our climate — beyond the tipping point into irreversible self-destruction.

Every President Leaves a Legacy, So What Will Donald Trump’s Legacy Be?

    As our country struggles to recover from the Trump presidency, it’s hard not to think about what Pres. Donald Trump’s legacy will be. We’re living it every day.

If you Google “Donald Trump’s legacy” (with the quote marks so you only get hits with those words in that order), you get 57,000+ hits, and it’s interesting to see the various takes on his legacy. The #1 hit is, appropriately, from the BBC, which has the useful perspective of being British but with a nightly news program on public television, which I record and occasionally watch. (There is an entire BBC America channel on both Dish Network and DirecTV.)

That article makes the observation that “If Donald Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader…. a president who, before the pandemic, presided over an economic boom, re-oriented America's opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist (conservative) majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a Covid-19 vaccine in record time.”

Indeed, the legacy of Donald Trump turned on his Jan. 6th incitement of violence because he could not accept defeat, an aspect of his personality so well laid out in his niece Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough.”

But that was not his first incitement of violence. At least one clip from his many rallies comes to mind where he encouraged his followers to assault a protestor, declaring that he would pay the legal expenses if they were prosecuted.

The BBC article describes his Alt-right followers as “Trump’s shock troops,” and indeed they were just that, appropriately reminiscent of the Nazi Brownshirts, aka Storm Troopers.  A big element of Trump’s legacy will be his emboldening of violent right wing extremists, including white supremacists, epitomized by his response to the Charlotteville “Unite the Right” rally.

Trump’s “Big Lie” about losing the 2020 election due to fraud and his emboldening of right-wing extremists is his most enduring legacy (in that we are living with it well beyond his term in office), but there are other important elements of his legacy worthy of highlighting.

We lost four years of leadership in addressing climate change, which poses an existential threat to our planet. He cut funding for renewable energy and boosted support for coal and other fossil fuels. He emboldened climate deniers, but that was just one element of a larger denial of science. We’re living with that legacy not only in the forest fires and drought plaguing our country but in lives lost due to vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, which he fostered despite taking credit for Operation Warp Speed.

Trump’s damage to the Republican Party may or may not be long lasting, depending on how successful the party, propelled by his rhetoric, is in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Losses in those elections would be a second repudiation of Donald Trump and could, hopefully, lead to a return to the GOP of old which did, for the most part, put country above party — at least until the election of Barack Obama, when it truly assumed the role of being the “Party of No” under the leadership of Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Trump’s reshaping of the judiciary, not just the Supreme Court, will be an enduring legacy, too. With the help of Sen. McConnell, he appointed over 250 judges, most of them recommended by the conservative Federalist Society. The American Bar Association rated 10 of Trump’s appointees “unqualified,” but the Senate confirmed them anyway.

Donald Trump succeeded as no previous president has in demonizing the free press, or what he called the “lamestream media.”  (The use of insult name-calling is also part of his legacy.) If a news item didn’t flatter him, it was deemed “fake news” and his followers believed him. He called the free press “the enemy of the people,” but saying so identifies Trump as the true enemy of the people.