Biden warns Trump is an existential threat to democracy. The media whiffs it

In advance of his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, President Joe Biden traveled to New York on Sunday and spent time at a fundraiser in a Broadway theater Monday night. In front of supporters there, he hammered at the threat Donald Trump presents to the nation's democracy.

“Let there be no question, Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy. And I will always defend, protect and fight for our democracy,” Biden said, according to the Associated Press.

CNN has more from the speech:

“I will not side with dictators like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. Maybe Trump and his MAGA friends can bow down and praise him, but I won’t,” Biden said.

“I don’t believe America is a dark, negative nation, a nation of carnage driven by anger, fear and revenge. Donald Trump does,” he added later.

Citing Trump’s vow if reelection to act as “retribution” for his supporters, Biden asked: “Did you ever think you’d hear a president of the United States speak like that? Well, I believe we are a hopeful, optimistic nation driven by the proposition that everyone deserves a shot.”

CNN describes the speech as "some of his fiercest condemnation to date" of coup conspirator Trump, but none of Biden's remarks seem especially controversial. The AP itself has reported on Trump and his allies’ plan to overhaul the government on authoritarian premises. Trump has repeatedly told crowds he was their "retribution," including at a Waco, Texas, rally that coincided with the 30th anniversary of the deadly Branch Davidian standoff. On a fundamental level, one cannot plausibly argue that a man who organized a mob of known-violent supporters, refused to support their disarming, and had them march on the Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of his opponent's election victory is not a dangerous threat to democracy itself.

Trump is pressing for fascist revolution, and nothing Biden said at the fundraiser is false. But instead of acknowledging that, the media writes stories that play off the potential ensconcing of an authoritarian cultist as one of many competing election factors. Here's the AP's take:

It was the among the president’s strongest rebukes of the Republican front-runner and former president, who is facing criminal charges for his role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. And it comes as the political pressure is ramping up from Republicans in the House who have opened an impeachment inquiry into Biden in an effort to tie him to his son Hunter’s business dealings and distract from Trump’s legal peril.

Biden said he wanted to send the “strongest and most powerful message possible, that political violence in America is never never never acceptable.”

What the hell is that?

On one hand, "criminal charges for [Trump's] role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election." On the other hand, Biden is facing an "impeachment inquiry"—one that has editorially been determined to be a House Republican attempt to "distract from Trump's legal peril," even as the reporting excludes the crucial detail that the allegations against Biden are, to all available evidence, utterly false.

CNN's version is no better. "Biden takes on Trump and age questions in new fundraiser speech," goes the article’s headline. The first paragraph focuses on Biden accusing Trump of being "determined to destroy democracy." But paragraph two brings us the apparently similarly important news that:

Biden also sought to rebut chronic questions about his age, claiming his long experience in Washington gave him the wisdom to steer the nation forward.

Ah. On the one hand, a potential end to democracy. And on the other, Biden referenced attacks on his age. You can see how both of those things would perk up political journalism's ears to roughly the same extent.

On the same day Biden made these remarks, we learned that Trump has been using classified documents as scratch paper to pass messages to his assistant. It's the sort of buffoonish incompetence or intentional criminality—it's unclear which—that should disqualify anyone from government service.

If press rooms can recognize that the House Republican "impeachment inquiry" of Biden is a straight-up attempt to "distract" from all the crimes Trump's accused of, then the rest of it should follow. That means the House Republican attempt is crooked. That means the party itself, or at least its most powerful members, are attempting themselves to subvert democracy by propagating hoaxes.

Follow the ball, here, reporters. Yes, we grant you that Biden is slightly older than his also-old opponent. But what is the thing future historians will be talking about when chronicling this election and its outcome? What are the threads that will be weaved together to explain these times, presuming a future Republican Party allows history books to accurately record them?

It isn't poll numbers on how many Americans think Joe Biden is old, CNN. It's not a few paragraphs tacked on about Biden's "tepid fundraising schedule," AP, after getting bored with Biden's warnings about our imperiled democracy a mere half-dozen paragraphs in. Figure this out.

Sign the petition: Trump attempted a coup on January 6. He is a clear & present danger to democracy

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Kerry talks with Drew Linzer, director of the online polling company Civiqs. Drew tells us what the polls say about voters’ feelings toward President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and what the results would be if the two men were to, say … run against each other for president in 2024. Oh yeah, Drew polled to find out who thinks Donald Trump is guilty of the crimes he’s been indicted for, and whether or not he should see the inside of a jail cell.

Siege of the Capitol the culmination of the GOP’s long embrace of anti-democratic authoritarianism

Republicans scurried to distance themselves Wednesday from the horrifying takeover of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., by a riotous mob of fanatical Donald Trump supporters. “Those who made this attack on our government need to be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham. Those storming the Capitol need to stop NOW,” chimed in Sen. Ted Cruz. The Senate Republicans’ Twitter account posted: “This is not who we are.”

This is, however, exactly who they are. What happened Wednesday was the apotheosis of the GOP’s two-decades-and-longer descent into right-wing authoritarianism, fueled by eliminationist hate talk, reality-bereft conspiracist sedition, anti-democratic rhetoric and politics, and the full-throated embrace under Trump of the politics of intimidation and thuggery. It came home to roost not just for Republicans, but for us all.

This radical authoritarianism was evident not just in the intent of the Capitol siege—an insurrectionist attempt to force Congress to overturn the known results of the November presidential election—but in the faces and voices of the men and women who comprised Wednesday’s mob.

  • In the crowd of rioters invading the Capitol building while chanting “treason” and “our house.”
  • In the grinning young white man who offered a Nazi salute to the invading rioters.
  • In the mobs harassing journalists and destroying their equipment, telling them: “Every corner you set up now, we’ll be there.”
  • In the voice of the man chanting inside the Capitol: “Traitors get the rope!”
  • In the zip ties and handgun carried by one of the Capitol invaders, suggesting that these insurrectionists intended to take hostages, and perhaps to execute them.
  • In the voice of the woman from Knoxville, Tennessee, who explained why, despite being maced, she had attempted to enter the building: “We’re storming the Capitol! It’s the revolution!”

There is little question that one man is primarily responsible for the unleashing of this kind of proto-fascist politics: Donald Trump. As I explained a few months ago:

Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.

Trump’s response all along has been to dance a tango in which, after sending out a signal of encouragement (such as his “very fine people on both sides” comments after the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017), he follows up with an anodyne disavowal of far-right extremists that is believed by no one, least of all white nationalists. Whenever queried about whether white nationalists pose a threat—as he was after a right-wing terrorist’s lethal attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, when he answered: “I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”—Trump has consistently downplayed the threat of the radical right.

More recently, the appearance at the very least that Trump is deliberately encouraging a violent response to his political opposition has been growing. When far-right militiamen have gathered in places like Richmond, Virginia, and Lansing, Michigan, to shake their weapons in an attempt to intimidate lawmakers and other elected government officials, Trump has tweeted out his encouragement. When a teenage militiaman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, two fatally, Trump defended him while mischaracterizing the shootings. When far-right conspiracy theorists created a hoax rumor that antifascists and leftists were responsible for the wildfires sweeping the rural West Coast—resulting in armed vigilantes setting up “citizens patrols” and highway checkpoints, sometimes with the encouragement of local police—Trump retweeted a meme promoting the hoax.

The reality currently confronting Americans is that the extremist right has been organizing around a strategy of intimidation and threats by armed “Patriots”—embodied by street-brawling proto-fascist groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, American Guard, and the “III Percent” militias, along with their “Boogaloo” cohort, all of them eager to use their prodigious weaponry against their fellow Americans in a “civil war.” And what we have seen occurring as the 2020 campaign has progressed is that the line of demarcation between these right-wing extremists and ordinary Trump-loving Republicans has all but vanished.

However, Trump never could have accomplished this kind of empowerment of the radical right, not to mention his ceaseless underhanded attacks on our democratic institutions, without having been enabled at every step by an enthusiastic Republican Party, both its establishment wing and its far-right “populist” bloc, as well as an army of authoritarian devotees in right-wing media and social media.

People like Cruz and Graham, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and former Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr, all have played major roles in enabling Trump’s multiple depredations. At every step, Republicans have avidly empowered Trump as he has ravaged our international alliances, our national security apparatus, our courts, our Justice and Education and State departments (not to mention Interior, Energy, Treasury, and multiple other departments, notably the Environmental Protection Agency).

The problems with the Republican Party and the conservative movement generally extend well beyond the past four years, and well beyond Trump himself. Indeed, the man the party empowered and enabled to undermine our democratic institutions is the embodiment of conditions created within the GOP for the previous four decades and longer, all of them profoundly anti-democratic and authoritarian.

The strands of authoritarianism that conservatives wove together for many years to create the noose that is Donald Trump are all clear and on the record:

  • Ronald Reagan’s abiding anti-government sentiments (“Government is not the solution to our problem, it is the problem”) became deeply embedded as a fundamental approach to governance within the conservative movement—guaranteeing not just its incoherence and cognitive dissonance, but inevitably its antagonism to democratic institutions, particularly voting rights.
  • Bill Clinton’s presidency—or rather, the conservative reaction against it—begat the far-right “Patriot” movement that Trump now essentially leads, borne of “New World Order” conspiracy theories, Bircherite nationalism, and hysterical fearmongering. It also established what became a permanent right-wing ethos in which any kind of Democratic presidency is characterized as illegitimate, and the Republican Party became the vehicle for pushing this claim (as in the Javier-esque impeachment effort the GOP then undertook).
  • During the Bush years, any questioning of the Republican administration’s conduct of the Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11 invasions (thanks in no small part to a relentless drumbeat of fearmongering after those terrorist attacks) was summarily attacked by its defenders as “on the side of the terrorists” and “helping the terrorists win”—that is, disloyal and treasonous. Not just war critics but anyone who dared question Bush policies would find themselves summarily subjected to a barrage of smears and eliminationist rhetoric. “We don't want to get rid of all liberals,” Rush Limbaugh was fond of saying. “I want to keep a couple, for example, on every major U.S. college campus so that we never forget who these people are."
  • John McCain’s presidential nomination in 2008 gave us Sarah Palin, who more than any Republican politician previously normalized the know-nothing “populist” politics that now completely dominate the party. It also unleashed the tide of nativist bigotry—manifested especially in the expressed world views of her adoring fans, who had no hesitation in pronouncing Barack Obama a Muslim, a terrorist, and a man who “hates white people”—on which Trump would later surf into the White House.

This tide soon swelled to mass proportions during Obama’s presidency under the aegis of the Tea Party phenomenon, which was portrayed in the press as a populist uprising for conservative values but which in reality was a major conduit for the revival and ultimate mainstreaming of the far-right “Patriot”/militia movement of the 1990s, and all of its attendant conspiracist fearmongering and bigotry (manifested especially in the “Birther” conspiracy theories). Trump, who built his political power by promoting that theory, declared himself the personification of the Tea Party in 2011, and by the time he announced his campaign in 2015, he was broadly perceived as just that.

By winning first the GOP nomination and then the presidency, Trump culminated all these long-developing trends into a genuinely authoritarian politics fueled by ignorance and bigotry and resentment, filtered through the prism of paranoid conspiracism. All of which has led us to the pass we reached this week.

The conspiracist authoritarianism has long ceased to be merely a fringe element. Over 80 percent of Trump voters believe that Joe Biden won the election fraudulently. In one poll taken yesterday, 45 percent of Republicans approved of the Capitol siege, and 68 percent said it posed no threat to democracy. This is who they are.

The Republican Party’s hostility to democracy—embodied by conservatives’ running refrain that “America is not a democracy, it’s a republic”—has become its official policy over the past decade, manifested most apparently in its egregious voter suppression policies and court rulings that reached a fever pitch in recent years. It’s now a commonplace for Republican politicians (notably Trump himself) to fret that a high voter turnout is nearly certain to translate into Democratic wins as a reason to even further suppress the vote.

As David Frum (a never-Trump conservative) noted in his book Trumpocracy: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” On Wednesday, that rejection became undeniably, irrevocably manifest.

Rather than taking a hard look at what they have become after the mob their president ginned up stormed the Capitol, today’s lame attempts by conservatives to gaslight the public about what happened Wednesday (with figures like Matt Gaetz and Mo Brooks trying to gaslight the public by claiming the invaders were actually “antifa”) make all too clear that the Republican Party, now consumed by right-wing authoritarianism, has ceased to be a viable partner in a working democracy. The problem the rest of us now face is how to proceed from here.

Things in Portland were getting better, until Trump made them worse … deliberately

In the last two weeks, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that there are “many, many people in jail right now—many, many people in jail, all over the country” for attempting to topple Confederate statues. And then there was the sequence from Trump’s appearance on Thursday, in which he promised, “many exciting things … Things that nobody has even contemplated, thought about, thought possible, and things that we’re going to get done … we can honestly say nobody has ever going to see eight weeks like we’re going to have.” He continued, “We’re going to get things done that they’ve wanted to see done for a long, long time.”

Trump did not say who “they” were, but it’s not hard to guess what the things are. Because a day earlier, Trump made it clear that one of the “detailed” and “thoughtful” things he has planned for next week is a federal takeover of multiple cities from “the left-wing group of people” that voters have elected as governors, mayors, and other local leaders. “Next week, we’re going to have, I think, a very exciting news conference because we’re going to be talking about some of these cities that — where the Democrats running them have just lost control of the cities. So that’ll be very interesting.”

Interesting … may not be the right word.

On Saturday morning, it did seem as if the national media had finally noticed that Portland, Oregon exists. Video of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler demanding the removal of uninvited federal troops from his city’s streets appeared on multiple broadcasts, as did video of those unidentified federal forces kidnapping people off the street and forcing them into unmarked vans

The New York Times has detailed the last fifty days of protests and unrest in Portland. The article does a good job explaining the many steps between the protests against police violence and systemic racism that grew in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, and how those protests eventually led to unarmed protesters being shot in the face by federal officers. That story includes a spiral of protest actions, over-response from police, escalation of tensions, and events such as a July 4th exchange with protesters directing fireworks toward the federal courthouse while police returned a hail of rubber-coated bullets, pepper balls and tear gas … for three hours.

But the biggest takeaway of “how did we get here” when it comes to unidentified men in camo dragging people into vans, or blasting them in the face, is simple: Donald Trump wants it that way.

A year ago, it might have seemed possible that Donald Trump could be reelected, based on the complacency of a white America willing to overlook—or reward—three years of racism and corruption in exchange for an extra nickle on their paychecks and the satisfaction of knowing they had a leader who was making white supremacy fashionable again. But with COVID-19 revealing just how impossibly weak Donald Trump’s leadership really is, and coming off a year in which Trump’s impeachment brought a cascade of testimony to his pettiness and insecurity, any concept that Trump might hold onto power in anything resembling a normal election is out the window.

If the American people can go to the polls, or even better, mail in a ballot, to select their choice in November, Trump will lose in all but a handful of the most blood red states. In fact, his slide over the last month has been so precipitous, it’s hard to predict that any state is unthinkable in the fall.

Trump knows this. In response, he’s going with what has always worked for him in the past—racism, the shock doctrine, and fear. Trump intends to sell his followers on a vision of America where Democratic states and cities are not just less important than red states, but a threat to real Americans. A threat that must be dealt with. What’s going on in Portland right now is the prototype for Trump’s America

As the Times article—and the mayor, and the governor, and everyone on the scene—makes clear, the presence of federal forces in Portland has greatly escalated the violence and tension in the city. It’s only since these forces appeared on the scene that “it’s gotten really brutal.” That’s because the federal forces have no respect for the usual tension and back-and-forth that exists between protesters, even the most peaceful protesters, and police. Here’s a scene in downtown Portland from a week ago.

Last Saturday, the crowd was 100 or so. It was very chill—nothing going on beyond the now-normal occupation of the Justice Center. And feds came out grabbing people seemingly at random and beating people with sticks. There was the kid who got shot in the head and his skull was fractured. 

The federal forces didn’t just shoot an unarmed student in the head. They shot the relationship between the police and the protesters. They blew away an already tentative sense of cause and effect. They made it clear that there are no rules. Anyone could be hurt at any time for any thing. Or nothing.

This is not accidental. In both the protests in Washington D. C. and what’s going on in Portland, the forces sent in by Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and acting Director of Homeland Security Chad Wolf are people completely untrained in dealing with either public demonstrations or even normal law enforcement. These are ass-kickers, and they’ve been sent in to kick ass. 

They are not there to make things better. They are very, very much there to make things worse.

And they’re being successful. Early on in the sequence of protests in Portland, a man called “Legend” started providing free food to protesters. His efforts got him tear gassed, but the community response ended up allowing him to create an always-open spot where anyone—protester, homeless, or just hungry—could come in for a free plate of food. The community rallied around him, local merchants provided supplies, voluntary contributions covered all the costs. Other services grew up around “Riot Ribs,” including free medical care, and even help in finding jobs and homes for those on the streets. But after the federal forces smashed the unspoken agreement between the police and protesters, the location was stormed, Legend and everyone else involved was driven away or arrested, and all the donated food was confiscated. A fence was put up to make sure no one could come back. The relationship between the police and protesters went way down. The chance of violence … through the roof.

This is exactly the kind of outcome Trump is going for. It does Trump no good to have people sitting around sharing food, helping their community, and  planning for the future. He needs there to be violence. So he, and Barr, and Wolf, are creating it. They have no intention on stopping with Portland. The United States is currently undergoing the greatest crisis it has faced in a century. At the same time, it is wrestling with the greatest reconsideration of Civil Rights in half a century. Trump has no interest in dealing with the former, and nothing but distaste for the later. He’s creating a crisis on top of crisis on top of a crisis because … racism and fear. In the end, it’s all he ever brought to the game.

Fox News and right wing sources are already selling their audience on a vision of America in which blue states and cities are in “anarchy” and where violence “demands” a federal presence. It fits exactly with their claims that had the gun-waving couple in St. Louis not directed a military weapon at passing protesters, they would have been “murdered” and their house “would be ashes.” They mean to make violence not just understandable, but inevitable.

Trump means to send federal forces to Chicago, and Seattle, and anywhere else he can think of, explicitly to insert the chaos and violence that justifies taking even more federal control. And it would not be too much to believe that action is headed toward something very like a declaration of martial law, or a federalization of police forces.

However, there is one thing that can slow Trump’s action: Visibility. The right wing has been getting a stream of “antifa violence” fed to them 24/7 since the George Floyd protests began. They’re plenty ready for Trump to crack some skulls and shoot some protesters. What happened to John Lewis on that bridge in Selma may have shocked the nation, but Trump supporters are eagerly waiting to see that kind of bloodshed on their screens. Every note of racism and fear has been played to not just make them want it, but feel like they need it.

There has to be more visibility for everyone else. A momentary blip on the news 50 days into protests and over a week after federal forces blew apart the situation, is far from enough. What’s happening in Portland needs to be elevated not just because it’s frightening, and a huge threat to America, but because when it’s seen up close, the intention is also obvious, crude, and even more than a little ludicrous

Mayor Wheeler has forcefully renewed his call for the withdrawal of federal forces. Oregon Governor Kate Brown has made it clear that Trump is “looking for a confrontation” in hopes of turning violence in Portland into votes in Ohio or Michigan. Even the U. S. Attorney for the District of Oregon has called for an investigation into an action that his boss has played a major role in organizing (So don’t be surprised to hear about another U. S. attorney “resigning”). 

But the most important thing at the moment may be to elevate the videos and reports from those on the ground. To join in saying that this is unacceptable. And to make it clear to Donald Trump that you see what he is doing.

We�re fighting to save our democracy � in Portland and nationwide. And we�re just getting started.https://t.co/LdhRXKw5IY

— ACLU (@ACLU) July 18, 2020

�Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street we call it kidnapping� https://t.co/6GvqjkOANC

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) July 18, 2020

Unidentified stormtroopers. Unmarked cars. Kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti. These are not the actions of a democratic republic.@DHSgov�s actions in Portland undermine its mission. Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 18, 2020

How far will you go to save our democracy from Donald Trump?

Have you ever considered what happens when Donald Trump loses in November? One year ago, his former attorney Michael Cohen testified before Congress that Trump would not accept electoral defeat this upcoming election. Sadly, he’s probably right: If there’s one thing Trump has been consistent about, it’s that he narcissistically refuses to accept reality whenever it’s in any way negative toward him. This is why Trump has repeatedly, and ridiculously, insisted that he won the popular vote in 2016. In his very first meeting with Congressional leaders, he told them he won the popular vote because “3 to 5 million people voted illegally, and I’m not even counting California.”

Despite images to the contrary, Trump still refuses to accept that his sparsely attended inauguration was anything except the largest in history. Trump is so mentally incapable of admitting defeat that he literally took a Sharpie marker to an official map rather than admit he got something wrong. Most people found that hilarious, while others thought it pathetic.

I found it dangerous.

Recent events have made Trump even more reckless than “usual.” His impeachment acquittal by Republican senators, despite overwhelming evidence, seemingly proved Trump’s own adage that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any political support. Right after the vote, when Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ gave a jaw-dropping justification that Trump had “learned his lesson,” Trump decided to shed any pretense of caring about democratic norms, and fully embraced his goal of complete authoritarian corruption.

Trump has turned the Department of Justice into his own personal political hit squad. His Treasury Department, which refused to turn over anything to Congress, even under subpoena, quickly and illegally turned over private financial information on Joe Biden’s son. Trump has pushed out career public servants and replaced them with sycophants who place loyalty to him above the Constitution. Republican senators have willingly surrendered their power on just about everything, even allowing Trump to rewrite their budget through decree, and helped him pack the courts with unqualified toadies.

Trump destroying democracy with Attorney General Bob Barr.

Now that the checks and balances are gone, Trump is in a great position to steal the next election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has done his part by refusing to allow any bills on election security to come up for a vote, while remaining silent as Trump openly calls for foreign hacking. It appears that voter suppression and gerrymandering are no longer enough. Yet even if all the dirty tricks fail, and Trump still manages to lose the election outright, Trump is very likely not going to step down.

Many call this line of thinking paranoid, but that’s because they give Trump and his GOP allies too much credit. Election night has always been the one time that the Republicans have had to come face-to-face with reality. Unlike trickle-down economics or climate science, elections are straight math, no matter your preconceived view. You can’t challenge an election.

Or so we thought.

As with so many other things, Trump is going to change that dynamic. There are many possible scenarios, but several have Trump likely calling the election for himself long before the votes are in. If the results are not breaking his way during the election, expect Trump to cry fraud. Washington Monthly put out a very plausible sequence of events of what might happen once this occurs. Trump would declare, probably through a tweet, that he is hearing “from a lot of people” that polling sites are “fixed” and “rigged” against him. After Trump claims fraud, the GOP leadership is almost certain to back him up. His chief bootlickers, like Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham, will call for bogus investigations.

If the vote comes down to a state like Florida, where the GOP is in full control, they likely won’t certify the Democratic winner. Even if it came down to a purple state that refuses to fix the election, like Pennsylvania, recall that our constitution requires the current vice president to certify the election results. Mike Pence, who is the most submissive veep in our nation’s history, will not do this if Trump instructs him not to. The GOP has likely already calculated this, because in that event, the decision would go to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there are more GOP controlled states than Democratic ones, the victor would most assuredly be Trump.

The Senate has already proven they won’t do anything to stop him, and the Supreme Court is packed with Trump’s people, like Brett Kavanaugh, who warned that he would not be impartial after his confirmation hearing.

So then what?  What if Trump loses the election, refuses to leave, and the GOP doesn’t make him? Can you imagine a scenario where Trump loses the popular vote AND the Electoral College, yet is still in office after a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court? What would you do in this case? I am seriously asking YOU: Then what?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I come home, read the daily dose of awful news from this administration, get angry, fire off a few posts, and then do something else to take my mind off of the political despair. But that is getting harder to do. Opinion writers tell me I’m being silly: Americans will never accept a dictatorship. Yet, for the most part, the populace has been staying silent. After all, it certainly doesn’t look like a dictatorship. We don’t have tanks rolling down the streets or violent militias patrolling neighborhoods—mostly, anyway. People still feel free to march and to protest, and we still have a free press where journalists don’t fear violent retribution—mostly, anyway.  

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse... And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945

Yet dictatorships don’t happen overnight.

Right now, Trump has merely “joked” about refusing to leave office—over two dozen times. Trumpian politicians are only recently starting to get more brazen, like introducing a book banning bill to imprison librarians. Trump’s promised government retribution for late night show mocking hasn’t started, nor has his unconstitutional declaration to end birthright citizenship. Although Trump says he can legally order the attorney general to do anything he wants (he can’t), and plans to go after Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, and Mitt Romney, he hasn’t—yet. But all of that is bluster, right? We’ll be okay. Americans always are.

If Trump remains in office after the next election, all of this will change. There will be absolutely nothing and nobody reigning him in. Meanwhile, Trump’s list of enemies, perceived and real, grows. As Americans, we have become more and more comfortable with his attacks on our Democratic institutions. We have become numb to his frequent attacks on his immigrant scapegoats and the free press.

We aren’t in a dictatorship yet, but it absolutely can and will happen here if we allow it, and sooner than you think. Right now, many Americans don’t want to speak out. They, like me, just want to go about their lives. The problem with that is if you wait until it gets bad enough to where you feel you have to speak out, only then will you realize speaking out will no longer be possible.

Consider this 2017 warning from Yale history professor Timothy Snyder.

The framers of the Constitution were worried that someone might come along who could be elected president who didn't have concern about the rule of law or about democracy. We are now in that situation.

[...]

 Up until now, there is nothing in Mr. Trump's words or in his actions which would even suggest that he cares even a little bit about democracy or about the rule of law.

[...] 

What I would say is that our institutions were set up for a moment just like this one, but they'll only protect us if we enliven them and if we support them.

You can watch Snyder’s full video below. 

YouTube Video

Authoritarian leaders like Trump count on two things: that you’ll despair, and that you’ll be quiet. Yet authoritarians can’t turn into dictators without a compliant populace. For me, becoming noncompliant means that my personal ban on discussing politics with friends, neighbors, and co-workers is over. I don’t have to verbally attack anyone to confront a blatant lie, but I will no longer be silent.

My “Christian” friends calling immigrants an infestation of MS-13 are on notice. How the hell is any of this Christian? Phony justifications by right-wing politicians for Trump’s plans to stay in office for a third term due to “lost time” will no longer be politely ignored.

I’m asking you, right now: What you are comfortable with doing, and what you are amenable to giving up? For me, it’s comfort. I can’t be upset that there aren’t mass protests in the streets if I’m not there myself. I can’t participate as long as I fear that one of my bosses or clients will see me. Not anymore.

There’s plenty of organizations to join or financially support that need help now, from Indivisible to Planned Parenthood to the ACLU, to name just a few. There’s even the main opposition party known as the Democrats, and the brave candidates who are risking everything to fight our slide into Trump’s tyranny. For far too long I have avoided getting too involved, because I feared it would interfere with my primary career. Those days are over.

Yes, I may anger some clients, and I may lose more than I gain, but I’d rather lose them than lose my country. The type of involvement needed, the kind of canvassing I need to participate in, and the speaking out that needs to happen will no longer allow me to hide. However, I feel if I don’t get involved now, it will only get worse. Trump has no trouble going after critics’ pensions, their families, and their income, using the courts and his executive powers to do so. Yet he has openly pined for the power of the dictators he fawns over—the ones who imprison their critics ... or worse. The more political power he is able to accrue, the more likely that may happen.

We need to stop him. Now. If you are in a government position, or even a military position, where you are being asked to do something that you know is wrong—such as permit or engage in corruption, or target dissent—please remember that dictatorships rely on our cooperation to survive. That cooperation can either be voluntary or coerced, but it has to happen in order for their plans to work. There may come a time you need to make a very difficult choice with real consequences. You don’t have to go along with something that is unjust just because you are expected to.

These are difficult times, but our nation has been through dark times before. There were always heroes who have pulled us through. Just look at Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. He showed us what a hero looks like, and has paid quite the price.

We are all soon going to face a test. We have a president who has turned his office into a cult of personality, who has repeatedly shown his disdain for the law, and who puts his personal interests above everything else. Is it any wonder that we are being prepared for the increasingly likely event that the president may declare martial law?

I ask everyone reading this to undergo the same uncomfortable self-examination. If Trump refuses to leave the White House, how much are you willing to sacrifice, and how much you are willing to tolerate? Our democracy depends on your answer.

Trump’s targeting of truth tellers is turning the intelligence community into a crowd of cowards

Donald Trump’s removal of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, his brother Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland was not a “massacre” in the spirit of what happened with Richard Nixon’s dismissal of special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Because what raised the body count in Nixon’s case was that his own people resigned rather than carry out clearly immoral orders. That’s not a problem for Trump.

The whole story of Donald Trump’s occupation of the White House has been one in which every unit of the government—from the EPA to the DOJ to the State Department—has been systematically cleansed of competency in favor of reflexive obedience. So naturally no one at the White House had a second thought about escorting out a decorated veteran for the crime of speaking the truth, or another veteran for the crime of being related to someone Trump doesn’t like. And just as naturally, Trump had no hesitation in owning these actions.

But what Trump has done so far, may be just a hint of the destruction to come, and what he’s already done to the intelligence agencies represents a looming threat from both inside and outside the nation.

Every time Trump plumbs new depths of odiousness, his staff makes a scramble to create an excuse. On Friday, that excuse was that Vindman wasn’t being let go because he obeyed a congressional subpoena; it was all just part of a “shrinking” of Trump’s already wildly reduced White House staff. 

And every time Trump’s staff constructs one of these pretexts for why he’s not as awful as he seems, Trump rushes forward to make it clear that he so, so is. Just as he continuously blew up the various reasons that Republicans concocted as excuses for Trump’s actions in Ukraine, he couldn’t allow the public to think that he was anything less than a monster in sending away Vindman.

That’s why Trump was on Twitter Saturday morning to make it clear he was sacking the Ukraine expert for being “very insubordinate.” Why Yevgeny Vindman was also shipped off wasn’t clear. Apparently he was insubordinate adjacent. Trump’s advisers surely have an excuse for that one, too.

Of course, both Vindmans are just immigrants in the armed services. As The Washington Post reported last November, Trump’s attitude in that area was godawful on multiple fronts.

“The Trump administration has reversed almost all progress, out loud and with purpose. Their message to immigrant service members is the same as that to Vindman: You are foreign, you are suspect, you cannot belong.”

But if what Trump has done so far seems egregious (because it is), it’s barely a patch on things to come. As The Washington Post reports, Trump has his staff working up the removal of intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson. Atkinson’s involvement was simply that he notified Congress of the existence of a whistleblower complain as required by law

Who watches the watchmen? Not a damned soul, apparently. Or at least no one who is allowed to do anything about it. Like speak.

At the State Department, at the National Security Council, at the CIA, the FBI, the DOJ … everywhere in the government the actions have been the same. Long term non-partisan employees have been forced from their positions and roles that have never in the past been political have been made over in the service of Trump. By long tradition, the CIA director does not attend the State of the Union address to avoid even a symbolic suggestion that the agency acts out of anything but its best interpretation of the information. But Gina Haspel was there on Tuesday night, bouncing up with the best Republican jack-in-the-boxes to applaud every moment of Trump’s partisan attacks and game show stunts.

Even before Trump gets around to sacking Atkinson, the conversion of the intelligence community into another aspect of his campaign machinery is already clear. As Politico reports, the regular briefing of Congress on threats to the nation has been delayed. The reason for that delay: “fears of provoking Trump's ire.”

Even though the purpose of this annual appearance is to outline the biggest threats to the nation in front of the nation, intelligence agencies are now arguing to move the whole hearing behind closed doors. More than that, they want the whole threat overview classified. After all, people don’t need to know what the dangers are; not when the biggest is sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Intelligence agencies don’t want to tell Congress the truth about what is happening in public, because they’re afraid they might say something Trump doesn’t like. Because saying something that Trump doesn’t like can be punished. Even if it’s true.

Especially if it’s true.