Category: Fascism

Trump supporters were fed explicitly racist and anti-Semitic propaganda before marching on Capitol

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Republicans want to frame Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial as if it’s all about the speech he made at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6. It’s not. The impeachment is over the incitement to violence and insurrection created by Trump over the whole span from the election to the assault on the Capitol. That includes Trump sending tweets such as “This Fake Election can no longer stand”  and, of course, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

However, so long as Republicans are focusing on the events of that one morning, it’s worth taking a second look at that rally and the one that came before on the evening of Jan. 5. While the words of Trump’s closing speech—complete with repeated demands that his followers march to the Capitol—are the most obvious subject of the impeachment, he was far from alone. Speakers at those two rallies included Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. All of them did their share in both raising the temperature of the crowd and encouraging violent actions. 

But there was one other event at that rally that both sums up what Trump’s movement is all about, and contributed to driving insurgents into the halls of Congress. It was a film. One in which every frame is a cast study in delivering violent, anti-Semitic propaganda. 

There’s no doubt that every speaker on the agenda added to the dark energy that resulted in the deadly insurgency. In fact, as The Washington Post reports, one of the speakers at the Jan. 5 rally was actually among those who bashed their way into the Capitol the following day. Brandon Straka—a white guy who founded the “walk away” campaign that encouraged Black voters to leave the Democratic Party—described Jan. 6 as “the revolution” in his speech to the gathered Trump supporters, and encouraged them to “fight back” as “patriots.” Straka, who frequently appears on Fox News as “a former liberal,” assaulted a police officer, called on others to do the same, then broke into the Capitol. He’s now facing multiple felony charges.

That same evening Roger Stone spoke while being flanked by “guards” from the Oath Keepers. As Mother Jones noted, Stone has a long-standing relationship with terrorist group the Proud Boys. On Jan. 5, Stone was there to tell Trump supporters to “fight until the bitter end” to block Joe Biden’s victory. Stone described the following day as the central moment of an “epic struggle.”

Michael Flynn described Jan. 6 as “a crucible moment in United States history.” While his word choice was suspect, his message to the gathered mob was clear. “We should not accept this,” said Flynn.  “Some of these states had more dead voters than the battlefields of Gettysburg or the battlefields of Vicksburg or the battlefields of Normandy. … We did not have a free, fair, and transparent vote on the third of November. And the entire world knows, everyone in this country knows, who won the election on the third.” And Flynn finished by explicitly telling the crowd what was expected of them. “The members of Congress, the members of the House of Representatives, the members of the United States Senate … those of you who are feeling weak tonight; those of you who don’t have the moral fiber in your bodies, get some tonight. Because tomorrow we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.” On the heels of Flynn’s speech, former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos stepped up to make it clear that Trump’s supporters would not forget the “traitors” who voted to count the electoral votes. 

Before Trump spoke on Jan. 6, Rudy Giuliani took the stage and spun a completely fantastic tale in which halting the day’s count of electoral votes would somehow generate a 10-day period in which everything about the election could be reviewed. There’s nothing in the Constitution or later law that even hints at such an event, and Giuliani was speaking after 63 days and 62 lawsuits had failed to uncover any of the evidence of fraud he assured the crowd was present. Still, “Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked,” said Giuliani, “the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat.”

Donald Trump’s sons also appeared that morning, and their speeches—particularly that of Donald Trump Jr.—did have one especially notable quality. As Politico reported, Junior’s speech was so laced with expletives that Fox News, which had been covering the event live, was forced to cut away. But as Trump’s eldest son warned Republicans that they better vote the way his father wanted spoke, he did make one clear statement between all the four letter words. “This gathering should send a message to them,” said Trump Jr. “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore! This is Donald Trump's Republican Party!” Oh, and Eric also spoke. “We will never, ever, ever stop fighting,” said Eric. 

But for all those speakers, it was a film that both set the mood of the day and serves as the best defining document of Trump and Trumpism. Just Security has done a breakdown of the imagery involved in this brief film, and the message of fascism shines through. Not just the kind of authoritarianism that everyone casually assigns to Trump as if that’s just peachy, but genuine shiny-boot and red armband fascism, complete with enough tropes of Übermensch and Untermensch to make Leni Riefenstahl jealous.

As Just Security’s analysis makes clear, the video follows a long tradition of fascist framing. That doesn’t just mean presenting Trump as a heroic figure whose powerful presence causes others to swoon, or contrasting a false paradise under Trump with an equally false wasteland without him. It also explicitly involves using images to remind supporters what Trump stands for: white nationalism.

Everything about the video is designed to help viewers see a through line that connects what’s happening in the Capitol to an elite group of Jews secretly, and not so secretly, guiding America toward a state where white Christians are under siege. The scope of the threat is expanded to include an international conspiracy that includes the U.N. and E.U. who, with Jewish-controlled Hollywood, are seeking to weaken powerful white America.

The video shifts to an image of Senator Charles Schumer, reminding the viewer of prominent Jewish leaders of the Democratic party. Schumer is wearing a Kente cloth, an image evocative of Ku Klux Klan ideology — that Jews support Black liberation movements as a way to undermine white rule and destroy the nation. The next frame shows the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flanked by two Jewish Congressman, Representatives Nadler and Schiff. Pelosi, too, is controlled by Jews.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy may have had a sudden memory lapse when it comes to understanding QAnon and the intrinsically anti-Semitic ideology at its core. Trump’s video team did not forget. They’ve created a video that is practically a look into Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hate-filled mind.

Vimeo Video

This video was sequenced right after Rudy Giuliani told Trump’s supporters that he wanted “trial by combat” and right before Trump himself stepped up to call on his followers to march to the Capitol. What those people who murdered a police officer, trampled over a woman, injured hundreds, smashed open the doors of the Capitol, raised a gallows, and went hunting for congressional hostages received wasn’t just limited to Trump’s statements on the morning of Jan. 6. What drove them there was what Trump, his surrogates, the right-wing media, and Republicans in both the House and Senate did after—and before—the election.

They created a world where people don’t just believe the propaganda of the video above, they’re willing to act on it. 

Censuring Trump for fomenting a violent insurrection would be ‘unity’ rooted in cowardice

Posted on by Hunter

Yeah, how about no. Multiple news reports have Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine taking the lead on feeling out whether or not Republicans would be willing to respond to Donald Trump's attempted overthrow of U.S. government by "censuring" him, rather than holding an impeachment trial. It is a terrible, ridiculous idea and hopefully it has already died a quiet death by the time you reach the end of this sentence.

The thinking appears to be that since the near-unanimous majority of Senate Republicans continue to stand behind Trump even after he demanded a mob march on the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes that would confirm Joe Biden's presidential win—a demand that the mob acted on, resulting in multiple deaths inside the building and the near-assassination of lawmakers—perhaps the party of outright treason would be willing to compromise by giving their would-be authoritarian strongman a stern finger-wagging letter.

It's a given that Senate Republicans will vote to acquit Trump, as they did when Trump got caught brazenly extorting the leader of a foreign nation with personal demands intended to help boost his own reelection chances. But, the thinking apparently goes, maybe we can make a nice show of "unity" by having both parties agree that rallying a mob intent on attacking and possibly killing members of the political opposition is somewhat bad—not bad enough to do anything concrete about or to prohibit a person from re-taking office, but certainly bad enough for a note to be dropped into their permanent record.

Screw that. Screw all of that, very much and sincerely.

What Donald Trump attempted, even before the crowd turned violent, was a coup against democracy. He, his allies, and the majority of Republican lawmakers all demanded that the results of a United States election be overturned, based on nothing but nonsensical and provably false claims, and that the will of American voters simply be ignored because the Republican Party did not like the results. It was an act of sedition before the crowd marched over. It was an act of sedition when prominent Republicans peddled hoaxes relentlessly, claiming the election results to be invalid because of conspiracies that not one damn person in America could prove.

Donald Trump may have been acting purely out of malignant narcissism, and may indeed be living inside delusions layered upon delusions in which any and every failure on his part, during his entire adult life, has only happened due to the secret machinations of invisible enemies, but the action he took was unambiguous. He intended to overturn the election results. His allies intended to help him overturn the election results. The House and Senate Republicans who voted to throw out the election results intended to help him overturn the election results.

It was an insurrection against the government, and if there is no stomach among Republican lawmakers for punishing it as such, it is because they were themselves allied with those efforts. They remain allied in a unified attempt to dodge repercussions for attempting to overturn an election that did not go their way.

To be sure, those who acted with treasonous intent against this country are not eager to vote for consequences. That is to be expected. Attempting to compromise with them, finding some common ground where violent insurrection is still acknowledged to be bad so long as the insurrection's chief beneficiary and provocateur is able to skate by without the presentation of evidence against him, is attempting to compromise with those who sought to end the fabled "peaceful transition of power" by party fiat.

The streak is broken. There was no peaceful transition of power. Among a majority inside the party now fully enmeshed in fascist propaganda and plots, there is only begrudging acknowledgement even now that our democracy remains legitimate; on Fox News and in evasive lawmaker interviews, the same hoax theories are still sniffled about, and Republican officials and leaders are taking not making even the barest effort to clarify to their still-addled base voters that Joe Biden won the most votes and electors, that there was no conspiratorial and secret fraud, and that the new Democratic administration is, indeed, a legitimate one.

If Republican senators are going to vote to immunize Trump even from an attempt to overthrow the government, oblige them to cast that vote. There needs to be a list. There needs to be a record.

Fortunately, there appears to be little to no support for allowing Republicans to dodge a trial; this "censure" nonsense is likely to be over before it begins. We're going to get a list of which top Republicans truly believe, even now, that Donald Trump's actions were within the bounds of what America should allow. It will be a long list, and everyone on it will be senators who have betrayed their nation countless times before in their bid to normalize abject corruption in service to Republican power.

Jan. 6 was far from the first insurrection Trump supported, and it’s unclear if it was the last

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Right now—and this is a real thing—Donald Trump has lost the Secretaries of Transportation, Health and Human Services, Education, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and whatever the heck role Mick Mulvaney held And really, that’s just the tip of the milky white iceberg of milky white people who made the tough moral decision that 3.95 years of inciting violence, instilling racism, and driving divisiveness was simply all they could take. I mean, 3.94 years? Sure. But they always expected that Trump would become presidential before he stopped being that thing. Everyone has their limits, and for a lot of Trump’s associates, those limits seem to be symbolically stepping back at the very last possible second out of a powerful delusion that this will somehow purify them in time for their next six-, seven-, or eight-figure position.

Then, as happens in serious democracies, this run of camels who finally discovered their last straw, led to Trump spending a good part of his week talking over strategy with the MyPillow Guy. Mr. Pillow came to the White House clutching a sheaf of papers that cleverly pointed out Trump could use the insurrection he incited to declare that people were being insurrectiony. Then he could invoke the Insurrection Act. Then, once Trump had installed himself as president for life and turned the CIA and FBI into the KGB and Stasi, respectively, Trump could just declare martial law and shoot them. Really. That was the plan. Plus you get 80% off a full body pillow using the code #CrossTheRubicon.

Admittedly, there’s no truth behind the discount code. I think. But since the pillows are nothing but cloth bags of shredded foam that probably cost Mike Lindell a nickel apiece to manufacture, feel free to give it a try.

In any case, the major point here isn’t that the pillows are demonstrably smarter and more patriotic than the guy who peddles them. It’s that Trump is so devoid of anything that looks like a serious adviser, he really did spend hours in the White House going over a plan to take America along the same path blazed by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and, of course, Adolf. At the direction of the MyPillow Guy.

All of this is extraordinarily sad. But not for Donald Trump. It’s sad for everyone who isn’t Trump.

As The New York Times reports, everything that has happened with Trump, was exactly what had to happen with Trump.

The siege of the Capitol wasn’t a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis. For years, he’s been telling us he wouldn’t accept an election loss. For years, he’s been urging his followers to violence, refusing to condemn their violence, and insinuating that even greater violence was on the way. As he told Breitbart in 2019, in one of his characteristic threats, “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

And what do you know, Trump was right. It was very bad.

The Times also points out that Trump didn’t start cheering on mobs overrunning capitols on Jan. 6. That was really more of an endpoint. Trump started off by cheering on crowds who tore through multiple state capitols over social distancing guidelines, or rumors that someone might restrict 100-shot magazines for their AR-15s, or threats to statues dedicated to racist mass-murderers and traitors. In every case, Trump praised the militias, the white supremacists, and the hoarse-throated mob. 

What happened in D. C. on Jan. 6 was just a national version of what happened in Wisconsin, in Colorado, and in Kentucky, and in a dozen other states. Trump not only encouraged these events, he even refused to say there was anything wrong with a plot to kidnap and publicly execute Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Speaking of which, here’s Trump from the rally that came right before his people swarmed up the Capitol steps, smashed through doors and windows, and went prowling the halls of Congress with handcuffs. “We’ve got to get rid of the weak congresspeople,” said Trump, “the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them … Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

Gee. Where did people get the idea that he wanted them to kidnap, try, and execute members of Congress? Right from Trump. (Bonus: Note why Liz Cheney was so willing to sign on to impeachment).

What happened on Jan. 6 was shocking, but it should not have been surprising to anyone. Trump has been calling for this moment since he came down that gold elevator. He’s not just overlooked violence, but encouraged it. He’s made it clear, at every speech and every rally, that beating people up is okay. That violence is good. That executions are fine. In fact, he has complained that there was not enough violence and brutality to suit him in this wimpy modern world. He didn’t just license his followers to smash the police in the face with “thin blue line” flags, he made it inevitable.

Trump is who he has always been. His followers are doing as he has always wanted. None of this was a secret. For the last four years, all of the Republican Party and half of the media has pretended they could not see that Trump was simply a fascist, doing what fascists always do—offering violence and calling it order. 

Don’t expect them to start admitting it now.

Rep. Brian Mast is a craven, repulsive liar, but we can still answer his question

Posted on by Hunter

Trump loyalist Florida Rep. Brian Mast is now a traitor to his country, but more to the point he is also dishonest, politically craven, and a garbage human being. So let's dispense with this quickly.

During the impeachment vote, Mast was one of many House Republicans attempting to straddle the thin line of claiming to be outraged by last week's armed insurrection against Congress while still insisting that Donald Trump's role in inciting attempted murders was not impeachable because reasons. The argument was insincere, lie-based, and about what you would expect from one of the traitors who himself egged on violence with hoax claims of election flaws that did not exist.

Indeed, Mast was one of those lawmakers to rise in challenge to the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 immediately before a mob entered the building with the intent of capturing or murdering those who would not sign on to the same Trump-promoted false claims. There is a direct line between Mast's lies and multiple deaths, and between Mast's lies and the now-broken chain of "peaceful transition of power" that lasted from the Civil War until the time Brian Mast was elected to Congress. He is a seditionist, and was before the violence began.

One of Mast's pillars of argument was that you could not pin the armed insurrection on Trump because there was no evidence Trump did the thing everyone in the nation saw him doing: "Has any one of those individuals who brought violence to this Capitol been brought here to answer if they did that because of our president?" He said this very smugly, like a stupid person believing themselves to be the first in history to notice that the sun and moon looked to be approximately the same size, and waited for a response that he knew would not come because speeches on the floor of Congress do not generally follow a call-and-response format.

Here ya go, sport. Video of the insurrectionists asserting that they were "invited" into the building by Donald Trump.

Florida Rep. Brian Mast making what seems, to him, to be a dramatic point: Standing silently after asking if any rioters have said that they acted bc of the president. Well. https://t.co/WfPqWB8BUM

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) January 13, 2021

We done here? Yeah, probably.

There's not going to be the wholesale expulsion of seditionists and traitors responsible for these deaths because the House Republican caucus is a collection of criminals who fully intend to immunize each other even for insurrection—they will purge the non-seditionists like (shudder) Liz Cheney and elevate the most vocal promotors of the party's democracy-attacking lies to ever-higher positions. That’s too bad, but it does not absolve them of the provably false claims that led to murders and now to law enforcement warnings of a new possible era of conservative-stoked terrorism. They are still the insurrection's ringleaders, and it falls on all the rest of us to treat them with the appropriate amount of contempt and disgust for the rest of their lives.

Rep. Brian Mast, your hoaxes and lies led to an attempt on your colleagues' lives. You are a traitor to your nation. And you are in crowded company.

There was no peaceful transfer of power; Trump goaded mob into an attack on U.S. Capitol today

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

A brief roundup of news from today's unprecedented and grimly historic day in this nation's capital city.

• Trump began the day by threatening Vice President Mike Pence and Congress with demands that the election be overturned based on false claims of supposed "fraud." Pence released a statement confirming that he had no unilateral ability to do so.

• Immediately after Trump's remarks to a pro-Trump mob that included members of some of this nation's most infamous violent and fascist groups, the mob marched to the U.S. Capitol and breached police lines to enter and vandalize the building.

• House and Senate lawmakers were forced to evacuate the building as pro-Trump traitors pushed through the building. Gunfire was exchanged at one point; one seditionist was shot and killed.

• Seditionists roamed through the Capitol for hours, rummaging through offices and taking photographs, while capitol police did little to stop them.

• President-elect Joe Biden was among those who did not waste time with euphemisms, instead calling the pro-Trump attackers "an insurrection."

• After hours of delay to re-secure the U.S. Capitol, Congress resumed debating Republican objections to counting the votes of state electors.

• There may or may not already be movement by Trump's cabinet to immediately remove him from office by declaring him unfit for office as specified in the 25th Amendment.

• As many as 30 House Democrats are already supporting a move to immediately, and again, impeach Donald Trump for his incitement of violence today.

• Some among the seditionists apparently intended to take lawmakers hostage, hold show trials, and execute them.

• Photos show pro-Trump seditionists inside offices, taking selfies on the evacuated House floor, and vandalizing the building's contents.

• Trump responded to the crowd's assault by telling them "I love you. You're very special."

• World leaders condemned the attack on democracy.

• Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, the first senator to announce that he would object to the lawful counting of electoral votes, was condemned by the Kansas City Star for having "blood on his hands."

• The differences between law enforcement's treatment of insurrectionists openly declaring their intent to topple the U.S. government and that of Black Americans who protested police brutality this summer were dramatic, and unforgivable.

• While Trump is undoubtably directly responsible for the attack on the capitol, racist policing enabled it.

Some Democrats want to move past Trump. But ignoring his seditious acts threatens American democracy

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries delivered a message Monday about the posture of House Democrats' leadership team regarding Donald Trump's relentless attempts to engineer a fascist takeover of the American republic. 

“We’re not looking backward," Jeffries told reporters during a press conference. "We’re looking forward to the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20th.” 

That forward-looking vision came less than 24 hours after the Washington Post posted smoking-gun audio of an hour-long phone call in which Trump (aka Mafia Don) attempted to threaten and cajole Georgia's top election officials to "find" enough votes to overturn the state's election results. 

Nonetheless, Kate Bedingfield, an adviser to President-elect Joe Biden offered a similar take to Jeffries, saying, "The country is ready to move forward."

But the problem with simply rushing past Mafia Don's political grave is that ignoring his seditious acts is as much a threat to the future of American democracy as Trump's failed efforts were in the first place. In short—seditious, traitorous acts left unchecked beget seditious, traitorous acts. In fact, Senate Republicans with the twinkle of 2024 presidential bids in their eyes are already lining up in support of Trump's effort to tear down democracy in order to maintain his grip on power. Trump's final gambit is all but certain to fail on Wednesday during a joint session of Congress to certify the election results, but the major takeaway is that plenty of future GOP Trumps are waiting in the wings to trash representative democracy on the way to meeting their own political ends unless a price is exacted for doing so. And the lesson those Republicans have learned so far—just as Trump learned from his acquittal—is that there's no serious price to pay, political or otherwise, for betraying the country.

Both the incoming Biden administration and Congress have a role to play in safeguarding our democracy for generations to come. One is criminal and the other is a matter of governance. Biden must appoint smart, resolute leaders to the Justice Department and then simply get out of the way and let them do their jobs. Hamstringing justice in any way with regard to Trump's endless assault on the law and the Constitution would be disastrous for the country's future. But Biden can easily make those appointments to the Department of Justice and then rightfully send the message that his administration is focused on the task of righting the ship in regard to the pandemic and the faltering economy. 

House Democrats, however, cannot afford to simply move along, as if the threat to our democracy ends once Trump is summarily booted from the White House residence. That is a patently false contention given the upheaval we are already witnessing in the Republican party. Trump must be held to account. That can be done in several ways, a couple of which are already in process.

One way is by making a criminal referral to the FBI over Trump's attempted election crimes, an investigation that Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Kathleen Rice of New York are already urging FBI Director Chris Wray to undertake.

Another possibility is censuring Trump over his call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson introduced a censure motion on Monday with the support of 90 of his colleagues. That number will likely grow in the coming days and weeks as Congress gets back to work—or at least, it should grow, since there are presently 222 Democratic members of the House.

Impeachment is another potential option, but to what end at this point? Trump is just over two weeks away from removal and, as we have already seen, the effort would surely be blocked by the GOP-controlled Senate. Heck, more than a quarter of the Senate Republican caucus has jumped aboard Team coup at this point. 

What does seem a worthy effort, however, is continued investigations of Trump and his minions. Not only do the facts need to come out, but if Democrats are to draft legislation to safeguard our democracy against future Trumps, they will need to know exactly what actions he and his enablers took in their extensive efforts to kneecap America's institutions and systems of governance. 

But none of those three options—a criminal referral, censure, and ongoing investigations—amount to simply "looking forward." What is past will haunt the nation and Democrats, in particular, if it is buried before an autopsy can be conducted and people held to account for their roles in assaulting and undermining America’s democracy. 

As Trump’s staff works to sabotage a Biden presidency, Trump himself still wants to go farther

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

The Washington Post has yet another look at how Donald Trump and his loyalists are spending their last days at the levers of power. Not all of it, of course, because there's just too much, but the highlights.

To be honest, it's difficult to believe Donald set aside time for any of it. He has been singularly obsessed with delusional claims that the November elections were rigged against him, to the tune of millions and millions and millions of sneaky fake votes, because he is a malignant narcissist whose failure is causing him to decompensate into a sludgy puddle of make-believe. He and his top staff are engaged in a full-tilt campaign to overturn an election based on literally nothing but propagandistic falsehoods. He, and they, are spitting on their oaths of office as a full-time profession.

Rather than Mike Pence and the rest of Trump's top staff stuffing him into a sack while delivering formal notice that the "president" has, alas, become so unstable as to be incapable of fulfilling his duties, a collection of fascist-minded House Republicans is egging him on, America's violent underbelly of paramilitary frothers is taking Trump's delusions as signal that their own plans for genocide will soon come to fruition, and the press is still describing all the details with a detached, neutral air that both recognizes Trump's acts as unprecedented and attempts to play them down as (1) the impotent ravings of a man who is Too Sad Right Now or (2) not all that different from, say, the undignified spats between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Here's the deal: The presidency of the United States is currently held by a leaking bag of garbage. Also, the bag is a psychopath with delusions of grandeur. The garbage bag is currently mulling, with his advisers, things like can the military enter the swing states Trump lost in November, seize the voting machines, and force the citizens to vote in a new election held according to whatever rules Trump's federal forces can enforce? This is not likely to happen, mostly because even the staff that eagerly assisted him in a prior extortion scheme aimed at forcing a foreign power to cooperate with a scheme to falsely incriminate his election opponent still has reservations about partaking in crimes technically punishable by firing squad. But Trump is, still, mulling ways to not just declare the United States elections illegitimate and invalid (he's already doing that, and daily), but enforce his claims using federal force.

On track two, and mind the gap, Trump's collection of archconservative party-line Republicans, anti-democratic activists who have for decades worked to portray all challenges to Republican rule as inherently illegitimate, is hurriedly sabotaging the nation's government by installing like-minded loyalists in positions where they cannot be easily dislodged, eagerly and gleefully using basement-tier conspiracy theories to amplify their own prior claims of non-Republican illegitimacy, and pushing forward last-minute actions intended to damage Biden's ability to govern at all.

Even if, as with the Republican efforts to block the Federal Reserve from providing emergency pandemic aid the moment Joe Biden has taken office, it results in deaths.

These are not policy spats. These are organized efforts to delegitimize democratic elections and to sabotage the economy so as to delegitimize non-Republican leaders. Trump's status as emotionally unstable buffoon is not a lucky coincidence making the rest of it slightly less dangerous, but an intentional choice made by a Republican electorate that demanded a cult-leader clown, the latest in a long-bubbling rebellion against government know-it-alls and book learners that has pushed an entire new crop of conspiracy clowns, con artists, and outright saboteurs into Congress.

The media, writ large, seems to find itself continually surprised when Trump and his top advisers take new steps even more contemptuous of laws and democracy than the last. It was evident when Republicans neutralized impeachment charges that the White House would take it as affirmation and redouble their efforts. It was evident when the White House purged increasing numbers of "disloyal" government watchdogs that the intent was to eliminate institutional resistance to doing once-shocking things. It was evident throughout the summer that the White House was more comfortable using propagandistic claims and bluster to downplay the severity of a nationwide pandemic than taking concrete steps to save lives. It was evident from Trump's preelection, pandemic-era rallies that he intended to challenge the election if he lost by only a little; it was evident within days of the election that he now intended to challenge the results even after losing by a lot.

He will propose even more shocking things, and the media will pretend to be surprised by them. His White House and Republican Party allies will embrace those things, or at least hold their tongues while waiting to see whether his newest contemptible acts will, by some chance, bear fruit.

Trump reworked Syrian policy as a favor to an oligarch he had long courted as a possible real estate partner. Trump tasked his "lawyer" with producing evidence incriminating his rival, who subcontracted the job to Russian-allied organized crime. Trump has used both the Department of Justice and his own pardon powers to immunize his allies from the consequences of crimes committed for his own benefit or that push his own agenda.

I'm not saying that we should hold off on the retrospectives of all the malignant ways Trump's White House and his Republican allies are attempting to sabotage government rather than hand it off to a rival intact. It's fine. But there's a month left, and Trump is continuing to re-tune his staff to include those willing to endorse even more radical schemes while jettisoning objectors. This is considerably more dangerous than it is being portrayed. Still.

Trump’s demand that the election be overturned is farce—but Republican complicity is not

Posted on by Hunter

America's fascist moment has not passed, and will not pass while any of the current crop of Republican elected officials remain in office. The Republican Party continues to attempt to nullify the results of the presidential election—a longshot bid, to be sure—using conspiracy theories designed to do damage to democracy itself.

Surely it cannot be that bad, you may think to yourself. Surely Republicans are operating from a position of rank cowardice, and have only accidentally stumbled from that into strategies that accidentally undermine this nation's democratic ideals. It is that bad, and they are not cowards. They are attempting a power play—a new authority to nullify whatever elections their now thoroughly corrupt party cannot win. We are in a new era of voter manipulation and suppression characterized by party-sponsored lies intended to propagandize the public into believing not only that non-Republican governance is illegitimate, but that non-Republican election results are as well. The Republican Party is now fascist in both method and intent. Every senator and House member is, as we have seen, complicit.

It was an inevitable point, after the party witnessed impeachable crimes from the party's leader and instead voted to adopt those crimes as new valid policy. If crimes themselves are valid, if undertaken to boost Republican power, then lying to the public about the bones of democracy itself must be equally justifiable.

On the Sunday shows, multiple Republicans yet again pushed the false notion that Joe Biden may not have truly won the next presidency. To give audience to such malignant lies, whether in service to both sides-ing democracy or not, is contemptible, and the networks and hosts bear responsibility. It is not easy to simply end interviews with public figures when it is clear they are using the media to disseminate malevolent propaganda, but it is necessary. If the networks cannot do that much, their "news" programs are themselves public frauds.

Republican Sen. Mike Braun was one of those figures pushing forward false propaganda for the sake of misleading the public. Ostensibly booked to discuss COVID-19 stimulus options—itself a sham booking, since there has proven to be no possibility that Sen. Mike Braun will ever put forward a competent opinion on any subject, much less one so dire—Braun instead blustered to enabling ABC host George Stephanopoulos at length with conspiracy theories of voter fraud and other known-false, Trump-pushed claims.

On the ever-execrable Fox News, the ever-execrable Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe called the election into question, saying "We'll see" if "there is a Biden administration." (Ratcliffe and the now thoroughly feral conspiracy wolverine Maria Bartiromo followed that up by puzzling over "Who got to Bill Barr?"—for the sin of not proving multiple conservative conspiracy theories that proved, even for Barr, too ephemeral to coax into faux-existence.)

It is important to note that John Ratcliffe is a frothing ex-House Republican seen as so conspiracy-minded and single-mindedly devoted to Republican power over the national good that even the Republican Senate balked, long and hard, before eventually confirming him to his current post. It is because of that past status as House propagandist and absurd Trump provocateur that he was elevated to the Republican administration to begin with. Ratcliffe is yet another fringe Republican figure elevated to higher power specifically due to his corruptions.

The Sunday show performances, of course, came on the heels of yet another week in which Donald Trump himself promoted crazed theories that the election that saw him get a shockingly high number of pro-incompetence, pro-white-nationalism votes but still millions less than challenger Biden must, by virtue of his loss, have been fraudulent. Trump is promoting those falsehoods obsessively, suspending nearly all presidential duties to instead weave nonsensical tales claiming the presidency was stolen from him. He did so at length this weekend in Georgia, during a campaign appearance ostensibly on behalf of scandal-wracked Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue.

Both of those Republican Senators have called for the state's secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, to resign for his refusals to endorse the theory that massive voter fraud landed them in runoff elections. Though Raffensperger has been receiving plaudits for not furthering his party's conspiracy claims that the election was rigged against them, and for going farther still and condemning those claims, Raffensperger said on Sunday that he still supports both of their candidacies.

This, then, is an illuminating look at where even the most "heroic" and democracy-abiding Republicans now reside. He is not willing to himself endanger the republic merely to boost two Republicans seeking reelection. He is, however, still willing to endorse the candidates doing exactly that damage. Because, says Raffensperger, "I'm a Republican."

It is said as if it is obvious. It is natural to Raffensperger that he would still support the Republicans, even if they were engaged in corrosive, anti-democratic propagandizing that he himself could not stomach. However devoted to his nation Raffensperger may be, his devotion to even his party's worst actors remains higher.

Trump, in the meantime, has made the blunt request to the state's Republican governor that Georgia simply nullify the results of their presidential election. He asks that the vote counts be thrown out, and for the state's Republican-held legislature to appoint him the state's electoral winner.

It is (again) an explicitly corrupt request. Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp has no authority to nullify the election. There is no scheme by which such an attempt would not be inherently un-democratic, whether successful or not. Trump is both ignorant enough and criminal enough to request it anyway.

Surrounded by less inept aides, there is no telling how much damage a similarly corruption-minded Republican president could do.

The attempts to dismantle democracy itself, rather than abide by election losses, are the newest arrived-at spot for the Republican Party after a litany of fascistic actions and proclamations. It is Jim Crow writ even larger, a new anti-democratic theory that not only ought the votes of non-white Americans be treated as illegitimate, but those of every voter who refuses to support the party.

After years of promoting the theory that Republican lawmakers were slavishly defending and promoting each of Trump's most corrupt actions due to a party-wide and all-encompassing cowardice, pundits are still attempting to pin current lawmaker silence, in the face of these Trump-led lies and blatantly fraudulent conspiracy claims, on the same. But this is wrong.

Or, as The Washington Post's Greg Sargent puts it, it "badly undersells the bottomless bad faith and dishonorable instrumentalism that Republicans are employing here."

The Republican Party is embracing claims of massive but invisible election conspiracies for the same reason they remained stubbornly, supremely silent on Trump's proven act of extorting election favors from a foreign nation: While the actions involved are absolutely corrosive to democracy, all of them of authoritarian vintage and used here for authoritarian ends, it is possible those actions could end up working. It is not so much that the McConnells of the party are remaining silent to avoid a lame duck's impotent wrath, and more that Republican lawmakers are almost to a person not willing to close the door on the very small but still real chance that Trump's obsessive attempts to overturn an American election could succeed.

They are playing a part considerably less nuanced than Brad Raffensperger's own decision to speak out against anti-democratic conspiracy propaganda while still endorsing the party leaders most directly responsible for promoting them. They are refusing to speak out against the claims so long as Trump's team of rancid legal pretenders, his administration propagandists, and the fringe elements of their conservative base still pursues them. If there is even a 10% chance of success, Republican lawmakers will not be speaking out to thwart it.

They defended Trump's impeachable act of election extortion with a similar silence. They pretended they could not see the evidence; they demanded they not be shown the evidence. If the Rudy Giuliani-led attempts to concoct Ukraine-based propaganda against Joe Biden had borne fruit, and at the time of impeachment there were still good reasons to believe the fabricated evidence could still be sold to the public, Republican lawmakers would benefit equally from the hoax discrediting their most visible opponent.

The decision to nullify impeachment proceedings, allowing Trump and an assortment of top officials to continue pursuing corrupt means to power, was an affirmative act by Republican senators. Their calculated silence here is for identical reasons. The acts may be criminal—but judgment on that will be withheld until the spoils can be divvied.

It is not likely that Trump will succeed in his own narcissism-fueled quest to claim that he could not have failed, in anything, unless subterfuge was involved. There are too many moving parts, the figures involved are still too ridiculous, and there are simply too many states involved this time around. But the eagerness of the party's base to adopt such rhetoric, the Republican Party leadership's embrace and furtherance of the moves, Republican lawmakers' calculated wait-and-see silence and, especially, their refusal to speak out to condemn election conspiracies all have firmly established Trump's propagandistic claims as acceptable tools for the party going forward.

Whether or not individual Republican actors like Raffensperger themselves act on such claims, there will be no penalties for simply declaring, upon losing an election, that the election was somehow Invalid, and therefore Illegitimate, and therefore the winner will be whoever a state's Republican officials choose to appoint. It is in the realm of the debatable, because Republicans on the Sunday shows are debating it. It is plausible that a future president may not be seated, if his predecessor has the backing of this crop of Republican elected figures and can put forward claims that are even fractionally less ridiculous.

The attempt to delegitimize American elections en masse rather than admit defeat is not a mere product of Trump's narcissistic delusions. It has the backing of top Republicans. It has the endorsement of an increasingly fascist-minded conservative media universe. It does not come from a vacuum; Trump is not the one filing the lawsuits to overturn results, and is only one of numerous Republican elites making the same outlandish assertions of "thousands" or "millions" of faked ballots, claims that near-unanimously target cities with large non-white populations.

It is a fascist movement, one based on the theory that party power must be preserved even if it requires the production of hoaxes and propaganda to accomplish. One that shows gaudy public contempt for expertise, and which invariably declares that any factual evidence that does not comport with the party's own oft-buffoonish claims must necessarily be a hoax perpetrated against Dear Leader, launched by remnant groups in government or outside it that seek to damage Dear Leader.

The party continually tests which democratic norms can be dispensed with, and have been successful at dismantling many or most. The push to overturn the results of a presidential election, and specifically to do so by nullifying the actual votes and tasking loyalist state elected officials create new ones, has very little chance of being successful this time, based on these states and these claims.

That does not mean that the party will not lend its weight to similar calls to overturn a future election. It does not mean that, in a Republican Party that continues to aggressively purge itself of the insufficiently sycophantic, it will with certainty run afoul of local officials unwilling to lend their own names to the effort. It does not mean that every collection of party lawyers and provocateurs will be as incompetent. There will be those that analyze these fraud claims not to discredit them, but to determine how they can best be made more compelling. And the movement of out-and-out imbeciles, Americans who pride themselves on believing hoaxes while condemning expertise, only continues to grow.

America remains at the same fascist moment, and Republican lawmakers and ex-lawmakers are going on the Sunday shows pushing false claims meant to suggest that our democracy itself is unreliable or compromised, having turned in results that the party's leader does not like. They are not turning the moment back, but pushing it forward. Again. Still.

The assault on the 2020 election is more dangerous than anything else Trump has done

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Way over on the farthest left, there’s a cliff; a dark potential called communist totalitarianism. The horrors that wait beyond that cliff have been more than adequately demonstrated by everyone from Joseph Stalin to Pol Pot, and progressives of every nation are extremely aware that the pathways to that cliff must be constantly challenged, heavily patrolled, and always eyed with concern. Likewise on the right, there’s an yawning gyre called fascist totalitarianism. The edges of that pit are lined with the bones of millions, and whether the followers wear brown shirts or black, this system has proven to be extraordinarily effective at hastening a nation from rationality into murderous dystopia.

Only there’s a difference when it comes to how the specters on the left and demons on the right have been handled. Because for decades, but especially within the last four years, the right has worked to take their ogre and simply relocate it to the left; to describe fascism not as something that belongs to them, but as “liberal fascism.” And there’s a reason for this that goes well beyond not just wanted to have themselves associated with goose-stepping men in armbands—a reason that plays directly into what’s happening right now following the 2020 election.

On Monday, Attorney General William Barr ordered the Department of Justice to investigate claims of election fraud for which there is no evidence. Sen. Lindsey Graham said the only reason why Republicans lose races is because Democrats cheat. And the two Republican senators from Georgia attacked their own state over claims that they failed to run a proper election, providing no more evidence than that they allowed Donald Trump to lose.

All of this stands in stark contrast to every election in recent history. Even the most rancorous campaigns of the past have swallowed their pride, made that concession call, and done so swiftly, because they understand the cost of not conceding.

That Republicans would so joyfully attack the machinery of free elections seems extraordinary, even considering the efforts applied for more than a century to make sure that only the right kind of white people get to the polls in the first place. But it shouldn’t be. After all, elections are just another institution, and Republicans have more than adequately demonstrated that they can smash, or subvert, any institution designed to act as a check on power. See impeachment. See the courts. See the Senate report that was quietly released admitting that Trump’s campaign did in fact have repeated contact with Russian agents, regularly coordinated with Russian objectives, and made promises to Russia in exchange for assistance. Nothing came of that. And why should it, considering that Republicans had just voted that they didn’t even have to hear the witnesses before declaring Trump innocent of anything, anywhere, at any time.

The reason that right-wing media is saturated with claims that fascism is “of the left” is simple enough: If there is no gyre, no demons, nothing dark waiting out there beyond the current bounds, then there is never any reason to stop moving to the right. Fling open Overton’s window and let the right winds blow. There are no paths on the right that need to be guarded, nothing bad to watch out for. It’s all good stuff over there.

Historically, of course, this is nonsense. The whole concept of left and right, for more than a century, was specifically designed to describe the space where democracies could operate between those two walls. Fascism is intrinsically of the right. To claim otherwise would certainly be a shock to actual fascists, who not only railed against the left, but did not hesitate to lock up their citizens for the crime of expressing socialist sympathies—when they didn’t simply kill them en masse.

But that’s also part of the goal of the fascism relocation project. It doesn’t mean to assert there’s nothing to fear on the right; it’s an invitation to a new dimension, one that takes the far right off the axis to place it above politics as usual. Once that’s done, everything is permissible, anything is excusable in the defense of moving the nation more toward that wonderful, always brighter, place on the right—even if it means tearing down the whole engine of democracy. 

The last chance for Republicans to denounce Trump has passed. Now it no longer matters

Posted on by Hunter

It's Election Day, and Republicans are still being spineless little weasels. Donald Trump has been repeatedly suggesting, in public, that he will not abide by the results of the election but will instead launch both polemics and legal maneuvers to sabotage the counting of votes. He's offered up the bizarre theory that states should declare a winner on election night—something that never happens, as many states need days or weeks to fully count all ballots received and the official certification of results typically happens on dates set by each state.

None of this is abnormal or even remotely conspiratorial; there is a reason the Constitution specifies an early November date as Election Day, but sets the inauguration of the winner to be late January. Nonetheless, the hopelessly incompetent, forever lying malignant narcissist who functions as Republicanism's rotting head is quite certain that it is all a conspiracy against him, personally, and is therefore willing to sabotage democracy itself to keep presidential immunities that will expire upon the next president's swearing-in.

When Politico's Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman went to query top Republican lawmakers about Trump's threats to block vote counting and plunge the country into still another constitutional crisis, however, they couldn't find anyone willing to condemn or even criticize Trump.

"Many Republicans insist they are disgusted by Trump’s threats, they just aren’t willing to say so publicly. Dozens of quietly anti-Trump members on Capitol Hill, or who left the Trump administration, usually in disgust, are willing to torch the president—but only under the cloak of anonymity," reports Politico.

There will be no other opportunities to put nation over party for these Republicans. Whether or not elections in the United States will still be considered legitimate, and whether or not votes that go against Dear Leader and his allies will be considered legitimate, it will be decided in the next several days. This is it. It is akin to Trump threatening to sell off a state to a foreign power, or to Trump declaring that he is dissolving the House of Representatives as retribution for impeachment. No matter what argument is offered up, what Trump is proposing is a sabotage of the Constitution.

So far, every public Republican reaction has been to back Trump's conspiratorial pronouncements. A sea of Republican functionaries have launched legal battle after legal battle, already, demanding that votes cast by mail (during a deadly pandemic) or votes at early polling centers (during a deadly pandemic) be nullified. Republican members of the House and Senate, however, have zipped their own mouths shut and have little to say on the schemes.

Instead, they would have us believe that they do indeed have principles, behind the scenes. Not ones they are willing to share out loud, or ones they will offer up with their own names attached. These are principles anonymously held—tossed into the ether as temporary placeholder, meant as ephemeral foothold for later declaring, to the same reporters, that they did indeed have principles all along.

It doesn't count. A principle you are unwilling to act on is not a principle. Whatever you later claimed you did when your nation's democracy was under attack doesn't matter.

When the Constitution conflicted with Dear Leader's visions of grandeur, Republican lawmakers offered no resistance. Not a scratch. If they distance himself from Trump only after voters did the hard work of ejecting him themselves, they are frauds, each and every one. They should be treated as such.

History will record that every Republican lawmaker assisted Trump despite him being openly corrupt, contemptuous of his oath of office, catastrophically incompetent, authoritarian-minded and authoritarian-fixated, racist, a steadfast promoter of white nationalism, and a propagandist not just willing, but obsessive in his efforts to disinform our citizens to acquire and preserve his power.

Trump is a fascist, and they backed his fascist tendencies and demands. Whether they privately were offended by them does not matter. The backers of fascism are called fascists, and there is no qualifying adjective that they can pin to their chests afterward, if their own Dear Leader figure is defeated, that will turn them into retroactive heroes.