The Crisis Coming in 2024

Bart Gelman’s recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly, “January Was Practice,” should alarm every American. It lays out in clear and chilling detail what very nearly happened in the wake of the 2020 election (particularly on Jan. 6), but also who, exactly, the people are who would support the overturning of an election (and democracy itself) should Donald Trump be defeated again in 2024. There are at least 20 million of these people, according to Gelman, who cites a recent CPOST (Chicago Project on Security and Threats) poll. And the vast majority said that Biden was an illegitimate president, and that violence would be justified to restore Trump to the White House. 

            This is astonishing in itself. But one other statement “won overwhelming support” among the 20 million respondents, about two-thirds of whom agreed with this statement: 

“African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”

This is a version of what has been called the “Great Replacement Theory”—an ethno-nationalist theory, popularized by French writer Renaud Camus, who warned that the white population in Europe was being replaced by non-European (i.e. black and brown) immigrants, in a process he called “reverse-colonizing.” A form of this Great Replacement Theory has taken hold in America; and what makes this belief even more alarming is not only that these are the very people willing to use violence to overturn an American election, but that these violence-prone crazies who assaulted the National Capitol on January 6 were NOT primarily from rural areas of the American South or Midwest as we might have thought. Rather, they were people with decent jobs in well-populated counties—but counties where “the white share of the population was in decline.” As Gelman writes, “for every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent.” In other words, the bulk of insurgents on Jan. 6 were white people who believed what they seemed to be seeing: that “their” country, like  the 2020 election, was being “stolen” from them by “non-whites”—aided and abetted, of course, by the government actions of the hated Democrats who (they believe) specifically favor those non-white workers. 

            These ‘committed insurrectionists,’ as they have been called by Robert Pape, form a virtual army of shock troops ready to use violence to support the ex-president if he runs again, and to start a new Civil War, if necessary, to preserve their white privilege. If this sounds like hyperbole, listen to some of the Jan. 6 rioters Gelman interviewed. One guy (Phil is the only name he would give) said:

“Civil war is coming…and I would fight for my country….Oh Lord, I think we’re heading for it. I don’t think it’ll stop. I truly believe it. I believe the criminals—Nancy Pelosi and her criminal cabal up there—is forcing a civil war. They’re forcing the people who love the Constitution, who will give their lives to defend the Constitution—the Democrats are forcing them to take up arms against them, and God help us all.” (Gelman, ibid.)

 

Another Jan. 6 rioter, Gregory Dooner, told Gelman something similar: “Violent political conflict…was inevitable, he said, because Trump’s opponents ‘want actual war here in America. That’s what they want.’” (Gelman, ibid.) Notice that the pattern here is the usual one in the Trump era: total reversal of the truth. The hated Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are allegedly forcing a civil war (I assume by not recognizing Donald Trump’s Big Lie.) They are forcing those who are “defending the Constitution” to take up arms. As is obvious to anyone not blinded by right-wing propaganda, exactly the opposite is the case: the right wing insurrectionists are the ones taking up arms, and, they hope, forcing those who respect the Constitution and democracy to fight a new Civil War. Such a war would be based in the same determination with which the Confederacy tried to overturn the Constitution (and the Declaration) by insisting that NOT all men, particularly enslaved Africans, were created equal. And, importantly, that states had the right to institute their own laws keeping those Africans slaves, in defiance of the federal government. 

            Gelman goes on to show that this is precisely what Trump, his advisers, and now the entire Republican Party, is intent on doing in 2024. It was “the main event,” as he terms it, in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election: “a systematic effort to nullify the election results and then reverse them.” This plot—and it must be called a plot, in light of the revelations that have now surfaced about specific plans by Trump and his advisers (the scenario for this election overturn came from adviser John Eastman, an arch-conservative lawyer, who wrote a detailed 6-point memo outlining how it would work, with VP Pence playing the main role) on how to nullify Biden’s victory. Indeed, one of these plans is now known to have emerged on Nov. 4 before the results were known! (“Why can't [sic] the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS”)—a plot that would require “GOP legislatures in at least three states to repudiate the election results and substitute presidential electors for Trump.” That is, the pro-Trump plotters needed a mere 38 electors to reverse the election results, and they carefully selected six states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—where they might get those electors. Why? once again, because the state legislatures in those states are controlled by Republicans. And this very plot was actively promoted by the conspirators we now know had gathered at the Willard Hotel in DC (Eastman, Giuliani, Bernard Kerik, Bannon, and others), and were in constant communication with Trump and his White House.

            Fortunately, these efforts, including the appeal/command to VP Mike Pence to delay the counting of the votes, alleging that there was fraud in some state results, did NOT work. But it was not for lack of trying. Those attempts included an appeal to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to stop the count and throw the issue into the Supreme Court, as in Bush v Gore. But even Alito did not respond to this desperate attempt. Neither did Pence, who was threatened with  lynching as he tried to fulfill his Constitutional duty to certify the electoral votes. And, as it became clear that neither Alito nor Pence would stop or even delay certification of Biden as the winner (and Trump as the loser—a position that is akin to death for him), Steve Bannon on his podcast played the only card left. On January 5, he summoned his troops: 

“Tomorrow morning, look, what’s going to happen, we’re going to have at the Ellipse—President Trump speaks at 11.” 

This last-ditch effort, advanced at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, would comprise an invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters to stop or delay, by violence if necessary, the dreaded count and certification of the electoral vote. This invasion was not just a tour of the Capitol as some have claimed. Its purpose has been clearly outlined a number of times, as for instance in the words of one of the rioters, Ali Alexander:

“I was the person who came up with the January 6 idea with Congressman Gosar” and two other Republican House members. “We four schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting.” 

We all know what happened on that certification day, Jan. 6. Except, that is, for the right-wing version, which has raised the issue of rioter Ashli Babbitt’s shooting death by an officer (as she attempted to enter the Capitol through a window she had broken) as evidence that yet another deep-state, left-wing plot was at work. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the violent Proud Boys militia, claimed that the shooter was a black man: “This black man was waiting to execute someone on January 6th. He chose Ashli Babbitt.” Another crazy has alleged that making the police officer who stopped Babbitt a hero was yet another example of the “only injustice in America today—anti-whiteism.” Though the accusation is totally false, it fits the narrative that the rioters feel comfortable with: that the white race is being sacrificed and replaced by people of color.

            This is the situation we now face. Gelman makes the point that 2020 and the subsequent Capitol riot were attempts (that nearly succeeded) to stop the electoral count and declare Trump the winner—when he had clearly lost. Trump, his millions of supporters (all believers in his “fraud theory”) and the entire Republican Party do not intend to allow their scheme to fail again. They are, according to Gelman, “fine-tuning a constitutional argument that is pitched to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court.” Their scheme involves one they have been implementing for years—cementing Republican majorities in the legislatures of several key states (they now have legislative majorities in 30 states, and hope for more in 2022). With these majorities, they will promote the independent state legislature doctrine. This doctrine, very much like the one the Confederates used prior to the Civil War, “holds that statehouses have ‘plenary,’ or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors.” This differs from the current Constitutional system, in which each party chooses its electors; and whichever party candidate wins the popular vote gets ALL the electoral votes of that state. But if any state legislature can substitute its own slate of electors, discarding the popular vote for a bogus reason like fraud, “it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead.” Alarmingly, Gelman points out, there are already four justices—Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas—who “have already signaled support for a doctrine that disallows any such deviation from the election rules passed by a state legislature.” In other words, the “independent state legislature” doctrine. 

            The end game, then, is that the stage is set for the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee happens to be, will not be allowed to lose. If the electoral college vote, determined by the popular vote, does not go his way, several state legislatures (already busy passing voting rules that disenfranchise millions of normally Democratic Party voters), can simply claim fraud, substitute their preferred slate of electors, and appeal to the Supreme Court to sanction their theft. And if, as often happens, Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 elections, and  take control of the entire U.S. Congress, they will be in full control, at the national level as well, of the vote count and certification. 

            Gelman adds this statement by Nate Persily, an election law expert at Stanford: 

“If a legislature can effectively overrule the popular vote, it turns democracy on its head.” 

Indeed it does. So we must again wait, as during the Civil War, to see if, in these United States, a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’ can long endure the assaults upon it—not, this time, by southern secessionists, but by the millions of loonies whom  Robert Pape has called “insurrectionists,” and who have been unleashed and driven on to battle by their recently-found Messiah, Donald Trump.  

And very much related to that is this critical question: do enough Americans care whether Democracy— that is, their electoral decision about who governs them—survives? Or are they more concerned, as some recent polls suggest, about the price of gasoline, or eggs, or where they can be “free” to go without a mask or a vaccination? 

 

Lawrence DiStasi  

Donald Trump, Traitor

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, Donald Trump, the 45^th President of the United States, is a traitor. As president, he swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States by faithfully executing its laws. These are his publicly-recorded words:

 

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

 

And yet, in at least two major ways, he has violated that oath. First, he has perpetrated the Big Lie that he actually won the Presidency in the 2020 election, and that he was deprived of his victory by fraud. In pursuit of that claim—rejected by every court and every state that heard it, including Arizona—he and his cohort organized and instigated the January 6 assault on the nation’s Capitol. This resulted in five deaths, with 140 more wounded, and endangered the lives of hundreds of Senators and Representatives, all in the brazen, violent attempt to prevent the assembled Congress from doing its Constitutional duty—e.g. to certify the election. Perilously for our democracy, this attempt to overturn the 2020 election has never quite abated, nor has Trump’s insistence that he is the legitimate president who should be re-instated in place of the “fraudulently-elected” Joseph Biden. 

Second, the migrant conflict on the border of Poland, created by the dictatorial president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, is a blatant attempt to cause a crisis in NATO by weaponizing migrants. Both Russian President Putin and Pres. Lukashenko know full well that migrants incite right-wing opposition: Viktor Orban took power in Hungary by inflaming popular fears of migrants, and Donald Trump followed the same playbook to take the U.S. presidency in 2016.  Nor is this mere speculation: Lukashenko has publicly promised to “flood the EU with migrants and drugs”— this in response to international sanctions following his downing of a plane that was crossing Belarusian territory carrying dissident journalist Roman Protasevich (see Heather Cox Richardson, “Letter from an American,” Nov. 10, 2021). This, of course, follows the many signs of fealty that Trump gave to Putin, both before and after his election—not least by criticizing and denigrating NATO members and leaders nearly every time he had the opportunity. He is the first US president in memory to have done this, and many critics consider this cozying up to our avowed adversary, while denigrating our perennial allies, as tantamount to treason. Lukashenko’s current move with migrants plays this same game. 

            It is hard to think of more that any president could do to qualify him for treason. In spite of this, Trump retains millions of die-hard supporters throughout this nation. Not only are they supporters, but many of them seem ready and eager to foment a revolt to overthrow the legitimate and now-certified election of Joe Biden, and install their great leader in his place. It is, for me at least, impossible to imagine that most of them are fully aware of what his means. Perhaps they consider the similar attempt to fight a war with the Lincoln-led Union in 1861 as a good precedent for their plans. But that secession-driven attempt, which caused the death of more Americans than all our other wars combined (until the War in Vietnam), was clearly treason. This little detail seems not to matter to Trump’s supporters. Some of the latest evidence for this comes from the now-notorious memos from John Eastman, conservative lawyer (one of Trump’s senior advisers to promote and validate the Big Lie), outlining how VP Pence, acting to supposedly count the votes, could recognize that several states have alternate slates of electors, and thence turn the electoral decision either over to the Congress, where Republican senators could use the filibuster rule to prevail, or to the state legislatures, where Republicans control a majority of state delegations. Either way, Pence, if he went along with the plan (which praise be, he did NOT), could, “without asking for permission,” declare Trump the winner. Subsequently, Subsequently, Eastman also “co-wrote a blueprint for how Trump could use the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power after a disputed election” (Lindsay Beverstein, “The Evidence We now Have is Utterly Damning,” Raw Story, Nov. 18.) The Jan. 6 insurrection followed. 

Even more astonishing than the collusion of Trumpistas, is the collusion of almost the entire Republican Party. Every member of that party in the current Congress, with a few glaring exceptions like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, as well as thirteen outliers who took the risky step of voting recently for the Infrastructure package sponsored by the hated Democrats (earning them vilification and death threats), has genuflected at the altar of Trump to follow his lead. This includes that arch-hypocrite, Senate majority leader McConnell, and House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy. How is this possible? What of the party of Lincoln? What of the alleged conservative commitment to Constitutional originalism? It’s as if we’re in the topsy-turvy world of Alice in Wonderland, and makes one wonder:  Have any of these people ever read the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence? 

            Let’s quickly review those two revered documents. The Declaration has these words in its second paragraph:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… 

 

This does not say “some men” or “only men of noble birth or white skin color.” It says all. Jefferson goes on to enumerate all the violations committed by the British King as reasons why “these sovereign states” are cutting their bond with him—essentially because of his behavior as a  dictator who considers himself superior to common settlers, e.g. the people of America. In other words, the polar opposite of a leader in a democracy.   

As to Amendment XII of the Constitution, reflecting Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 3, it says:

The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed… 

 

That is about as clear as it gets, and means exactly what it says: the president of the Senate, that is, the then-sitting Vice-President, Mike Pence, must open the votes from the Electors of each state, and count them. The entire Congress—not the president, he is not a King—then certifies the election. This is its Constitutional duty, as it was Mike Pence’s duty, which he faithfully carried out on Jan. 6. 

But, the Constitution notwithstanding, Trump has continued to express his rage at Pence, the same rage that his minions expressed by screaming “Hang Mike Pence” as they invaded the Capitol on January 6. Though he was protected by the Secret Service, and escaped lynching that day, it was clear that the Vice-President of the United States was shaken. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to complain (as if he were King) about this alleged betrayal by his Vice-President and supposed ally in not following John Eastman’s script. The latest twist in this nearly-unbelievable episode of a president turning on his own vice president, is his expression of approval of the insurrectionist behavior in an interview conducted in March by Jonathan Karl of ABC news. In Karl’s rendering of that interview, to appear in his forthcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, he quotes the former president as follows:

“It’s common sense, Jon. It’s common sense that you’re supposed to protect…How can you, if you know a vote is fraudulent, right, how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress?”

 

What this means is that Donald Trump defended the invaders’ chants of “Hang Mike Pence” during the Jan. 6  attack, saying it was “understandable” because they were angry that the legitimately-conducted election hadn’t been overturned(quoted by Jesse Rodriguez and Rebecca Shabad, “Trump Defends Jan. 6 rioters’ ‘hang Mike Pence” chant in new audio,” nbcnews.com, Nov. 12, 2021.) One comment about this, among many, is that of CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, who said on Nov. 12:

"Big picture: first of all, this is a constitutional nightmare. This is a constitutional worst-case scenario. The utter madness of a president… who is endorsing, supporting these people who are attacking his vice president.” 

 

As if the unhinged behavior and comments of the former President were not enough, one of his former principal advisers, Steve Bannon, has added to the fire. Bannon, like many of Trump’s inner circle, refused to honor a subpoena from the House Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Assault on the Capitol (the committee had asked Bannon for documents and testimony). Charged with criminal contempt for defying the subpoena, he was taken into custody by the FBI, defiantly alleging that his people would take action. But even before being charged, Bannon had clearly stated, on his War Room podcast (the war room is what the Willard Hotel meeting on the eve of Jan. 6 among Trump conspirators, including Giuliani, Bannon, and Eastman, is also called), what he and the right-wing Trump minions were trying to do: do away with democracy to reverse the results of the Trump loss in 2020:

“‘We’re taking action. We’re taking over school boards. We’re taking over the Republican Party with the precinct committee strategy. We’re taking over all the elections,’ Bannon said.” (Peter Wade, Rolling Stone, Nov. 12, 2021)

 

Not content with that, Bannon added to this defiance when he was taken into custody by the FBI: 

 

"I'm telling you right now, this is going to be the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden," Bannon told reporters after the hearing, swearing his team is "going to go on the offense." (cnn.com, Nov. 15, 2021)

 

How much more offensive the Trumpers can get is not immediately clear. But it is clear that Donald Trump and his minions have little regard for either the law, or democracy itself. 

            One more element has recently surfaced. Tom Boggioni writes that Max Boot, the conservative military expert, referenced a memo to Donald Trump “making the case to fire Defense Secretary Mike Esper” as evidence that Trump wanted to find some other head of the military whom he could control. The said memo, written by Trump’s director of personnel, Johnny McEntee (formerly his baggage handler) was “both sinister and ludicrous.” It made the case for getting rid of a Cabinet officer because of “insufficient loyalty to the president.” Boot goes on to say that Trump “appears determined to turn the military into his personal goon squad.” Further, if he manages to get another term as president,  “Trump would want to ensure that the ‘guys with guns’ are on his side” (Raw Story, Nov. 15, 2021). In short, Donald Trump has had no compunctions in the past, and certainly would not in the future, about using the U.S. military (before him, mostly kept from use as a political actor) to compel domestic compliance with his dictates—very much like the kings and dictators he admires most. 

            Enough said. The former president seems to take pride in breaking with America’s most hallowed traditions, up to and including behavior that seems, and, in my opinion is, treasonous. That he has been able to get away with this, so far, is an indication of how far the United States has strayed from the democratic republic that was once the envy of the world. And also, how huge portions of the public seem totally unaware of the danger that inheres in that departure, and/or how little they seem to care. Let us hope that the danger is forestalled before it is too late—before, that is, a real dictator steps on stage. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi