See No Evil, Hear No Evil: GOP Bends Over for Trump

“Some cult leaders have predicted Armageddon and are at a loss when the world fails to end and just keeps plugging along through the indifferent cosmos.” Jim Harrison, The Great Leader

Raining heavily here this evening. Water spills off the overwhelmed gutters.  The backyard approaches quagmire status. It’s 50 degrees outside. My reading stacks up beside me, books and periodicals. I feel wiped out, resigned,  unsettled, and lonely. Yes, I have generally felt less anxious since Trump fled to Florida. His relative radio silence is like a gift to a weary nation. But I’ve still got to divorce myself from the political scene, stop watching, listening, and reading about politics. It’s hurting my human soul. If you swim in a cesspool, don’t be surprised when you can’t get the stink out. There’s some wisdom for you. 

Trump may have left DC, but the Orange Menace isn’t gone -- his shadow still scares the shit out of most Republicans, and, like battered spouses and beaten dogs, they return again and again for more humiliation and degradation. I read that the Republican Party is in disarray, splitting into two factions -- one titularly represented by Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney -- and the Trump Party represented by stellar characters like Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert and many others. Mitch McConnell can’t decide which way to lean at the moment; all depends on the direction of the wind. Mitch has little on his mind these days except obstructing the Democrats and regaining his Majority Leader title. This brigade of cowards makes me despair for our country. They have one and all placed loyalty to Donald Trump above their oath of office and the nation. The GOP is poised to make a public declaration that Donald Trump, and those presidents that follow him, is above the law, above the Constitution, untouchable. It’s that simple. Like Covid-19, the Trump Fever is still raging. 

Does every person who voted for Trump in November still support him? After his year of lying about the election -- if I win it’s fair, if I lose it’s rigged -- and nearly two months pressuring state-level officials to tip the election his way, even after the votes were certified, and lying about his landslide victory that never was. Still with him? After almost all Trump’s legal challenges were thrown out of the courts. And, most of all, after January 6th. Are you still on Team Trump, wearing that red cap, even after the emergence of information that some members of that mob had tactical ability, police or military training? Many were probably swept up in the mass energy of the moment and borne along, but some were there with intent. There was a level of coordination, possibly from Trump loyalists and lackeys within the government. The acting Director of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, happened to be out of the country on January 6. Doesn’t that seem odd? That the security apparatus -- local, state, federal -- was caught flatfooted when it knew in advance that violence was very likely, reeks of an inside job. An order delayed at a critical moment by one of Trump’s lackeys, a bit of information withheld. We need a serious investigation to find out how it went down and how high up the power chain it went, but I have no confidence this will happen on the necessary scale. We must move on for the good of the nation, let bygones be bygones…

Trump may be able to make his supporters feel better, but he’ll never heal their pain. What ails them is deeper, closer to the bone. 

The Democrats still haven’t learned that Mitch McConnell can be trusted no more than one would trust a coiled viper.  

It looks clear that Republican senators will not vote to convict Trump. What they saw and experienced on January 6th didn’t convince them. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have no issue with how Trump abused the power of his office to  invalidate an election and incite a mob to invade and desecrate the US Capitol. That’s just fine with Paul and Rubio and 43 others. Nothing to see here, folks. Let’s move along. Forget the officer the mob murdered, and all those who were injured. Give them no justice. I hope history holds a harsh judgment for any elected official who had the chance to hold Donald Trump accountable for his assault on democracy, and caved. 

When did the concept of honor die in America? Is it buried at Wounded Knee, Antietam, or on the banks of the mighty Mississippi? Can it be found at the Alamo or in a field near the Potomac? Is it bobbing on the tide in New York Harbor? 

A two-party democracy with only one functioning party cannot long survive. Our democracy is reeling. I fear that within a decade, or less, it will be effectively finished. 

The Great Forgetting

 “How hard will the Democrats fight for the majority that elected them, and how hard will the Republicans fight to enshrine minority rule in our institutions?” Waleed Shahid, The Nation

He’s gone. The blessed day finally arrived. Trump lumbered away, disgraced, deflated, and defanged.  The people’s house is under new management; Joe Biden is now president. No riots broke out, the hallowed steps of the Capitol weren’t stormed by heavily-armed Trump supporters. It seems those malign forces went back to ground. 

But no sooner did Biden sit down in the Oval Office -- after it had been thoroughly disinfected, fumigated, saged, and exorcised -- than did the Great Forgetting begin. Republican halfwits like Lindsey Graham called for unity and warned of angering millions of people if Trump is tried by the Senate. Cries of “Putting a former president on trial is unconstitutional!”were heard on the cable networks. One piece I read on Politico or The Hill even argued that in the name of national unity Biden should pardon Trump as Gerald R. Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. The argument didn’t sway me. There can be no unity unless there are consequences for Trump and all connected with the January 6th Insurrection. We must call it what it was: a brazen attempt to seize political power by force, and by terror. Some of the folks who stormed the Capitol at Trump’s instigation believed they had license to rampage and immunity from consequences. Where did that notion come from, who planted the seed? 

America has to look under its bed and find out who gave aid, comfort and money to Trump’s foot soldiers, but I fear the January 6 Insurrection will slip out of focus, lose purchase as time passes and Congress gets distracted by shiny political objects. We need to immediately establish a commission invested with broad authority to investigate, hold public hearings, and out the enablers on the inside, the ones with badges and government-issued ID, and possibly even a few who sport Congressional lapel pins. 

In our investigation of the Insurrection, we must determine what Trump was doing and who he communicated with while the insurgents ransacked the Capitol and chanted for Mike Pence to be hung. Phone records, text messages, emails -- we need to see it all. 

Donald Trump will not enjoy his final years on this earth. Too many arms of the law encircle the worst president in modern American history, twice loser of the popular vote, twice impeached, and let’s hope once convicted. 

I repeat what I have written before -- it will take a few years to gauge the full effects of Trump’s single disastrous term. He drove the country blindfolded at full speed, convinced that only he knew the way, and millions of people took his word for it and went along for the ride. Biden’s crew has just begun to sort through the slag left by Trump’s people, and will no doubt be stunned and horrified by the incompetence and stupidity they discover. 

Like millions of my fellow citizens, I felt a sense of relief when Inauguration Day came off without a hitch. It was a good day for the country, a great day for women as Kamala Harris assumed the vice presidency. I see America too clearly to get weepy about the performative rituals of American democracy, but I do not dismiss their value. The spectacle surrounding the peaceful transfer of power was all the more remarkable and meaningful after four long years trapped beneath Trump’s oppressive ego. It was solemn and serious and steadying, a measure of comfort for a weary nation. The Trump years were hard, marked by cruelty and stupidity on a stunning scale. When the helicopter carrying Trump cleared DC’s airspace the tone of the country immediately changed. Biden gave a heartfelt speech full of platitudes about unity and American ingenuity and our essential, enduring decency, but along with the words themselves, it was the sound of a reassuring voice that many needed to hear. 

I don’t have any doubts about Biden’s basic decency, honesty, and sense of honor. It’s his policies on the economy, the use of military force, mass surveillance, climate change, and racial justice where I worry about Biden. Policy and time. Let’s not forget that Biden is a 78-year-old man faced with multiple challenges. 

After only a couple of days’ time the rose began to wilt. The usual political fuckery began with Mitch McConnell reverting to his obstructionist role. Biden’s doing as much as he can by Executive Order, but sooner or later he will need to pass legislation and that still entails striking deals with McConnell.  

Unity and reconciliation will come through accountability for Trump, as well as his enablers and collaborators. 

No Forgetting, No Forgiveness

 “Our tribune, gentlemen of the jury, must be a school of truth and plain concepts.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The news is depressing. Insurrection. Pandemic. Life disrupted, upset, fucked up and fucked over. I can’t get the horror of the images from the January 6 Insurrection, and the deeper meanings they represent out of my head. When large numbers of people buy into the notion that elected officials deserve to be attacked, beaten, kidnapped, or murdered for taking a political stand or voting on principle, when we get to that point, a border has been crossed and we’re in a different country. Collective fury from a mob, armed and prepared to exact mortal vengeance on their fellow citizens, police officers, and democratically-elected political representatives over political disagreements, is the hallmark of countries on the brink of collapse. 

Consider this strange tableau -- 20,000 National Guard troops protecting the presidential inauguration from attack from American citizens. Not the Germans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Russians, not Cubans or Vietnamese, not evil members of Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Americans. This is the kind of shit I saw on black-and-white TV when I was a child, Walter Cronkite reporting while images from somewhere in far away South America rolled behind him. We looked with scorn or pity on unstable banana republics ruled by dictators, believing ourselves to be different, better, permanent residents of Reagan’s shining city on a hill, bathed in George H.W. Bush’s thousand points of light and Barack Obama’s American indispensability.  

What happened on January 6 cannot be forgotten or forgiven, swept under the carpet as if it wasn’t a heinous blow against democracy. Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for protecting the country from right-wing domestic terror organizations. We should name them as such, and shut them down using every tool in the Federal statutes. They crossed the line on January 6. As a society, we have to demand the insurrectionists get a straight red card, and if convicted in a court of law, a penalty commensurate with their crime.  

That’s the hard task ahead of Biden. He must do nothing less than back America away from the abyss. It’s a tall order for any political leader, let alone one of Biden’s age and conciliatory disposition.

I have only one question for Joe Biden: Will you hold those people responsible for the Insurrection, whoever they are, by investigating, indicting and convicting them? Or will you exhort us to “forgive & forget, look forward, not back, to the hopeful future rather than the dark past…” The usual political flimflam, in other words, a tiger with no teeth. This is not the time for pardons, amnesty, or forgiveness. There must be penalties, accountability, expulsion, sanction, and incarceration. 

Will the Democrats finally seize the narrative, the story, and make voters understand who bears responsibility for the past four years? It’s not a sexy idea, but it has to be part of the narrative: Trump and his GOP enablers and collaborators forced the nation to the brink of violent overthrow, and Joe Biden is attempting nothing less than a rescue mission from a three-headed monster: seething political unrest, a broken economy, and a wicked pandemic that has killed more than 350,000 Americans, the largest death toll in the world. America is number one -- in Covid deaths. A price must be paid by Republicans for years of calamitous misrule. This isn’t a matter of fixing or replacing some broken furniture -- the house has been torched from inside and the rafters are still smoking. Renovation and restoration are needed. Cosmetic improvements will not do. That’s the hard task ahead of Biden.  He must do nothing less than back America away from the abyss. It’s a tall order for any political leader, let alone one of Biden’s age and conciliatory disposition.  

I saw one hopeful piece of news glimmering in the darkness: the National Rifle Association has filed Chapter 11. Perhaps this is a sign that the arc of the moral universe that Dr. King talked about is still functioning. 

Trump Makes History

 “But he (Biden) will fail at that task, risking both his presidency and his party’s fortunes if he refuses to hold Trump and his enablers to account. A politics of ‘forgive and forget’ will not unify the nation.” John Nichols, The Nation

The final tally was 232 to 197. Ten Republicans voted with the Democrats to hand Trump a second impeachment. After all that has happened over the past seven days, and with more information coming out every day about coordination between the insurrectionists and some on the inside, only ten Republicans had the courage to impeach Trump. 

The rest stuck with Trump. The best counter argument they could muster was a call for unity, and consideration for the delicate feelings of Trump’s loyal base. A few cowards warned against inflaming the nation; others said impeachment wasn’t necessary because Trump will be gone soon. It was a procession of craven Republicans with more fidelity to Trump than to the Constitution. 

 We need healing! We need unity! We need reconciliation! Called the Republicans, as if the past four years never happened. As if more than 350,000 Americans haven’t fallen to Covid. As if their slavish devotion to Trump isn’t responsible for all the divisive rhetoric about blue states and red states, us and them, evil Democrats, and months of racist dog-whistling and demonizing of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. 

The Republicans ask that the millions of Americans who despise Donald Trump and endured four years of cruelty, incompetence, grift, self-dealing, law-breaking, norm-shattering and criminal idiocy, be gentle and patient with those who support armed insurrection. They ask those who waited for the chance to vote Trump out of power to refrain from seeking accountability. It’s like asking for mercy for the arsonist who just torched your house. Republicans only believe in swift justice when it applies to black & brown Americans, Muslims, immigrants, and others they don’t favor. 

I’ve never heard any sane person argue that we shouldn’t arrest child-molesters, rapists, and thieves for fear of sparking anger in the criminal community. The majority of Republicans are happy to let Trump walk away, unscathed. It’s astonishing. It’s also a disgrace and an insult to any person who has sworn the oath of allegiance to the United States. 

Four years of Trump. It’s fitting that he becomes the first president in American history to be impeached twice. That’s his legacy as well as the heavy stone Republicans must carry from now on. They sold their souls and the bill has come due. 

Ten brave souls from a party of hundreds. Only ten. 

Like a nation under siege, the presidential inauguration on January 20 will be protected by a National Guard force of almost 20,000. It’s unknown how many in that number are Trump supporters. State governments from sea-to-shining-sea are bracing for attacks. This is the carnage and chaos wrought by Trumpism. This is what happens when people worship false idols.  

Adrift on the River of Madness

 “More of the same means more disaster.” Chris Hedges

Why is Rudy Giuliani still walking around free? Why hasn’t Donald Trump Jr. been arrested? Why haven’t there been news conferences with federal officials so that journalists can ask questions about the complete security failure at the U.S. capitol on January 6, and the apparent help provided to the insurrectionists by some members of law enforcement? 

In regards to the latter, what we discover when we pull the covers off may be frightening. 

The House of Representatives has introduced an article of impeachment against Donald J. Trump. After what happened on January 6, you would think that most Republicans would agree that Trump’s immediate removal is necessary for the good of the nation. Of course, you would be wrong. A majority of Republicans support appeasing Trump and his violent MAGA followers. I guess they haven’t seen enough, even though it was their place of work that was stormed and ransacked, with the mob clamoring for Vice President Mike Pence to hang.  

The GOP ideology of power-at-any-cost renders all who believe in it blind. Some of the same Republicans who amplified Trump’s election fraud nonsense now caution that another impeachment will “inflame” the country. Never has the complete hypocrisy of the Republican Party been so obvious and despicable. After nearly five years of coddling Trump, shrugging off his boorish behavior, racist pronouncements, staggering stupidity, and apologizing for his authoritarian proclivities, the GOP has forfeited any claim to moral authority. Kevin McCarthy, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson -- all of them -- are traitors and need to shut their mouths; they’ve done enough damage. 

Pundits keep asking, are we at an end or a beginning? 

It doesn’t feel to me like an end, so it must be a beginning. No society as unequal as ours can long remain stable and peaceful. For the Americans who ransacked the capitol I have nothing but contempt; for those who believe Trump’s fantasies I feel little except pity; and for those who compare what happened on January 6 to the mass protests for justice that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, I feel a slow burning hatred. 

White supremacy implies white immunity. We saw it in action on January 6. 

The GOP ideology of power-at-any-cost renders all who believe in it blind.

The Proud Boys and others of the same ilk should be designated as domestic terror organizations and given no leniency. What is more likely to happen is a rash of new anti-terrorism statutes that will ultimately make it harder for non-violent groups -- like BLM, anti-war, and environmental activists -- to stage mass demonstrations. 

The river of madness in 21st century America stretches from 9/11 and the hysteria that birthed the Patriot Act and the War on Terror, to the illegal invasion of Iraq, the torture at Abu Ghraib and the indefinite detention of suspects at Guantanamo, to the bailout of criminal financial institutions in 2008, and the incompetent response of the Trump regime to the Covid pandemic. Both political parties have lurched right, and both have promoted the welfare of the wealthy few to the detriment of the struggling many. Both parties have happily coddled corporate interests, including Big Tech firms like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, all of which have too much power and far too much personal information about all of us. (Twitter gets no brownie points for finally banning Donald J. Trump.)

Did you notice that stock market indexes rose the day after the January 6 insurrection? After the seat of the legislative branch was attacked and five people died, stocks rose! If that’s not market perversity, I don’t know what is. 

The Senate Sedition Caucus:

Ted Cruz (TX)

Josh Hawley (MO)

Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS)

John Kennedy (LA)

Roger Marshall (KS)

Tommy Tuberville (AL)

Thanks to the Lincoln Project for the above. Let’s not forget these collaborators or the 147 Republican House members who voted to contest the legitimate results of the election to mollify Donald J. Trump. Let’s also remember Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham, whose support for Trump has been steadfast. 

End or beginning? I fear we will see more violence in the days and weeks ahead. The genie is out of the bottle and loose in the land. America is having a psychotic episode. 

A Nation Starving for Justice

 

“Trump failed to steal the election because he and his legal team are incompetent criminals, not because our democratic institutions defeated him.” Elie Mystal, The Nation

In some ways the fall of Trump is like a Greek tragedy. The con man and his crime family flew too near the sun, and now their black wings are melting and their talons and teeth are disintegrating. 

Serves Trump right. Let it continue. What I’m watching for now is accountability from the politicians. It starts with removing Trump. I’m a lifelong, active Democrat, but I’m not a fan of Nancy Pelosi. She’s obviously very smart -- whip smart, and pretty formidable as a personality -- but I think she’s too much of a centrist and too often on the side of corporate power and enormous, immoral military expenditures. I don’t trust her to lead a legislative charge to reform the criminal justice system, end mass incarceration, make meaningful investments to confront the coming climate crisis, or begin a transition to Medicare for All. 

Today, as words and images and headlines about the insurrection of January 6, 2021 zipped around my brain, I thought back to the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. It was a little more than a year ago when Pelosi and her team drafted the articles of impeachment. Will Pelosi go narrow and shallow or wide and deep? Will she go big or small? I asked these questions on this blog. Pelosi and the Democrats, their eyes looking forward to the 2020 general election, went small, restricting their articles to the crimes identified in the Mueller Report. If our political machinery functioned with any measure of accountability, or justice, those narrow articles would still have been sufficient to take Trump down. They didn’t because Trump by then had cowed the GOP, taken it over, and pissed all over it to mark it as his; they didn’t work because the GOP is deeply cynical and obsessed with holding the intoxicating power of minority rule. Mitch McConnel, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, the detestable Josh Hawley, and so many more, put fealty to Trump (and their own ambition) ahead of fealty to the Constitution and the good of the nation. There’s no getting around that. Too little too late Betsy DeVos. Same goes for you Elaine Chao. You’re no champions of justice, and you do not even have the honor to go down with your captain. Don’t start making sense now Bill Barr. Have the heavy scales fallen from your eyes? Please. You’re marked like former Nazis were in the years after World War II. Don’t tell me you didn’t know, because you did, you noted the political winds and the opportunity for personal gain and made your choice. 

The point I was staggering towards was that had Pelosi gone big, brought the kitchen sink, the corrupt GOP would still have acquitted him, but it would have placed all of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors in the book, on the record. That might have been a cause worth fighting for. In any case, regardless of how few days remain in Trump’s disastrous and traitorous term, the Democrats must make the GOP go on the record, face again a choice: support Trump or the country. 

Ironically, the destroyer of the Republican Party isn’t even a Republican, not in the Party of Lincoln sense. Trump used the Republican Party like an inflatable sex toy, and he fucked it sideways and upside down, and thrice on Sundays. I despised George W. Bush with incredible intensity. I thought he was the nadir. W earns no pass from me. But say what you will about Bush, he was a decent man at heart, dumb but not crazy, and he respected most of our basic institutions enough not to deliberately destroy them. 

You can’t run a moderate and just government with lackeys and grifters in every key position. Expertise matters. Facts matter. Language matters a lot -- look what Trump’s words incited on January 6. Look at the seeds his words spread over the last four years, seeds of  hate and distrust, cruelty and revenge, incompetence and greed. 

Trump is for Trump and only Trump. So many of us told you this from the very beginning of this terrible era. I predicted serious damage. Look around. Covid-19 has us on the mat because there has been NO federal leadership. You can’t fight a pandemic with 50 different approaches. The president cannot delegate responsibility for fighting a pandemic to the individual states to sort out. Pandemic’s don’t work that way. You can’t defeat a pandemic when you deliberately pit states and regions against one another for needed resources, favoring those groups you like and starving those you don’t. That’s not simply unjust, it’s cruel and stupid. A pandemic is like a war. A reasonable level of command and control is necessary. People have to make sacrifices, be inconvenienced, for the good of the whole.

We knew how this was going to turn out from the beginning. Trump’s future was written in his past. The man was a serial failure, a reverse-Midas; look at the records of his bankruptcies, at his history of cheating the society of his fair share of taxes, his failed marriages, his racism and misogyny, stupidity and cruelty. It was all there, only the consequences of his failure are many times worse. The more power a man like Trump gets, the more he craves. There is no end. I imagine it’s like a heroin  addiction. 

How many days did it take Mitch McConnell to ram Amy Comey Barrett down America’s throat? I think it was 8. Do not tell me that Donald J. Trump cannot be impeached in the time remaining. He can, and must be. We need to construct strong guardrails of precedent right now, at this moment of crisis. The entire American experiment in self-government turns on belief in the rule of law justly applied to all, the high as well as the low; on the peaceful transfer of power after democratic elections; and on two things that have become rare this century: moderation and justice. America is a nation starving for justice, for a sense of essential fairness. We fight among ourselves while the economic screws are applied by billionaires, hedge funds richer than some countries, Citibank and Bank of America, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, ATT and Verizon. One reason MAGA nation is so angry is that they have lived through decades where the elites commit massive crimes, drag us into endless foreign conflicts, cheat the system, rip people off, and walk away with no consequences and no accountability. 

Democrats must bring articles of impeachment to the floor immediately, and they must drag those Republicans who are no longer afraid of Trump with them. This is a guardrail that must be set in stone. For there to be any hope of reconciliation, there must be justice. 

Very Fine People

 “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I expected violence on the streets of DC today, but never did I think I would watch a mob of Americans storm and overtake the United States capitol, on the very day the votes of the Electoral College were to be certified by Congress, the people’s representatives. 

My first question is: how did that mob manage to overwhelm the capitol building so easily? Did the security people from all the agencies -- FBI, ATF, Capitol Police, Park Police, National Guard, Metropolitan Police -- not know Trump’s MAGA army was coming? Did they forget that Trump invited them to DC for a “wild” day. Did they not know in advance that Trump was making a speech this morning in the city, at which he was one-hundred percent certain to incite his audience with rambling madness about fraud, stolen elections, victimhood and grievance? Didn’t get the email? Clueless? Just assumed it would be another day in DC? 

Why was the DC security apparatus -- all those federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies so quick to mobilize -- and with such overwhelming force and numbers -- against the Black Lives Matter protesters last June, and so absent today? What accounts for the disparity? 

We must ask many more questions about that, and maybe take a good long look at the racial composition of the security forces. Something tells me we will find many people sympathetic to, and supportive of, white supremacy and white nationalism. Yes, we better look at the people with badges as well as the people in the red hats. 

Mitt Romney can usually be relied on to say the right thing, and he did so again this evening.  

I didn’t expect that January 6, 2021 would go down as a day of infamy in American history.

Around 1:30 eastern time, I checked CNN to see what was happening and saw the bold headline. I was at work, but couldn’t tear myself away, knowing that this was a seminal moment in American history unfolding in real time. The bedrock idea of democratic elections and the peaceful transfer of political and military power was under direct assault, incited by Donald J. Trump. 

Do not call those people protesters. That was a mob of domestic terrorists, of insurrectionists. Do not compare them to peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. That mob was from the same tribe that stormed the Michigan statehouse and plotted to kidnap the governor. A pack of people who feel aggrieved, almost all of them white. Michigan was a dry run. 

Let’s ask more questions. First, how much of a punk is Josh Hawley from Missouri? Call him Blow-Dried Ted Cruz. What a sniveling, gutless punk. Waste of a fine education at Stanford and Yale. Who is Josh Hawley to question Pennsylvania’s election process? Nobody. How dare he condemn the violence on the one hand, so pious and squeaky clean, and on the other say he’s just innocently bringing questions to the floor of Congress for debate. He’s just a patriotic guy looking out for average Americans, not a shamelessly ambitious politician trying to hitch himself to Trump’s base. Hawley, rot in hell. 

How’s Ted Cruz feeling at this hour? Ron Johnson? Does Kevin McCarthy think his hands are free of blood? What about Jim Jordan? Mark Meadows? Are you fuckers proud of yourselves? All of you, and many more, supported Trump’s election fraud fantasies, fed the beast that escaped its tether today, and now you express shock that the beast went berserk.

Oh, the hypocrisy on display in America’s capitol today. 

If that had been a mob of black people, many would have been shot dead on sight by the authorities. No doubt in my mind. Just like those good old days Trump and his followers so deeply long for, those days and nights in parts of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas. The good old days when black people could be murdered with even more impunity than they can be today. 

Didn’t Trump call himself the Law & Order president? 

Has Lindsey Graham seen the light? After kneeling before Trump with his mouth wide open for four years? After four years of running interference for Trump? After four years of making excuses for Trump’s idiocy, incompetence, and ignorance? Now, Graham has seen the light? Another punk with blood on his hands. 

I’m sorry for being all over the place, and angry, but I am pissed off tonight. I’ve got CNN on in the background. I’m following the voting and listening to people being interviewed. 

Several weeks ago in this blog I warned of this danger: Trump has the nuclear codes. That’s why, four years too late, there is talk of invoking the 25th amendment. Trump’s ego is melting down and nobody can predict what he’ll do. 

And what will Trump’s MAGA army do next? What’s their next gambit? They had a big day today, off the leash and full of vigor, running amok under Trump’s banner. They were treated gingerly by the authorities, few were arrested, and the majority were allowed to walk away without penalty. White immunity works. 

How many resignations will we see in the next few days? How many will jump the disgraced Trump ship before it crashes? Who will be on the bridge with Trump when it all comes to an end on January 20? Jared and Ivanka? Don Jr. and Eric? Lara and Melania? Rudy Guliani and Kayleigh McEnany?

A Season of Waiting

 “These are dangerous times for democracy. The danger can be seen in rising xenophobia and growing public support for autocratic figures who test the limits of democratic norms.” Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit

For those Americans who see Donald J. Trump and what remains of the Republican Party for the clear danger they pose to America, the past year has been a season of waiting. We waited for the Democrats to nominate their presidential ticket; we waited for the party conventions, and then the debates. We waited for November 3rd, election day, and hoped Joe Biden would win by a margin too big to steal. He did. Then we waited for December 14, when the votes of the Electoral College were certified. We have since waited for January 5th, and the Georgia run-off election which will decide if Mitch McConnell retains his seat atop the smoking heap that is the Trump-owned GOP -- a party that for more than a quarter century has cared about one thing and only one thing: power -- and is now devouring itself, split between Republicans who still believe in ordinary reality and the Constitution, and the Trump wing which believes in fantasy and is ready and willing to trample the Constitution. 

And then there’s January 6th, when a heretofore largely ceremonial process -- the acceptance by Congress of the electoral college votes -- will be turned into a fascist spectacle by Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz on the Senate side, and nearly seventy-five percent of House Republicans, led by the likes of Kevin McCarthy and Louie Gohmert. 

While those of us who care about democracy have waited, and waited, Donald J. Trump and his ragtag cast of enablers have filed bogus lawsuits alleging election fraud, made seditious statements in the media, and called the legitimacy of Biden’s win into question. Some of Trump’s pliant minions, like Cruz and Hawley, are playing along for reasons of ambition and self-promotion; others, like the aforementioned Gohmert, who is simply a nitwit, have contorted themselves to curry favor with Trump’s base, which they see as key to their future political advancement. Cynical? Yes. Dangerous? Absolutely. 

And then we learn of Trump’s hour-long phone call with the Georgia Secretary of State, in which Trump -- two months after the election, and with the vote counts certified and submitted to Congress -- put on his full mob boss act, alternately cajoling, threatening, and pleading for the Secretary of State to “find” 11,780 votes so he, Trump, could be declared the victor in Georgia. This act by Trump was shocking, but in no way surprising. We saw the same gambit with Ukraine. That escapade led to Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives, and should have led to his removal from office. 

The only surprising thing is how pathetic and demented Trump sounded on the call, rolling out wild conspiracy theories that have already been debunked. As mob kingpins go, Trump simply isn’t up to the task, he’s too stupid. After his experience with Ukraine and Bob Woodward, what man goes into an hour-long phone call with other people on the line, including legal counsel, and lays out the play as if he’d never heard of audio recording? Answer, a really dumb, desperate man. 

I expect a circus on January 6th, and quite possibly some violence in the streets of DC. The coup plotters will drag out the proceedings as long as possible, but when all their rounds are expended, Biden will be declared the winner, again. And then those of us who believe in democracy will wait for January 20th. We will wait, and we will hope that a desperate, cornered Donald J. Trump will not launch a war against Iran. That two-week span might be the most dangerous time of all. Desperate men commit desperate, destructive acts.

Our season of waiting continues.