The Department of Justice plot was entwined with the John Eastman fake electors – Mike Pence plot
Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Caesarism
Trump allies’ plot to seize local election offices just got a test drive in New Mexico
New poll finds that more than half of all Americans think democracy is toast. But that’s only true if we surrender
It’s a paradox worthy of Joseph Heller’s classic 1961 novel, Catch-22. Donald Trump’s deeply problematic state of mind made him unfit to be president in 2017. He got elected anyway, and now that same mental impairment, several legal experts say, may disqualify him from being held accountable for the crimes he committed in the Oval Office.
The brazenness of Trump’s insistence, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that he won the 2020 election is a continuing theme for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, which held its fourth public hearing on Tuesday. “The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer on this body politic,” said Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California. True enough.
But what if Trump believes his election lies? Writing in Politico, Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, says that Bill Barr’s statement to the January 6 committee that Trump was “detached from reality” about the election “might be his best defense against a possible criminal prosecution” for conspiring to overturn it. “The key,” Daniel L. Zelenko, another former federal prosecutor, told The New York Times, “is having contemporaneous evidence that he was saying that he knew the election was not stolen but tried to stay in power anyway.” Daniel Richman, a third former federal prosecutor and a professor of law at Columbia, writes in Lawfare: “Delusional pigheadedness is indeed a defense.”
It seems strange that discussion of Trump’s legal exposure should focus on this obstacle, rather than on the much larger one that no president has ever been tried for crimes committed while in office. Legal objections to such prosecutions may be spurious, but that doesn’t mean Attorney General Merrick Garland relishes the prospect of a prosecution that would invite constitutional challenge and rally Trump’s base to the 2024 Republican nominee—possibly Trump himself. Of all the reasons why Trump won’t likely be held legally accountable for his attempted coup, that’s the biggest.
But setting such practicalities aside, I can’t accept what Richman calls “the difficulty of a trip into the head of someone who has had a troubled relationship with expertise, precedent, and reality.” I’m not a former prosecutor, nor even a lawyer, and Richman is a very smart one. (I knew him in college. Hi, Danny!) Still, this deference strikes me as grossly misapplied to someone whose head I was forced to live inside—whose head we all were forced to live inside— for four very stressful years.
The argument against holding legally accountable a person with Trump’s feeble purchase on reality turns on the question of mens rea, or “guilty mind.” Does Trump believe his own lies? If he does, he lacks mens rea. To nail Trump, you need to prove that he didn’t really think he won the election or that he didn’t really think saying, for instance, “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised,” as we learned Tuesday he said to a Georgia elections investigator named Frances Watson—whom he never should have been speaking to in the first place—constituted a directive to commit voter fraud. I’m not yet prepared to believe no evidence exists that Trump acknowledged privately that he did lose the election, because Trump is no paragon of consistency. He uses words not to convey truth but to make things happen, and sometimes what he wants to happen is that this or that reasonable-seeming person be mollified with a reasonable-sounding remark. (This is something I learned about Trump—perhaps you did, too— while we lived inside that head of his.) Maybe Trump made one such mollifying remark to some reasonable-seeming person from whom we haven’t yet heard.
But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that Trump really does lack mens rea. He seems these days to be working overtime to demonstrate he does. That means, among other things, that Trump’s Cabinet ought to have invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove Trump from office. Early in the administration, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said he thought Trump was suffering from early stage dementia, according to Ira Rosen, a former producer for 60 Minutes, and tried to enlist Republican donor Robert Mercer to urge the removal process along. Like later internal discussions about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, this one went nowhere. Two efforts to impeach Trump also failed, even though Congress needn’t consider a president’s state of mind to remove them from office.
In both instances, the problem was that Trump’s mens rea deficit was contagious. First congressional Republicans caught it, including Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, who previously had denounced Trump as “a pathological liar” (Cruz), whom “we should have basically kicked … out of the party” (Graham). Next came Trump voters, who in 2016 harbored few illusions about whether their man was “honest and trustworthy” (more than 20 percent conceded he was not). Over time, Trump supporters adopted a more favorable view. Despite the ample opportunities his presidency gave them to learn how very dishonest he really was, by 2020 only 14 percent of Trump voters conceded that Trump was not “honest and trustworthy.” Does Trump say Biden was not elected president legitimately? Then 70 percent of Republican voters agree. An entire political party accepts Trump’s alternative reality. If Trump is delusional, then so are all those voters. You can’t diagnose all of them. We don’t have enough Thorazine!
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine applying mens rea to the bloodiest tyrants of modern history. Did they possess guilty minds? Not so’s you could tell. It wouldn’t be very difficult for a defense lawyer to demonstrate that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, who between them murdered about 65 million people, suffered from severe mental illness that prevented them from feeling guilt about their butchery. Now imagine going back in time and putting these three in the dock at Nuremberg or the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Would any such proceeding even consider that delusional pigheadedness shields them from the consequences of their crimes? “When Herr Hitler said the Jews were ‘a race-tuberculosis of the peoples’ and must therefore be eliminated, he was stating his sincere, albeit erroneous, opinion.” Merely imagining such talk feels obscene.
Granted, Trump was not a mass murderer; he merely tried and failed to pull off a coup d’état. That makes him much less of a problem than the twentieth century’s big three monsters. (I’ve long been persuaded by arguments that the head of state whose character most resembled that of Trump was Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.) But Trump’s small stature in the annals of tyranny also makes him, may it please the court, less obviously deranged for the purposes of our proceeding.
Trump has, perhaps, an innate ability, derived from extreme narcissism, to believe anything he wants to believe. But how different, really, does that make him from many other successful people in business? Does mens rea render America’s entire executive class unprosecutable? If so, we’ve got a bigger problem than I thought.
Trump may be a sociopath, but I can name several others in the upper reaches of corporate America who share his belief in the malleability of truth. So, probably, can you. With enough lawyers, Trump believes, you can create whatever reality you want. This, I’ve often been told, is an approach that’s widely shared within the upper reaches of the real estate industry. Trump is not impaired. He’s just a rich asshole who believes what he wants because he can. For heaven’s sake, don’t make that a reason not to put him on trial.
Most of us don’t want to grow up to be our parents, especially when we’re…
Arizona Republican’s comments come after January 6 hearing testimony that the effects of Trump’s actions were ‘horrendous’
Rusty Bowers, the Arizona Republican House speaker who made national headlines describing his refusal to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election, has said he will vote for Trump again if he runs for president in 2024.
“If he is the nominee, if he was up against [Joe] Biden, I’d vote for him again,” Bowers told the Associated Press. “Simply because what he did the first time, before Covid, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.”
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
As more truths about Donald Trump and his attempted coup come out, I fear there will be more irrational anger and threats from people who cannot bear the truth.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
- Beware the luxury beach resort.
- Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya.
- This president did everything right and still got no thanks.
Secret Doubt
As the January 6 hearings restarted today after the long weekend, I was thinking about the weird, psychotic fear that has overtaken millions of Americans. I include in those millions people who are near and dear to me, friends I have known for years who now seem to speak a different language, a kind of Fox-infused, Gish Galloping, “what-about” patois that makes no sense even if you slow it down or add punctuation.
Such conversations are just part of life in divided America now. We live in a democracy, and there’s no law (nor should there be) against the willing suffocation of one’s own brain cells with television and the internet. But living in an alternate reality is unhealthy—and dangerous, as I realized yet again while watching the January 6 committee hearings and listening to the stories of Republicans, such as Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and others, describing the threats and harassment they have received for doing their duty to the Constitution.
And the threats don’t stop with political figures; families are now in the crosshairs. Representative Adam Kinzinger, for example, tweeted Monday about a letter he received in which the writer threatened not only to kill him, but to kill his wife and infant son.
There have always been unstable people in America, and they have always done frightening things. But there seem to be a lot more of them now. Some of them are genuinely dangerous, but many more are just rage-drunk nihilists who will threaten any public figures targeted by their preferred television hosts or websites, regardless of party or policy.
The more I think about it—and I spent years researching such problems while writing a book about democracy—the more I think that such people are less angry than they are terrified.
Many of you will respond: Of course they’re terrified. They’re scared of demographic change, of cultural shifts, of being looked down upon for being older and uneducated in an increasingly young and educated world.
All true. But I think there’s more to it.
I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.
We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.
These outlets are eager to oblige. It’s not you, the hosts assure the viewers. It’s them. You made the right decisions years ago and no matter how much it now seems that you were fooled and conned, you are on the side of right and justice.
This therapy works for as long as the patient is glued to the television or computer screen. The moment someone like Bowers or Kinzinger or Liz Cheney appears and attacks the lie, the anxiety and embarrassment rise like reflux in the throat, and it must be stopped, even if it means threatening to kill the messenger.
No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach.
In the film adaptation of the Cold War epic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré’s fictional British intelligence officer George Smiley describes his opposite number, the Soviet spymaster Karla. Smiley knows Karla can be beaten, he says, because Karla “is a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
What this means, I regret to say, is that there will be more threats, and more violence, because there will be more truth. It’s going to be a long summer.
Related:
- The January 6 insurrectionist in the flower shop
- Trump’s savviest aides are already headed for the exits.
Today’s News
- The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety called law enforcement’s response in Uvalde “an abject failure.”
- The Supreme Court ruled against Maine’s exclusion of religious schools from a state tuition program.
- This past weekend, a historic European heat wave broke daily, monthly, and all-time highs. Heavy rain also left at least 84 dead in India and Bangladesh this past week.
Dispatches
- Galaxy Brain: Google has quietly crushed cherished parts of the internet, Charlie Warzel argues.
- I Have Notes: Nicole Chung reflects on writing in the midst of emotional and physical pain.
- Up for Debate: Eight readers pick their poison—high inflation or a recession.
Evening Read
The Atlantic; Antoine Antoniol / Getty
Sheryl Sandberg and the Crackling Hellfire of Corporate America
Story by Caitlin Flanagan
In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year. She was the chief operating officer of Facebook, back when most of us had no understanding of the platform’s fearsome powers—in the halcyon days when we thought it was just for sharing pictures of the grandkids and ruining marriages.
More From The Atlantic
- Rising interest rates are ending an era in which the rich got much, much richer.
- Dave Chappelle’s not kidding.
- Squirrels could make monkeypox a forever problem.
Culture Break
Read. “A Substitution,” a short story about a play, middle age, and a Manhattan storage unit. Then check out this interview with the author.
Watch. Chris Hemsworth transforms from hero to villain in Spiderhead, a new star-studded Netflix thriller.
Listen. On this week’s episode of How to Start Over, our hosts ask when it’s time to end a marriage.
That’s it for today. If you’re a fan of John le Carré (who died in 2020) or are new to his canon, I have a recommendation for you: Do not start with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Instead, read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold from 1963, and then read his 1990 The Secret Pilgrim, which was a kind of valedictory farewell from Smiley as he recounts his entire career to a group of young spies in training. Perfect summer books, both of them.
P.S.: If you’ve seen an Atlantic headline about “the heroism of Biden’s bike fall” circulating on social media, it’s not real. It seems to be a parody of this edition of The Atlantic Daily—and if so, it’s a pretty good one—but The Atlantic did not actually publish this.
— Tom
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
Jeet Heer
Despite gestures at moderation, the party’s anti-LGBTQ bigotry has returned to the fore.
The post Brace Yourself for a New Surge of Republican Homophobia appeared first on The Nation.
Clinton weighs in on the current political climate, and what Margaret Atwood got right about the future for women
Maureen Dowd’s description overlooks a crucial point: It took decades of America’s decay to birth this monster