Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

After months of waiting in seething frustration, it does feel quite like we’ve all jumped out of an airplane at the same time. The doorbell at Trump’s house has been rung by federal agents, and there is no un-ringing it. What had for so long appeared to be a cautious, desultory affair is now going off like a string of firecrackers, each snap and crackle signifying new evidence or information to squeeze Trump and his would-be band of merry insurrectionists further into a corner of their own devising.

It seems a hundred years ago that former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Select Committee that she saw former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows burning his notes after a meeting with a then-unnamed House member. That House member, Scott Perry, just had his phone snatched by federal agents brandishing a warrant, and he is, of course, outraged. That phone, according to Perry, contains “info about my legislative and political activities, and personal/private discussions with my wife, family, constituents and friends. None of this is the government’s business.”

Hate to break it to you, Scotty, but insurrection and attempted coups actually are right in the government’s wheelhouse. Perry is no stranger to all this; he was called to testify before the select committee in May over his role in trying to install Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general in furtherance of Trump’s plan to thwart the 2020 election results, but has so far refused to comply. Perry was also responsible for spreading wild-eyed conspiracy theories at the highest levels of the Trump administration, including the corrupted voting machines canard and the preposterous rumor that the Italian government somehow stole a U.S. election.

As for Meadows? In the roiled aftermath of the federal visit to Mar-a-Lago, in which about twelve boxes were removed from the home, the newest game in Washington, D.C. is wondering if there is a “flipper” within Trump’s camp directing all this federal traffic. Unlike their colleagues at the state and local levels, federal prosecutors tend not to move on their targets unless they already know what they’re looking for and already know where to find it. This often requires inside help, and Meadows’s name appears to be at the top of the list. Newsweek reports from last weekend:

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner predicted Friday that Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows will “rat” the former president “out” to Justice Department investigators as part of the probe into January 6, 2021. CNN reported on Thursday that Trump had been told by advisers to “cut contact” with Meadows, who is seen by some legal analysts as a potential key witness against the former president…. The legal expert also pointed to reporting by Rolling Stone that said Trump’s legal team is attempting to place blame for any alleged criminal behavior on “fall guys.”

“Who is one of the marquee fall guys?” Kirschner asked. “Mark Meadows. And do you really think Mark Meadows is just going to sit quietly by and take the fall for Donald Trump? Maybe just volunteer to dive under the bus? No,” the attorney added. “He’s going to cut his losses. He’s going to cooperate. He’s going to flip. He’s going to turn state’s evidence. He’s going to rat Trump out. He’s going to snitch.”

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen flipped for a better deal. Why not Meadows? Every proper scandal has its John Dean, and anyway, these guys wear $3,000 suits to work and expect to rotate out into some cushy corporate corner office, not an indictment for treason. Most of them didn’t sign up for this shit. Donald Trump, a man who has never been loyal to anyone but himself, might be on the verge of discovering how lonely an estate it is to be truly faithless… or will he?

Trump has taken the events at Mar-a-Lago and transformed them into a whole new loyalty test, one the herding lickspittles of the GOP are flinging themselves at with reckless abandon. Talk of Trump running for president in 2024 has gone from “maybe/probably” to “any second now,” which puts his would-be challengers in a rather delectable bind. If they don’t bend the knee now, they will be doomed with Trump’s outraged base. If they do bend the knee, they hamstring their own chances in ’24. The FBI, perhaps unwittingly, may have cleared the presidential field for the guy whose house it just searched.

Concern that Trump’s supporters could turn violent (again) motivated White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to call for calm as the details of the federal action await revelation. These words are coming for a reason: The Trumpian corners of social media are shrieking for civil war. The contradictions don’t seem to faze these people — wasn’t Benghazi essentially about Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents? “But her emails…?” Is this thing on? Bueller? — although it remains unknown how many of Trump’s people are still willing to put themselves on the line for him.

The far right remains a dangerous menace, one deliberately cultivated by Trump himself.

“Trump has a hold on a party that has been offered plenty of exit ramps from its relationship with him, but he is not Voldemort,” writes Juliette Kayyem for The Atlantic. “He has been isolated and humiliated. Many of the individuals who used violence to support him on January 6 are now in jail. His audiences have dwindled. Even on the night of the FBI search, in the area of Florida that he now calls home, an impromptu roadside demonstration in support of him attracted ‘roughly two dozen’ supporters, the Miami Herald reported. ‘Roughly two dozen’ isn’t a revolution. It isn’t even a rally.”

I suspect many people, and more than a few erstwhile Trump supporters, will take all this in stride. “No one stormed into Trump’s home unannounced with guns blazing, awakening him from a sound sleep and scaring him into paralysis,” notes Robin Givhan for The Boston Globe. “No shots were fired without regard for human life. His private quarters weren’t riddled with bullet holes. No one was carried out on a gurney. His outrage has not gone unheard. That’s what happens when a person is at the mercy of the law. That’s what happened to Breonna Taylor.”

That being said, this remains a moment for peak vigilance. Beyond the hordes of right-wing keyboard warriors, there remain white nationalists waiting to prove themselves in the streets. Even in disarray — half of these paramilitary groups have turned on the other half in the face of Capitol Hill riot indictments — the far right remains a dangerous menace, one deliberately cultivated by Trump himself. He leads a party that is actively and publicly willing to perform violent acts, that takes great pride in being considered dangerous. Such energy attracts fascists the way porch lights draw moths, and there are still almost 400 million firearms out there in the hands of civilians.

As we have seen time and again in our schools and malls and markets, all it takes is one to instigate a bloodbath.

If Donald Trump committed crimes on his way out of the White House, he should be subject to the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason for this is simple: Ours is a government of laws, not of men, as John Adams once observed. Nobody, not even a president, is above those laws.

So why did I feel nauseous yesterday, watching coverage of the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?

Because this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.

Think I’m being hysterical? I’ve been accused of that before. But we’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.

[David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic]

It’s tempting to think of January 6, 2021, as but one day in our nation’s history. It’s comforting to view the events of that day—the president inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—as the result of unprecedented conditions that happened to converge all at once, conditions that are not our national norm.

But perhaps we should view January 6 as the beginning of a new chapter.

It’s worth remembering that Trump, who has long claimed to be a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, throughout the 2016 campaign, reveling in chants of “Lock her up!” at rallies nationwide. (Republicans did not cry foul when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election.) It was during that campaign—as I traveled the country talking with Republican voters, hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon—that I began hearing casual talk of civil war. Those conversations were utterly jarring. People spoke matter-of-factly about amassing arms. Many were preparing for a day when, in their view, violence would become unavoidable.

I remember talking with Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old Navy veteran, outside an October Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve watched this country deteriorate from the law-and-order America I loved into a country where certain people are above the law,” Stauffacher said. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. Judges have stopped enforcing the laws they don’t agree with.”

Stauffacher went on about his fondness of firearms and his loathing of the Democratic Party. “They want to turn this into some communist country,” he said. “I say, over my dead body.”

[David Frum: Stuck with Trump]

This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.

On December 18, 2019, the day he was impeached for the first time, Trump tweeted a black-and-white photo that showed him pointing into the camera. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME … THEY’RE AFTER YOU,” read the caption. “I’M JUST IN THE WAY.”

As I hit the road again in 2020, crisscrossing the nation to get a read on the Republican base, it was apparent that something had changed. There was plenty of that same bombast, all the usual chesty talk of people taking matters into their own hands. But whereas once the rhetoric had felt scattered—rooted in grievances against the left, or opposition to specific laws, or just general discomfort with a country they no longer recognized—the new threats seemed narrow and targeted. Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.

“They’ve been trying to cheat us from the beginning,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump was visiting during the early days of the pandemic. “First it was Mueller, then it was Russia. Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?”

I asked her to elaborate.

“The deep state,” she said. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party.”

This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.

What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.

“The Obama FBI began spying on President Trump as a candidate,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted this morning. “If they can do this to Trump, they will do it to you!”

“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”

“If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic,” the Texas Republican Party tweeted. “It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”

[Adam Serwer: Conservatives believe Trump is above the law]

It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall. Investigations of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were already more or less guaranteed; the question now becomes how wide of a net congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to exact vengeance on behalf of Trump and appease a fuming base, cast in probing other people close to the president and his administration.

Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.

“Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around.”

And then what? It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries. Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”

It’s hard to see how any of this gets better. But it’s easy to see how it gets much, much worse.

We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.

Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.

Four weeks after the January 6th insurrection, two leaders of the revivalist New Apostolic Reformation…

In some corners of MAGA-land, a new civil war is getting under way. The FBI’s arrival at Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening to collect evidence in a criminal investigation related to former President Donald Trump is the trigger that some of his supporters needed to suggest that violence is imminent. Predictably, the unverified Twitter accounts of armchair revolutionaries circulated claims such as “I already bought my ammo” and dark talk of “kinetic civil war” and “Civil War 2.0.”

Not to be outdone, the National Rifle Association posted an image of Justice Clarence Thomas above an indignant quotation from a majority opinion he wrote: “The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second class right.’” Verified right-wing influencers got in on the martial rhetoric, too. “Tomorrow is war. Sleep well,” Steven Crowder promised.

The bad news is that much of this talk is sincere. It is intended to intimidate the people investigating Trump’s many abuses of power, and to galvanize and organize his true believers—some of whom already proved on January 6, 2021, that they will commit violence in his name. The latest such propaganda is shocking to read, mostly because the talk of violence comes so casually to Trump’s apologists. It is all out in the open now.

The good news is that some threats remain merely threats. A violent movement either grows or shrinks. Its ideology is not defeated; it simply stops motivating people to action.

[David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic]

Trump has a hold on a party that has been offered plenty of exit ramps from its relationship with him, but he is not Voldemort. He has been isolated and humiliated. Many of the individuals who used violence to support him on January 6 are now in jail. His audiences have dwindled. Even on the night of the FBI search, in the area of Florida that he now calls home, an impromptu roadside demonstration in support of him attracted “roughly two dozen” supporters, the Miami Herald reported. “Roughly two dozen” isn’t a revolution. It isn’t even a rally.

For many Americans who wish for a peaceful democracy and remain frustrated about Trump’s continuing influence in Republican primaries, hope springs eternal that someone or something—Robert Mueller, two impeachment drives, and now criminal investigators—will definitively erase his power. But expecting saviors to intervene is the wrong way to think about how the threat of violence from Trump’s supporters might dissipate. Rather, the danger will be over when violent MAGAism becomes a rallying cry for a limited pool of adherents whose online anger fizzles upon contact with the real world.

A win, at this stage, isn’t that Trump’s troops make an apology. It is that they remain an online threat, a cosplay movement, a pretend army that can’t deliver, whose greatest strength is in their heads rather than reality.

[David Frum: Stuck with Trump]

Trump, as a former president of the United States, may be a rather unique leader of a violent insurrection, but that doesn’t make the ongoing, multiyear strategy any less effective. The January 6 committee has adopted a counter-insurrection strategy by portraying Trump squarely as the leader of a violent movement, and not simply the leader of the GOP. But some of his more extreme followers are now turning on one another. Members of the Oath Keepers, for example, have spoken to FBI investigators about matters connected with the Capitol riot—a sign that at least some fear legal penalties more than they fear the consequences of breaking with Trump. If the former president’s legal jeopardy deepens, he will in all likelihood try to raise the level of agitation in the days ahead; he knows how to use language that incites followers to violence without giving them specific instruction.

But allow me at least a glimmer of optimism. “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come,” the poet and author Carl Sandburg famously wrote. And the decline of MAGA looks something like that—just a smattering of people respond to the overheated rhetoric of Trump and his allies. If Trump’s supporters only end up cosplaying a civil war, that itself is a small victory.

Jeet Heer

The post Theocracy Now! The Forgotten Prophet of the Resurgent Right appeared first on The Nation.

John Nichols

The post Steve Bannon’s Endgame appeared first on The Nation.