American Fascist Reprise

 

American Fascist Reprise

July 19, 2021

 

Back in October, 2016, when Donald Trump was the Republican candidate for president and it appeared that he might win (mostly because so many people so irrationally hated Hillary Clinton) I put a post on this blog with the title “American Fascist.” I argued as best I could that the term fascist truly does apply to Trump. I discussed first what the word fascist means. Then I attempted to describe what it could mean for someone to be a true fascist in the American context. Sadly I must now say that parts of that essay seem hopelessly naïve today. This paragraph near the beginning of that post must now be revised to reflect the much more threatening atmosphere that Donald Trump created as president and in particular after he lost the 2020 presidential election:

 

The other term in our phrase American fascist is of course American. Donald Trump is after all an American, and it is in the American context in all of its facets that he operates. American history, culture, and traditional values and priorities affect what it means to be an American fascist as opposed to some other sort of fascist. Violence (other than assassination of presidents or others by isolated individuals) had never played much of a role in our selection of a president. We have chosen and changed presidents through an electoral process not through violence for well over two hundred years now We have a tragic history of violence against non-dominant populations such as African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, but no president has ever assumed power through the application of violence. American fascism will then be less violent than European fascism was or is. European fascist movements had well organized bands of thugs that terrorized and killed the movement’s opponents or the kinds of people generally on whom the movement blamed a nation’s problems. Hitler’s use of the so-called brown shirts against political opponents and the Jews is a prime and tragic example of that phenomenon. Mussolini and other European fascist leaders had similar groups. American fascism has no such groups and very probably never will, the presence of small, white supremacist militia groups to the contrary notwithstanding. The European countries in which fascist movements came to power did not have long, well established democratic traditions. The United States of America does. Yes, Hitler was elected to office, and Mussolini was appointed by the king of Italy, but neither Hitler, Mussolini, nor any other European fascist had any qualms about taking power through extra-electoral processes. Both Hitler and Mussolini soon abolished all pretense at democracy after they came to power. At least at this stage of our history American fascist movements have not tried to take political power through force. For the most part at least, American fascism works through the country’s established political institutions and processes. After all, today David Duke, a white supremacist American fascist, is running for election to the US Senate in Louisiana, not trying violently to overthrow the American government.

 

The events of January 6, 2021, belie my claim in that paragraph that violence has never played a role in the transition of power in our country and likely never would. I wish I did not have to revise this paragraph. It is a tragedy that I must, but I must.

I must start this revision by stating the undeniable fact that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. He lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. The election officials of every state, many of them Republicans, certified the outcome of the vote in their state to Congress. There is absolutely no evidence of any significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. None. Anywhere. Biden won the election fair and square. Trump lost it fair and square. About that there simply is no doubt.

Trump has never conceded the election to Biden. A concession by a losing candidate in an election in this country has no legal significance. It doesn’t stop the counting of ballots if ballots remain to be counted. A candidate could concede defeat and still win the election just as a candidate could claim victory and still lose it. Nonetheless, it is traditional in this country for a candidate for any political office who loses an election to concede defeat and wish the winning candidate well in the position to which that candidate has been elected. John McCain, for example, conceded defeat to Barack Obama in a most gracious and positive concession speech. Concession has no legal effect, but it often brings an election to a de facto close and facilitates the winning candidate in assuming the office to which she has been elected.

Donald Trump has never admitted that he lost to Biden. He has never said he lost. He has never wished Biden success in his presidency. Quite the contrary. Against all of the evidence Trump continues to claim not only that he won the election but that he actually won it in a landslide. He keeps on insisting that somehow someone stole his victory from him. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support that claim. Nonetheless Trump had Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers file frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit in the first round of his attempts to overturn the result of the election. They were laughed out of court after court. Some of them are still facing the possibility of sanctions being imposed on them, presumably for violation of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure No. 11 or one of its state equivalents. That rule provides that when a lawyer signs a pleading such as the complaint used to start a lawsuit that lawyer “certifies that to the best of the [attorney’s] knowledge, information and belief formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances,” that the pleading “is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation” and that the “claims [in the pleading]…are warranted by existing law or a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or establishing a new law.” The lawyer certifies that the factual claims in the pleading either are supported by evidence or likely will have evidentiary support after reasonable investigation. The court may impose sanctions, usually a monetary fine, against any lawyer who has violated Civil Rule 11. An opposing party may file a motion to have such sanctions imposed, or the court may itself initiate proceedings that could result in the imposition of such sanctions. At least one or two courts have initiated such proceedings against one or more of Trump’s lawyers in these frivolous cases claiming election fraud. The pleadings these lawyers signed were that baseless.

There simply is no question that many if not all of Trump’s lawyers violated Civil Rule 11 when they signed pleadings that initiated lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the election because of voter fraud. According to news reports none of Trump’s lawyers ever presented a shred of evidence in support of their claim of election fraud. They could not present such evidence because there is no such evidence. Surely Giuliani and other Trump lawyers can expect to have monetary penalties imposed on them for violating Civil Rule 11 when they filed Trump’s lawsuits against the results of the 2020 presidential election. No court in the land wasted any time in dismissing these suits as utterly baseless. Civil Rule 11 says that the court may not impose sanctions under the Rule on a party to litigation who is represented by a lawyer. So Trump gets off the hook on that one, but the only way to explain what these lawyers did is to understand that they gave in to Trump’s demand that they file them.

These frivolous lawsuits were round 1 of Trump’s efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. It failed, but it wasn’t the last round in Trump’s fight to overturn the election that he lost. Round 2 consisted of a demand to Vice President Pence that he use his position as President of the Senate to throw out the electoral college votes the states had submitted to the Senate and declare the election void. I am no fan of Mike Pence, but we all owe him a debt of gratitude for telling Trump that he did not have the legal authority to do such a thing. He refused to comply with Trump’s demand in any way as he presided over the Senate’s certification of the election results. Round 2 of Trump’s efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election thus failed just as round 1 had.

So he turned to round 3, the incitement of violence against the United States Senate, in fact against the Constitution of the United States that Trump had sworn to protect and defend when he was inaugurated as president. He called on his supporters to come to Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, the date when the Senate would convene to certify the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States. He told them there would be a “wild time” in Washington that day. As the Senate was convening to perform its constitutional duty, as pro forma as that duty might be, Trump held a big rally near the White House and just up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. In his typical manner he whipped the crowd into a frenzy against the Senate and against Pence, repeating lie after lie about how he really won the election. He told them to march to the Capitol. He said he would be with them, which of course he wasn’t.

Trump’s mob marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Someone erected a gallows in front of the Capitol building, and the mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” The insurrectionists overwhelmed the outnumbered Capitol Police and broke into the building. The elected representatives of the American people fled for their lives if they could or sought cover inside the Senate and House chambers. Capitol Police shot and killed one rioter as she tried to break into the Senate chamber. Insurrectionists eventually got into that chamber. They rifled through the Senators’ desks and strutted across the dais at the front of the chamber. They broke into the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, photographed one of them sitting in her office chair with his feet on her desk, and stole a laptop computer. One Capitol Police officer died the next day apparently at least partly as a result of an injury he received during the violent insurrection. Some other insurrectionists died during the riot apparently from natural causes. Eventually the riotous insurrectionists left the building. The Senate reconvened and confirmed the election of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth President of the United States. With a few days of the invasion of the Capitol two Capitol Police officers committed suicide. Within a few days of the invasion of the Capitol two Capitol Police officers committed suicide.

Thus our nation experienced the gravest threat to our form of government since the Civil War, and we witnessed the first attempt by anyone to overturn the results of a free and fair American election by force. That attempt failed, thank God. But that day we saw a fascist president resort to strongarm tactics in what amounted to an attempt to overthrow American democracy. Back in 2016 when I wrote my blog post titled “American Fascist” it never occurred to me that our more than two hundred years old tradition of respect for the electoral process and the nonviolent transfer of power would end after the next presidential election. It certainly never occurred to me that the duly elected President of the United States, the fascist Donald Trump, would play a key role in bringing those noble traditions to an end. Yet that is what happened in our nation’s capital city on January 6, 2021.

I can no longer say what I said in my earlier post about violence never having played a role in the transfer of the presidential office. I can no longer say what I said then about American fascism not having anything like Hitler’s brownshirts. Organized groups of violent American fascists like the Proud Boys played a central role in the January 6 assault on American democracy. Our political culture has descended to a depth I not only didn’t think I’d ever see but that I thought we were incapable of reaching. Well, I did live to see it, and there seems to be no bottom for the outrages of our American fascists. It appears they will stop at nothing to grab power. And we can thank Donald Trump and his incessant stream of lies about the 2020 election for bringing American fascist scum out of the shadows and making almost if not quite socially respectable. My conclusion back in 2016 was correct. Donald Trump is an American fascist. Now I know that he is a far worse fascist than I thought he was. My bad. I’ve tried to correct it here.