To Indict or Not to Indict Donald Trump

 

To Indict or Not to Indict Donald Trump

August 29, 2022

The United States Department of Justice, the Prosecuting Attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, and the United States Congress are all investigating former president Donald J. Trump for violations of numerous laws from the election law of the state of Georgia to seditious conspiracy to overthrow the constitution of the United States and the system of government it creates. As of this writing no governmental entity with the authority to do so has indicted Trump for anything, and of course he denies having done anything wrong. It appears to this author, and to a great many informed observers and commentators, that there is more than enough evidence to indict Trump at least for violation of Presidential Records Act. It is undeniable that he took documents he was not entitled to take from the White House to his residence/resort Mar-a-Lago in Florida. For purposes of this analysis I will assume that the Department of Justice has concluded or will conclude that it has sufficient evidence to justify indicting Trump for violation of that law. In a typical legal case there would be no problem with the DOJ indicting the alleged perpetrator.

This however is not a typical legal case. The person the government could indict is a former president of the United States. No former president has ever been indicted for any criminal act. Though I find it impossible to understand how this can be true, former president Trump still has millions of supporters among the American people. Some of those supporters are extremists who are prone to resort to violence when they don’t get their way through peaceful, legal means. We saw them do that on January 6, 2021. Senator Lindsey Graham, a rabid and irrational supporter of Donald Trump, has said that there will be violence in the streets if Trump is indicted. We cannot dismiss the risk of such violence.

The DOJ, therefore, is faced with a decision no prosecutor has ever faced before: Should it issue a criminal indictment against a former president of the United States or not? The Department is faced with a balancing act between the adequacy of the evidence to indict former president Trump on one hand and both the unprecedented nature of an indictment of a former president and the likely vociferous and possibly violent reaction of some of his supporters to an indictment on the other. As much as I would like to see Donald Trump in handcuffs and prison garb, and as much as I believe that that is exactly what he deserves, I nonetheless acknowledge that this is a difficult decision for the DOJ to make. I want here briefly to examine the factors on both sides of the issue involved in federal prosecutors making that decision and to state how I would answer the question of whether or not to indict Trump.

What factors do we find that support indicting former president Trump? First, of course, there is the truth that the facts of the matter fully justify the issuance of an indictment. Beyond that is the fact that the United States is supposed to be a country under the rule of law. It is and must be a foundational principle of the legal and constitutional order in this country that no one is above the law. The law applies equally to everyone in this country. It must apply equally to everyone, or the rule of law becomes a fiction with no actual affect on how this country is governed and administered. The “no one is above the law” here must include the president. Under the rule of law, anyone who violates the law is accountable for that violation. No one can be exempt from that accountability. Moreover, though the law must treat all people equally, a president avoiding prosecution for a crime the president appears to have committed would set a particularly harmful precedent. Not indicting former president Trump would tell all future presidents that they could violate the law with impunity. Not indicting Trump would make the claim that this is a country under the rule of law a joke.

On the other hand, as I’ve already said, no former president has ever been indicted for anything. Richard Nixon might have been indicted for crimes he may have committed in the scandal we call Watergate, but President Ford gave him a full pardon for any such crimes. No one had to decide whether or not to indict Nixon. A president or former president of the United States is not just another American citizen. At least, most Americans don’t think of such a person as just another American citizen. The DOJ indicting Trump would be a huge news story. Many of his supporters would believe the lie Trump and others would tell them that the indictment was political not legal, that it was only evidence that leftist prosecutors in the DOJ were out to get Trump not because he did anything wrong but because they hate him. We also know from what happened on January 6, 2021, that there is a substantial risk of violence if Trump is indicted. There is no way to know how widespread that violence would be. We cannot however dismiss the possibility that it would be extensive.

So how should prosecutors resolve the issue of whether or not to indict former president Trump? I’m glad I don’t have to make that decision. Whether or not to indict an accused criminal is a decision prosecutors make all across the country every day at both the federal and state levels. Prosecutors know how to make that decision. As I understand it, the DOJ has written policies about how attorneys are to go about making that decision. The standard for issuing an indictment, again as I understand it, comes down to whether or not it appears that there is admissible evidence sufficient to prove a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I believe (or at least assume) that, absent any other considerations, the decision would be to indict Trump.

I believe that the DOJ should indict Trump despite the risk of a vehement and perhaps violent reaction by Trump’s more rabid supporters. A democracy under the rule of law cannot let a threat of violence stop it from holding everyone to the same standard of legal accountability. The law, perhaps especially the criminal law, must apply equally to everyone. That, it seems to me, is the decisive consideration here. We cannot let violent extremists stop the objective application of the law to everyone in this country. Yes, law enforcement will have to be on high alert to counter any resort to violence by people upset about the indictment. Yes, there may be casualties, as unfortunate as that would be. We must take that risk. Our commitment to democracy and the rule of law requires nothing less.

Putin's Fifth Column

 

Putin’s Fifth Column

August 27, 2022

 

I’m reading the book Putin’s Playbook, Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America by Rebekah Koffler.[1] Koffler is ethnic Russian. She grew up in Soviet Kazakhstan and emigrated to the United States as a young woman.[2] She worked for years in American intelligence including time with the Defense Intelligence Agency, where she worked for General Michael Flynn. Her political views, which she expresses in the “Author’s Introduction, Why I Wrote This Book,” are appalling. Yet her analyses of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian people are spot on. She claims that American intelligence agencies and the whole American government don’t understand and resist understanding Russia. Never having worked in American intelligence or any other part of the American government, I am in no position to evaluate that claim. I write here only to present and discuss one little snippet from the book that is both intriguing and concerning.

Koffler discusses at some length what she depicts as Putin’s, and more broadly Russia’s, plan to weaken the United States through non-military acts. As part of that discussion she writes:

 

Fomenting a crisis and bringing about the collapse of the US government and democratic system are goals Putin is pursuing….According to the unclassified 2017 intelligence assessment, in the runup to the 2012 US presidential election, the Russian government-sponsored, English language channel RT News helped stir up discontent by alleging election fraud, voting machine vulnerabilities, corruption of the US ‘ruling class,’ lack of democracy in America, ‘corporate greed,’ and other inflammatory messages. RT also advocated that Americans ‘take back’ the government and change the US system through a ‘revolution.’[3]

 

In this brief passage Koffler attributes what she says Russia did to a particular media outlet and a particular time frame, but she would not hesitate to ascribe the activity she mentions to the entire Russian government and to Vladimir Putin himself over the course of many years and right up to today.

Koffler here says the Russians try to convince Americans of these things in order to disrupt and weaken America:

 

1.      Election fraud.

2.      Voting machine vulnerabilities.

3.      Corruption of the US “ruling class.”

4.      Lack of democracy in America.

5.      “Corporate greed.”

6.      The need for Americans to “take back” their government.

7.      The need for them to do it through a revolution.

 

Of course, Russia spreads these disruptive lies clandestinely and denies that they do it at all. Concealing their hand in the spread of these things is part of their method of getting Americans to disrupt their own government while being unaware that Russia had anything to do with their beliefs and actions. The most striking thing about this list of things the Russians have spread in our country sub rosa is how closely its elements correspond to the beliefs of the MAGA, Trumpist wing of American politics. They correspond to those beliefs as follows.

Donald Trump and his minions have been screaming about supposed election fraud in this country for years. Even before he was elected in 2016, Trump declared that he could lose that election only if it were “rigged” against him. Since he lost the 2020 presidential election he has spread the big lie that he really won that election by a landslide but that his victory was somehow stolen from him. He continues to spread this lie to this day.

MAGA Republicans have been yelling about nonexistent voting machine vulnerabilities for years. They have made wild accusations against the companies that made the machines, and have been sued for defamation because they did. Some Trumpists wanted the government to seize voting machines in swing states that Trump lost, presumably so they could allege to have proven that the machines were indeed vulnerable and had indeed been hacked to create the result the anti-Trump forces wanted. It mattered not at all to those advocating the seizure of the machines that the federal government has no legal authority to do it.

The MAGA right’s connection to the allegation that America’s “ruling class” is corrupt is perhaps less obvious than are its connection to allegations of election fraud and voting machine vulnerability, but that connection is definitely there. The entire Trumpist, MAGA movement arises at least in part from the sense of many ordinary Americans that the people who supposedly control the government have worked for decades against their desires and interests. They have supposedly instead favored Black and Brown Americans. LGBTQ+ Americans. Non-evangelical Christian Americans (especially secular Americans). People not born or legally residing in the United States. The supposedly liberal elites of the east and west coasts. To the MAGA right, the supposed bias of the government and those who control it and use it against them surely appear to be corrupt.

The MAGA right also screams about what it sees as the lack of true democracy in this country. Trump and his acolytes (like Rudi Giuliani) have told Trump’s base over and over again that it is up to them to rescue the country’s democracy from those who supposedly have taken it away from them. Trump has told them that if they don’t, they won’t have a country anymore.

Corporate greed is perhaps not a term Trumpists use often, but a hatred of and desire to change it are still there in the movement. Trumpists scream all the time about how big corporations have cost the country a vast number of jobs by moving their manufacturing operations overseas. Those corporations have of course done it to reduce labor costs and thereby to increase profits. The Trumpists believe, not entirely incorrectly, that the desire of the big corporations for ever greater profits, which one can easily call greed, has hurt them economically. They want that situation reversed.

“Take our country back” and “Take the government back” are phrases the MAGA right uses all the time. The use of those phrases comes from a sense the Trumpists have that people like them used to control the US government, that they no longer do, and that their control of it must be restored. It doesn’t matter whether or not this sense is supported by the facts. It only matters that a great many Americans believe their sense of the matter, and what Trump tells them about it, to be true.

Finally, the Russians have worked to advance revolution as the way to restore the world the MAGA right believes once existed, no longer exists, and must be reestablished. At least some elements of the Trumpist movement have adopted this belief. We see it expressed in various ways. Donald Trump courts the support of armed, violent American terrorist groups (usually wrongly called militias) like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. He says there are “fine people” among the armed terrorists who marched through Charlottesville, Virginia chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” Never mind that anti-Judaism is a worn out fascist ideology that was always a lie and that hardly anyone will accept today. Trump condemns these violent groups only reluctantly and half-heartedly. We also see the notion of revolution as the way to correct America’s supposed wrongs in the way Trumpist extremists speak of starting a new civil war against what they consider to be the country’s established order.

And then there is January 6, 2021. A mob stirred up by Donald Trump and others stormed the US Capitol building. They broke in, forced everyone legally there to flee for their lives, changed that the wanted to hand Vice President Pence, and attacked and injured Capitol police officers. Through more than three hours of this seditious riot Trump sat in the White House watching and loving his mob’s attempt to overthrow the United States government by keeping Congress from carrying out one of its constitutional duties. Seditious rioting and revolution are sufficiently similar that Putin must have been delighted when he learned what Trump’s mob had done.

I don’t know to what extent Russian meddling in our country influenced the MAGA right to adopt these positions and conduct these acts, but it doesn’t matter. Whether that meddling was influential or not, the alignment of Russian disruption points and the MAGA agenda is unmistakable. Vladimir Putin and his sycophants in the Kremlin must be beyond delighted to see such a large segment of the American people playing directly into their hands. The MAGA right is nothing less than Putin’s fifth column in the United States. It’s agenda and actions are disrupting and weakening this country in exactly the way Putin desires. And of course, the members of the MAGA movement (except perhaps for Donald Trump himself) are utterly unaware that they are giving Russia exactly what it wants from us. The way the MAGA right is doing Putin’s work for him is yet another reason for all of us to oppose it and bring an end to it as soon as possible.

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[1] Koffler, Rebekah, Putin’s Playbook, Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America, (Regnery Gateway, Washington, D.C., 2021).

[2] There are significant populations of ethnic Russians in all of the former Soviet Socialist Republics.

[3]Op. cit., 91-92.

On American Evangelical Christianity and Christian Politics

 

On American Evangelical Christianity and Christian Politics

August 22, 2022

 

I recently read this statement in an essay in a major national publication:

 

When Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacramental.[1]

 

The author of this article identifies himself as a life-long evangelical Christian. His article is about the way people putting their commitment to their political beliefs over their commitment to their Christian beliefs is breaking the American evangelical movement apart. His solution to that problem is to banish politics from the church. He wants the church to focus on what he calls “Christian values,” though he’s a bit vague on what he thinks those are. In his view they have somehow to do with personal transformation and grace-filled living. I certainly do not contest his assertion that personal transformation and a life of grace are desirable results of a person’s commitment to the Christian faith. They are. I cannot, however, accept this author’s contention that evangelical Christians must divorce politics from Christianity as the way to heal divisions within the church.

Of course Christianity is about more than politics. Properly understood, it is a spiritual discipline that seeks to foster a person’s relationship with the universal, mysterious power behind all that is that we call God. But Christianity properly understood also speaks divine truth about the complex issues we all face every day, including politics. Christianity is about nonviolence, peace, and justice for all people. Those are political issues. To eliminate them from the sphere of religion leaves us with half a faith not a full one. Jesus directly addressed the political issues of his time and place. He spoke about power, how people should relate to power, and how people should relate to one another. He called the people of his time, and he calls us, to lives devoted to caring for the least and the lost. He sought to turn the world of his time, and of ours, upside down. He praised the meek not the strong and the peacemaker not the warmaker. He said the first will be last and the last will be first. Those are all political issues. To exclude them from one’s Christian faith is to overlook most of what Jesus was about.

The fault of American evangelical Christianity isn’t that it’s political. It’s that it gets its politics all wrong. It sees Christian politics as radically conservative when in fact truly Christian politics are nonviolently revolutionary. Many American evangelicals equate Christianity with American nationalism. Yet in truth, few dichotomies are as wide as the gap between Christian values and American or any other kind of nationalism. Most if not all American evangelicals strongly support the American military and the way the US government uses it around the world. But Jesus said love your enemies. He taught and lived radical nonviolence, which of course is completely incompatible with any kind of militarism. Most American evangelicals oppose the creation of an adequate social safety net for those who need it. Jesus said that insofar as we have cared for those in need, we have cared for him. Far too many American evangelicals favor a male-centered church and society in which women play a role secondary to that of men. Yet Jesus certainly had women disciples. He said Mary had chosen the better part over her sister Martha when she assumed the place her culture reserved for men to learn at Jesus’ feet. Mary Magdalene was the apostle to the apostles when she was the first to see the empty tomb and hear of Jesus’ resurrection. Far too many American evangelicals defame Muslims and want our country to close its borders to immigrants, especially non-white immigrants. Jesus said love your neighbor as yourself. The bottom line here is not that Christianity should be apolitical. It is that on the whole the politics of American evangelicalism just aren’t Christian.

Then, tragically, there is the issue of Donald Trump. Former president Trump is a man of deplorable personal morals with no commitment to Christian values whatsoever. He treats women as his personal sexual playthings. He mocks people with disabilities. He tells violent, anti-Jewish, white supremacists that there are “fine people” among them, which there absolutely are not. He told them to “stand down and stand by,” a line that can only mean stand by to use your violence as I will direct you. Insofar as he had any actual political agenda other than to gain and retain power, it was to have the federal government further favor the rich over everyone else and to undo government regulations that, among other things, facilitate workplace safety and address our current climate crisis. The way he handled the COVID pandemic is a national disgrace. He has no religious faith and is perhaps the least spiritual man in American public life. In all of these things, and in a great many more, Donald Trump is a man all Christians should condemn and call to repentance.[2]

Instead, millions of American evangelicals became and remain pro-Trump fanatics. They put him in the White House. He keeps lying about winning the 2020 presidential election, which he undeniably lost fair and square. He at least encouraged the seditious mob attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and did nothing to stop it when he clearly could have called it off. He may well have instigated it. Yet millions of American evangelicals put on their red MAGA hats and hope and pray that he will be elected president again in 2024.

So to the author whose essay prompted this one I say “no.” American evangelicalism may be in crisis. It may be breaking up the way he says it is. Yet politics are not the cause of the problem Bad, un-Christian politics are the problem. Neither the American nation nor American Christianity needs more MAGA fanatics. They need a great many more people committed to true Christian values in the public realm. They—we—need people committed to creating the world of peace through radical justice that Jesus called the kingdom of God. And what, after all, is a kingdom if not political?

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[1] Weber, Peter, “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart, Christians Must Reclaim Jesus from His Church,” The Atlantic, theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021.

[2] I will give Trump credit for one thing during his presidency. He did not get us involved in any more foreign wars, though of course he didn’t do that out any Christian values.

Soviet Socialism vs. Democratic Socialism

 

Soviet Socialism vs. Democratic Socialism

August 22, 2022

 

I recently started to read the book Putin’s Playbook, Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America, by Rebekah Koffler.[1] Koffler is an ethnic Russian born in the Soviet Union. She refers to having lived in Kazakhstan, formerly one of the Soviet Socialist Republics. She came to the United States and says she is now fluent in both Russian and English. She has worked in the American intelligence community including time as a Russia specialist with the Defense Intelligence Agency. She has some very strange political views. She once worked for General Michael Flynn of Trump administration notoriety. She thinks Flynn was innocent but became the victim of some sort of plot to discredit him. The thinks government people had it in for Donald Trump, and she says nothing against that abhorrent former president. I’m prepared to overlook Koffler’s personal and political nonsense because I believe her thinking about Russia to be, or at least I hope that it is, spot on.[2] There is, however, one thing that she does early in the book with which I must take exception. It is what she says about what she calls “socialism.” I want here to consider the stark difference between what the Communist Party of the Soviet Union called socialism and what democratic socialism has become in western Europe and could become in the United States.

To understand Koffler’s take on socialism we must start with the political ideology of Marxism-Leninism, the ideology on which the Soviet Union was based. Karl Marx (1818-1883) taught that history progresses inexorably through a process he called dialectical materialism. He said all history is the history of struggles between classes of people. The classes are created and characterized by people’s relationship to the economic means of production. The class struggle he saw in Germany and England in the mid-nineteenth century was the struggle between the capitalists, who owned the means of production, and the proletariat, that is, the workers, who Marx believed actually created wealth. He said that there would inevitably be a proletarian revolution in which the workers of the world would rise up against the capitalists. They would assume political power and ownership of the means of production that had belonged to the capitalists. They would dismantle the economic, social, and political systems the capitalists had created. Marx said that all of those things (and a great many more, including religion) were simply the means by which the capitalists controlled and exploited the workers to the capitalists’ exclusive benefit. In Marxist thought the proletariat would do away with all of that when it came to power through revolution.

Marx asserted that the proletarian revolution would initiate a two-step process of economic and social development. The goal of the process was the creation of a classless society. Marx called the first step in this process socialism. In this phase of historical development, the workers would establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. The goal of this dictatorship would be the elimination of all class distinctions. Doing that meant equalizing every person’s relationship to the means of economic production. The socialist state would represent the interests of the proletariat as it worked to eliminate economic classes.

Once the socialist state had done away with economic classes, history would have reached its ultimate goal. Marx called that goal communism. For Marx, communism was to be a world in which all are equal. Everyone would relate to the means of production in the same way, namely, through communal ownership. Everyone would live for the benefit of the society rather than only for themselves. They’d do that not because some state forced them to but because in the absence of the exploitation of one class of people by another, doing so would just be how it was.

Marx said that the transition from socialism to communism would result in the “withering away” of the state. States, he said, exist only because of the struggle between classes. Once there were no classes, there would be no need of a state. Indeed, a truly communist society could not produce a state because class conflict creates states, and in the communist society there would be no class conflict.

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was a Russian Marxist. He accepted Marx’s theory that history was moving inevitably toward the classless paradise of communism. However, he didn’t take Marxism quite as he found it. He introduced into Marxist theory a conception of the political party of the proletariat. He said that the political party of the proletariat, which he originally called social democratic and later called communist, would, during the socialist phase of development, act solely on behalf of and for the benefit of the proletariat. It would create and run the dictatorship of the proletariat that characterized Marx’s vision of socialism. It would bring about the evolution of the nation from socialism to communism.

From at least 1918 on, Marxist theory and practice developed in very different directions in Russia and in western Europe. In western Europe, most of the Marxist parties of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eventually gave up the idea of a violent revolution of the proletariat. They came to believe that that revolution was neither inevitable, necessary, nor desirable. The clearest example of this development (or at least the one with which I am most familiar) is the development of the German Social Democratic Party. Early in its being it was all about instigating the proletarian revolution. Some of its members even tried to bring that revolution about in Berlin after Germany had lost World War I. That attempt of course failed. In the 1930s the Nazis severely repressed this party which, if it existed at all, existed only underground.

After World War II however, a remarkable thing happened. The German Social Democratic Party, known as the SPD, from its name in German, Die Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, became one of the two most prominent political parties in the Federal Republic of Germany, the official name of what we usually just call West Germany. It came to be a political party that advocated the interests of Germany’s workers, but it did, and does, that advocacy peacefully through Germany’s democratic institutions.

In Germany and in much of western Europe, the social democratic parties, by whatever name they used (in the United Kingdom is the Labor Party), succeeded in creating societies governed through policies that benefit all the people but in particular the workers and the poor. These parties brought about government paid universal health care systems. They established strong national retirement systems. They made public education free or at least affordable. In Germany they helped create a system called Mitbestimmung in which representatives of a corporation’s workers are members of the corporation’s board of directors. These parties conduct electoral campaigns just as other political parties do. When they lose an election they accept the result. They truly are democratic. They are not out to suppress any of the civil freedoms we, and they, so cherish—freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc.

It was very different in Russia. The development of “socialism” there began with what the Soviets always called the Great October Revolution.[3] That “revolution” was at first nothing but a coup d’état against the weak Provisional Government that had, however ineffectively, ruled Russia since the tsar’s abdication the previous March.[4] The coup was carried out by a small group of fanatics within the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party known as the Bolsheviks.[5] Its charismatic leader was Vladimir Il ’ich Lenin (1870-1924). From the beginning it was clear that Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks had no intention of creating a true democracy. Lenin claimed that the Bolsheviks represented the most class conscious elements of Russia’s proletariat.[6] Those elements of society were the ones, in Leninist theory, who were entitled to make the country’s decisions. Lenin translated that contention into the exclusive rule of the country by what came to be called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin set out to eliminate all opposition. He claimed that any opposition to the Communist Party was counterrevolutionary and therefore to be suppressed. One of his first and most telling acts was the creation of the Cheka, the organization that eventually morphed into the KGB.[7]

Lenin died in January, 1924. I’ll spare you all the details, but before long a man who had been a minor functionary in the Bolshevik party in 1917 consolidated all the power of the Communist state in himself. His name was Joseph Stalin (1878-1953).[8] Under Stalin the government of the Soviet Union became a totalitarian, terrorist regime. It remained that until its dissolution on December 25, 1991, though after Stalin it was never again nearly as harsh and oppressive as it had been under Stalin.

When Koffler talks about socialism and its effects, though she doesn’t recognize this distinction, she is talking about the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union not about the goals of the democratic socialist parties of western Europe. She lists three problems with what she calls socialism and means Soviet communism. First, “socialist societies stop producing wealth altogether.” That statement was more or less true of the Soviet Union. It isn’t true of democratic socialism. Her second problem with “socialism” is that “as scarcity of goods grows, those in charge of wealth redistribution—the state—start taking care of their needs first, rationing goods and services for everyone but themselves.” Eventually, she says, ordinary people are forced to “cheat and steal to survive.” That certainly was true of Soviet communism. It is not true of western democratic socialism.[9]

Koffler’s third problem with what she calls socialism is “the complete state control over the individual.” She writes that in a socialist country the state “tells you what to do, where to live, what to wear, what to say, and what to think. The state censors everything.” There is “no free press, literature, or cinematography. No religion. No presumption of innocence. No equal rights. No private property. Suppression of dissent is routine and brutal. Eventually, people start to self-censor to avoid persecution. You speak and appear to think “correctly.”[10]

Koffler has here described the life of the ordinary person in the Soviet Union. The Soviet state was oppressive in the extreme. Under Stalin in particular no one knew who to trust because people were praised even for reporting family members who had in some way strayed from the Party line. People ended up trusting no one. The country never completely overcame that tragic state of affairs. The state did indeed censor everything. People wrote and published books, but only books that toed the line of communist correctness. Koffler overstates the matter a bit when she says there was “no religion” in the Soviet Union. There was some religion. I experienced some of it myself when I was there. It is true however that the Soviet government severely restricted the exercise of religion. Religious institutions had to function within strict rules set by the state. It was, for example, illegal to take children to church. In fact, some Russian Orthodox priests were actually KGB agents. The Soviet constitution actually did specify legal rights for the people, but one could not raise those rights as a defense in a criminal trial the way we Americans can raise our constitutional rights. The Soviet Union was indeed a place where individualism was suppressed, and there was none of the kind of economic and cultural wealth we experience in the west. None of that is true of western democratic socialism. Western countries with social democratic institutions like Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and others have strong economies and vibrant cultures. The people have freedom of speech, of the press, and of religion. Sweden, for example, is today absolutely nothing like what the Soviet Union was.

It is clear that the Soviet reality into which Koffler was born harmed, indeed scarred, her deeply. In no way do I mean to criticize her because it did. No one in the west is in any position to criticize the way Soviet people developed in and reacted to an environment so foreign to us as to be essentially incomprehensible to us. Koffler’s fault is not in what she says about the Soviet Union. It is her failure to recognize the sharp distinction between western democratic socialism and what the Communist Party called socialism in the USSR. I hope that will not make the same mistake.

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[1] Koffler, Rebekah, Putin’s Playbook, Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America, Regnery Gateway, Washington, D.C., 2021.

[2] For those of you who don’t know, I have a PhD in Russian history. I lived in Soviet Moscow (and spent some time in Soviet Leningrad) for the 1975-1976 academic year doing dissertation research.

[3] They celebrated it on November 7. Before the Communists took over, Russia used the older Julian calendar rather than the newer Gregorian calendar most of the rest of the world uses. On the Julian calendar the “revolution” took place on October 25, 1917. On the Gregorian calendar it took place on November 7.

[4] Koffler says, grossly erroneously, that that coup was against the tsar. It wasn’t, and I assume she knows that it wasn’t, though the Soviet Communists did usually depict it as though it had been.

[5] The word Bolshevik comes from the Russian word bol’she, which means larger. The Bolsheviks took that name years before 1917 when they won some dispute within the party. They were, however, actually a minority of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party.

[6] Although Russia’s industrial sector had been advancing rapidly in the decades before the outbreak of World War I, in 1917 Russia was still a predominately agrarian society. Most of the people were peasants not industrial workers. Russia was then not a place where most European Marxists expected the proletarian revolution to take place. Many of them thought that such a revolution wasn’t possible in Russia because of Russia’s agrarian nature.

[7] Of course, at the same time the Bolsheviks were fighting a years long civil war against anti-Communist forces of various types. The Communists eventually won that civil war. The twentieth century would have been very different than it was had they lost.

[8] Stalin was not a Russian. He was from Georgia. His birth name was Dzhugashvili. I was in Georgia briefly in the summer of 1968. By then all trace of Stalin had disappeared from Soviet life—except in Georgia. In Georgia his picture was everywhere. He was, it seemed, a national hero, probably because he had ruled and terrorized the hated Russians for so long.

[9] Koffler, op, cit., xxxiii-xxxiv.

[10] Id, xxxiv.

The Fascist Personality of Donald Trump

 

The Fascist Personality of Donald Trump

August 18, 2022

 

Former president Donald Trump is an American fascist. I analyzed that truth back when he was about to become president under our federal system of government though he would lose the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton. You’ll find that analysis on this blog under the title “American Fascist,” posted on October 26, 2026. I want here briefly to consider the personality of Donald Trump the American fascist. He is a very dangerous individual. We must take him and his movement seriously, and we must make sure he never comes to power again.

Fascism is a political system in which a state establishes strict control over all aspects of a nation’s life. The state controls not only the country’s politics. It controls the country’s economy, education, and cultural life. No aspect of life is beyond its control. That control is always exercised by one dictatorial leader. Examples include Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, Josef Stalin in Soviet Russia, Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy, Mao Zedong in Communist China, Kim Jong-un in nominally communist North Korea, and many others. In a fascist state like these, the leader, whether he be called Der Fűhrer, Vozhd, Il Duce, the Supreme Leader, or Chairman, exercises total or at least near total control over the country he is said to lead. The leader of a truly fascist system is inevitably a person who craves control over the people close to him and the people of the country over which he rules. He invariably enforces his control over the system he has created (or inherited) through a secret police force or other sort of organization that is loyal only to him and that terrorizes the people of the country into obedience to his will. He demands total loyalty to himself as if that were the same thing as loyalty to the country. In fascist systems, the distinction between leader and state virtually disappears.[1] Donald Trump exhibits the characteristics of the fascist personality in, among other ways, the way he draws no distinction between himself and the United States of America. We also see his fascist tendencies in the way he uses the Big Lie to take and hold on to power.

As president he recognized no difference between himself and the government of the United States. We see this aspect of his personality in the way he took with him a large cache of government documents that weren’t his to take when he left the White House. When his aids told him he had to give the documents back, he said they’re not theirs they’re mine. He wanted everyone in his administration to be loyal to him, not to the people of the United States, nor to the constitution he had sworn to protect and defend, nor to the rule of law as a foundational principle of our system of government. He fired the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when that man would not pledge his loyalty to Trump personally. He wanted his Attorney General to act as his lawyer and the whole Department of Justice to act as though it represented him not the US government it actually represents. He fired his first Attorney General when that man recused himself from the independent counsel’s investigation into Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russia rather than stay involved in the investigation to protect Donald Trump from the truth. He strove to exercise personal control over every aspect of the federal government that he cared about. He did not have an official terror agency like Hitler’s SS, Mussolini’s Black Shirts, or Stalin’s NKVD (a predecessor of the KGB). He did, however, encourage violence by white supremacist terrorist organizations (usually quite weakly called militias) that surely would gladly have taken on the role of those institutions had he asked them to. In all of these ways, and more, Trump demonstrated that he has the personality not of a democratically elected representative of the people but of a fascist Supreme Leader instead.

Trump also fits the mold of the fascist leader in his use of the Big Lie. Fascist regimes are invariably built upon lies. Often there is one Big Lie that the regime insists that everyone accept (or at least say they accept) as the truth. Hitler had a couple of Big Lies on which he, nominally at least, based his regime. One was that the German “race” was physically and morally superior to all other people. Another was that the supposedly evil Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s troubles and had to be eliminated. Stalin had a couple of Big Lies too. One was that the government and party he headed were all about establishing a classless society called socialism that would morph into an ideal age of communism in which all people would be equal. In the communist earthly paradise, everyone would happily gave what they could for the general welfare, and everyone would receive everything they needed for a good life. Another of Stalin’s Big Lies was that he was the great friend of all of the Soviet people who did nothing but protect their interests. Never mind of course that he killed something like twenty million or more of them before the Nazi invasion of 1941.

Donald Trump’s fascism is seen in the way he uses lies both big and small to advance his personal interests. He is an inveterate liar. He simply does not function within the categories of true and false. We can’t believe a word he says because truth just doesn’t matter to him. He told thousands of lies during his time as president. And along with all of his smaller lies, Trump has two Big Lies too. One is that he will “make America great again.” MAGA has become a shorthand for the Trumpist movement. Of course, Trump doesn’t give a damn about America, and he did nothing as president to make it great again, whatever that is supposed to mean. He sold the Big Lie of MAGA to enough gullible Americans to make him president in 2016. That he did hardly makes him truly be about American greatness.

 Trump’s other Big Lie, and one that is particularly important these days, is that the American people all love him but that corrupt Democrats rig elections against him. He insists that he won the 2020 presidential election by a landslide, but evil Democrats stole his victory from him. All through his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 he told his followers that the only way he could lose the election was if the election were rigged against him. He won the 2016 election by winning the electoral votes of several small states that offset the Democrats’ victory in a few of the larger ones, but he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton. So he didn’t object to the electoral vote. He did insist that he had also won the popular vote by a large margin and that somehow his popular vote victory had been stolen from him.

That lie of 2016, however, pales in comparison to Trump’s Big Lie of 2020 and thereafter. In the presidential election of that year Trump lost both the popular vote and the electoral vote to Democrat Joe Biden. All through the 2020 campaign he kept repeating his patently absurd claim that he could lose the election only if it were rigged against him. He lost that election. So he claimed over and over again, and he continues to claim to this day, that his victory was stolen from him. He and his minions like Rudi Giuliani said again and again, and continue to say, that the election was invalidated by massive voter fraud, never mind that they have never been able to produce a single bit of evidence of such fraud. Trump sent Giuliani and other hack lawyers into courts in every so-called swing state that he had lost trying to get a court to declare the state’s election invalid because of that alleged voter fraud. He lost that argument in court sixty times, and courts often chastised his lawyers for bringing a frivolous case for which there was no evidence. He pressured the Secretary of State in Georgia, a Republican, to “find” him enough votes to reverse Biden’s narrow victory in that state. He tried to get Republican controlled state legislatures to declare that he had won their state though he had really lost it. Certainly with his knowledge and consent, and perhaps at his instigation, several Republicans in states he had lost forged documents naming them as their state’s electors when they were in fact no such thing. Some state parties submitted their false elector certificates to the federal government, something that surely must be a violation of some federal law or other.

When none of those ploys worked to keep Trump in office, he quite desperately turned to a constitutional provision few of us knew about. The Constitution says that the Congress shall meet in joint session to accept and tally the electoral votes of the states. As President of the Senate, the Vice President presides over this joint session. Trump tried to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into rejecting the electoral votes of enough states that Trump would win or at least that the election would be sent back to the states or that the House of Representatives would select the president as the Constitution specifies.[2] Trump told Pence that as Vice President he had the legal authority to do it. Pence, thank God, knew he had no such authority. He refused to give in to Trump’s demand.

So, in a last desperate attempt to stay in office, Trump made one last use of his Big Lie. He called on his supporters to gather in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, the date of the joint congressional session that would finalize Joe Biden’s victory. A huge crowd gathered that morning at the Ellipse, near the White House and walking distance from the Capitol. Several of Trump’s minions, including Rudi Giuliani, fired up that crowd repeating Trump’s Big Lie over and over again. When Trump finally addressed them, the crowd had become a riled up mob. He told them forcefully and repeatedly that he had won the 2020 presidential election in a landslide. He said yet again that his victory had been stolen. He told them they had to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. When he said those things he knew that some in the mob were armed with semi-automatic rifles. Trump sent the armed mob down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to “stop the steal.”

Trump’s mob went to the Capitol, stormed the Capitol, overwhelmed the grossly outmanned Capitol police, invaded the building, and very nearly succeeded in overthrowing American democracy. The Secret Service got Pence out of the House chamber where the joint session was taking place and to an undisclosed safe location. The members of Congress present, and everyone else properly in the building, had to flee for their lives. Through it all, Trump sat in the dining room near the Oval Office watching it all on television. Members of his staff and even members of his family begged him to go public and stop the insurrectionary riot at the Capitol. For over three hours Trump did nothing. He said he agreed with the mob when it chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” His inaction during these hours is inexcusable and may one day play a part in a criminal indictment against him.

On January 6, Trump saw what a Big Lie can do with gullible, unsophisticated, and, frankly, quite stupid people. Hitler’s Big Lies brought him to power in Germany. Stalin’s Big Lies enabled him to come to power in the Soviet Union and terrorize the people of the whole country in a way that matched Hitler in Germany. Trump’s Big Lie hasn’t yet produced an Auschwitz or a Gulag. But with it he very nearly overthrew the government and constitution of the United States. Trump was desperate to remain in power. He still is.

In Donald Trump we see a classic fascist personality. He is a megalomaniac concerned about nothing but his own status and power. Most importantly, he combines two of the most telling characteristics of a fascist leader. He sought to use his Big Lie to subvert the US Constitution, overturn the country’s democratic structure and traditions, and retain the power the American system of government was legally and fairly taking from him. In doing so he was acting not as a politician within a democracy. His personality is not that of a democratic politician committed to the political institutions and traditions of his country. It is that of a would-be fascist dictator. Heaven help the United States of America if he ever again gets the chance to impose American fascism on our country. Heaven help us if he ever actually becomes president again. If he does, he may well succeed in becoming the fascist dictator he really wants to be.

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[1] I’ll address one issue here briefly. I have called both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fascist states. Yet of course those two dictatorships were based on very different lies. The Nazis proclaimed the superiority of the German people and the diabolical nature of the Jews. The Soviet Communists proclaimed the victory of the proletariat and the creation of a socialism that would eventually turn into communism. For my purposes here, this distinction is unimportant. Whatever their foundational lie, all totalitarian systems are essentially identical in the nature of their rule and the means they use to exercise it. For my purposes here, the differences between Nazi rule in Germany and the rule of the Communist Party in Russia make no difference.

[2] The Democrats were the majority party in the House, but under the Constitution the vote in this case was not done by each representative having one vote but by each state having one vote. Though they were a numerical minority, the Republicans controlled more state delegations than the Democrats did. If the election had gone to the House, as it did after the 1876 election, Trump would have been made president.

On the Value of the Law

 

On the Value of the Law

August 14, 2022

 

I’m not a lawyer, but I used to be one. I have a law degree. I practiced law for over twenty years. Since I changed professions and resigned from the Bar I have continued to write legal analyses on various issues. I haven’t practiced law for a while now, but I know more about the law, both its gifts and its challenges, than most Americans do. Most Americans, after all, are not and never have been lawyers. A relative of mine recently told me that the law is bullshit. I think he was referring only to one specific legal event, but still. He said the law is bullshit. I certainly dealt with a lot of bullshit when I was practicing law—incompetent judges, untrustworthy attorneys, uncooperative clients. It all goes with the territory of being a lawyer. Many of us believe that today’s US Supreme Court is dishing out a great deal of bullshit with its ideological, politically reactionary decisions.

Yet the law is not mostly bullshit. Indeed, most of the law is nothing like bullshit. It seems to many without legal training or experience, or without even a good civics class for that matter, that the law is more bullshit than it really is. A foundational truth that few Americans seem to understand is that law is indispensable for any collection of people to live together without violence and chaos. The law is first and foremost a way to prevent and resolve disputes between people peacefully rather than through force. That, after all, is why law developed in the first place. That is why we preserve it and live under it despite its complexity and at times apparent absurdity. It is something no ordered society can live without. We could easily live without as many lawyers as we have, but we cannot live without the law.

The law comes to us in two basic ways. There are written laws, and there are oral laws. Ancient humanity existed for a very long time before the rise of civilizations without formal law, yet even they surely had rules by which they lived and violation of which they punished. Though there were older legal codes in Mesopotamia, the oldest comprehensive legal code we know of is the Code of Hammurabi. It was written down around 1750 BCE. It takes its name from the king who issued it, King Hammurabi of the First Dynasty of Babylon. The ancient Hebrews had (and the Jewish faith still has) a code of laws called the Torah. It was written down no later than the early fifth century BCE. One of Rome’s lasting gifts to the western world was its code of laws. That code is still the basis of the law in some European countries (and in the state of Louisiana). The United Kingdom has a complex legal system. One of its chief characteristics is that most of it isn’t written. It functions nonetheless. The Roman Catholic Church, modeled as it is in so many ways on the Roman Empire, has a code called the canon law. The law of the United States (with Louisiana as an exception, something I won’t mention again) grew out of English law. It consists of written laws federal, state, and local. It also contains laws not written in law codes but in the case decisions of appellate courts both federal and state. It includes written codes of counties and cities. It also comes in the form of codes of administrative procedures both federal and state.

That’s where we find our laws, but why do we have laws in the first place? Laws, after all, regulate human behavior, and wouldn’t we prefer to have our behavior left up to ourselves and not regulated by some agencies and sets of rules most of us don’ t know much about? Well, we might think that could be good, but it wouldn’t be. In a complex society like that of the United States, relationships between people and institutions are so complex that there would be chaos without law. Laws facilitate people living together in an orderly way without fear of arbitrary governmental actions. To illustrate how valuable law and government under the rule of law is, lets look at a country that certainly had laws but that did not consistently apply those laws. It will help us understand the value of the law to look at what that country’s law and legal system did to the country’s people.

The country to which I refer is the late, unlamented Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It origins went back to the Bolshevik coup of November (October old style), 1917. It was organized into and given its name in 1922. It ceased to exist on December 25, 1991.[1] For all of its existence it was a one party state ruled by what came to be called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It had two institutions relevant to our discussion. On the one hand it had real laws. On the other it always had a security apparatus that operated as a foreign and domestic spy network. That agency’s name changed over time, but we know it as the KGB, the initial letters of the Russian words for Committee on State Security. The KGB was the primary institution through which the Communist Party exerted its tight control over all of the people of the country.

In my experience, it surprises many Americans to learn that the Soviet Union had a system of courts and both civil and criminal law, but of course it did. No country as complex as the USSR was can do without them. Those laws and courts functioned reasonable well nearly all of the time. The courts tried and convicted real criminals. The courts resolved contract disputes and personal injury cases. Most of the time there was nothing unique or remarkable about Soviet law and the Soviet legal system.

That does not mean, however, that the Soviet Union operated under the rule of law. It didn’t. The reasons it didn’t were the Communist Party and its enforcement arm, the KGB. The USSR was a one party dictatorship. The Communist Party controlled all aspects of Soviet life. Except to a very limited extent the Russian Orthodox Church, there were no nongovernmental organizations.[2] As a totalitarian regime, the Soviet government and its one political party always got what they wanted. That was as true in the field of law as it was in any other area of activity in the country. The courts functioned reasonably well until the KGB expressed an interest in the case. If the KGB wanted a particular outcome in a particular case, the court would invariable provide that outcome regardless of the facts or the law of the case.

The pervasive presence of the KGB (sometimes overt, sometimes covert), and the people’s knowledge that it was always present and always got what it wanted destroyed the rule of law in the USSR. Because the KGB operated at will outside the law the country’s people lived constantly in fear of the KGB and the Communist Party that controlled it. I’ll give you one minor example of that fear from my personal experience. I lived in Soviet Moscow for the 1975-1976 academic year doing PhD dissertation research in Russian history. My late wife, our toddler son, and I lived on the fifth floor of a dormitory wing reserved for western students of the enormous Moscow State University building south of downtown Moscow. We got to know a Russian student at the university who lived in a different wing of the building. Once we invited him to come to our place, consisting of a couple of very small rooms, for dinner. He immediately asked, “What floor does Boris live on?” He didn’t have to tell us who Boris was. We all knew that the was the KGB plant in the western students wing of the dormitory. We told our friend that Boris lived on the seventh floor. So our friend agreed to come. If we and Boris had lived on the same floor he would not have come. The risk of Boris seeing him associating with Americans would have been too high. And it was rather clear that this Russian student had some connections in and protection from the Communist Party. He was still afraid of the KGB. Our friend’s apprehension about encounters with Boris is just a minor example of the way the Soviet people lived in fear of the authorities. They knew the KGB could be brutal and that it often operated outside the law. Everyone was afraid of drawing goo much attention from anyone working for the KGB, and no one ever knew exactly who that was.

That little example demonstrates the value of a legitimate legal system for any country. Yes, laws are human creations, and the people of the legal system are fallible human beings. There are bad laws. There are some incompetent and even bad people working in the legal system, though mercifully in my experience not that many of them. Still, unless a society lives under the rule of law, there is no real security for anyone in the society. Everyone’s relationship with other people and with the society’s institutions becomes a matter of chance or a matter of the whim of powerful people. The rule of law doesn’t guarantee everyone’s safety. No legal system can control all of the people all of the time. Still, a society governed by law is far more orderly and secure than a society left to the whim of some leader or even of some minor bureaucrat who wants to flex their muscle. That’s why every human society has a legal system. Some of those legal systems work better than others. Still, be thankful you live in a country governed by law rather than in one that isn’t.

There is one element of the rule of law that is of great importance in the United States today. For the rule of law truly to be the rule of law, the law must apply to everyone. Full stop. No exceptions. In a society that truly functions under the rule of law, no one can be above the law, not even a president of the United States. That’s the only way the rule of law can be fair. No one is beneath it. Law applies to everyone. It protects everyone’s legal rights.[3] Also, no one is above the law. The law holds everyone accountable. Richard Nixon infamously said that if the president does it, it’s not illegal. He was dead wrong about that. If anyone is above the law, wrongdoing will go unpunished. Moreover, the people will lose faith in the law. Yet the law’s proper functioning requires that the people to whom it applies trust it, have faith in it. We see in our country that some people, perhaps many people, have lost or are losing faith in the law because of how some police officers, the courts, and the prisons treat Black people as though they were below the law. If we want to trust and obey the law, we must insure that we correct those wrongs and insure that the law applies to everyone equally.

The law often has its own way of doing things. There are often rules and procedures that lay people do not understand. People sometimes criticize the law not because there’s really anything wrong with it but because they don’t understand it. A striking example of this dynamic is the time Chief Justice Rehnquist of the US Supreme Court said that innocence is no reason to reverse a conviction for murder. To the lay mind that statement is nonsense. It doesn’t make sense to that lay person, however, because she doesn’t understand the proper function of appellate courts. They see an appeal as a new trial rather than as a review of legal issues only that it actually is. It’s not surprising, then, that to many people the law can appear to be bullshit.[4]

Yet on the whole the law is not bullshit. Neither is concept of the rule of law. The rule of law is out best, indeed probably our only, assurance of at least some peace and order in our life together as a society. If you need proof of that statement, please reconsider what I said above about Soviet law. Or learn about some other situation in which the rule of law is missing, where a nation is ruled more by the whim of some dictator or some controlling party. You’ll see what the rule of law is designed to prevent. Perhaps you’ll become more grateful for the law than you have been before.

Tragically, the rule of law is under attack in the United States today. One man, Donald Trump, is responsible for that potentially disastrous development. Former president Donald Trump thinks he is above the law. Many of his actions betray that conviction of his. He tried hard to reverse the result of a lawful election. When any law enforcement agency takes any action against him, as when the FBI executed a search warrant at his garish resort Mar-a-Lago, he and his minions, including his Republican minions in Congress, scream political persecution. At the very least Trump passively supported and very probably engaged actively in a violent insurrection against the United States government. As president he tried to make the Department of Justice his personal law firm, and to a limited extent he succeeded. Not all of his supporters by any means are white nationalist terrorists, but many of them are. He accepts and encourages the support of radicalized people who are prepared to use violence to get what they want. It is beyond comprehension how this man ever became president. If he ever becomes president again the United States will quite probably no longer be a country ruled by law.

I’m nearly 76 years old. I’ve lived through the debacle of the Nixon administration with its war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. I lived through the revelation of the collection of criminal acts we call Watergate. I’ve experienced the Republican Party under Reagan and the two presidents Bush reduce the federal government to the handmaiden of the economic elite at the expense of all other Americans. I’ve seen George W. Bush commit an illegal war of aggression in Iraq. Yet through all those horrors I never thought that the rule of law in this country was in serious peril. Today we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is. We are in serious danger of losing the only thing that makes communal life possible for us humans, the rule of law. May each and everyone of us do everything we can to defeat Donald Trump and his lawless supporters. It’s the only way we can preserve the rule of law our country so badly needs.

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[1] Because the Russian Orthodox Church uses the old Julian calendar, December 25 in the Gregorian calendar we use is not Christmas in Russia.

[2] The Russian Orthodox Church was not officially an agency of the Soviet government, but it did not oppose the Communist Party. It wouldn’t have survived if it had. In fact, at least some of its priests were also or primarily KGB agents. But at least the Church’s stated functions and aims were not those of the atheistic Communist Party.

[3] I know. In this country the law often does a lousy job of protecting everyone’s legal rights. That the law falls short of what the theory says it should mean does not make the theory wrong. It just means we have to work harder at making the law more truly function the way it is supposed to function.

[4] I’ve never been a judge, but if I were an appellate judge considering a murder case and was convinced that the defendant was innocent, I’d find some legal hook on which to hang a reversal of the judgment against them. Actually, real judges do things like that all the time. I was taught that when doing an appeal, make the court want to rule in your favor, then give it a legal hook on which to hang a judgment in your favor.