We've Come Off the Rails

 

We’ve Come Off the Rails

The United States of America has always prided itself on one distinction between it and many if not most other countries in the world. We established our country nearly 250 years ago through a violent rebellion against the British, but since then governmental power has been gained peacefully. With few exceptions, Americans have not seen violence as a legitimate way for anyone to come to power anywhere in our country. In the Civil War, which was of course horrendously violent, the Confederate states used violence in an effort to take power over them away from the federal government more than to put themselves in control of it. Our governments come to power under a binding constitutional system through peaceful (if often verbally nasty) political campaigns and free elections.

That way of political being is under serious threat today. It is under serious threat because of one man, Donald J. Trump. Trump cares about only one thing in the whole world, namely, power for Donald J. Trump. We know that to be true for myriad reasons, but one of those reasons stands out as the most significant When he lost the 2020 presidential election he did everything, or nearly everything, he could think of to do to hold on to the presidency despite that loss. He used legal means first. He and his supporters filed dozens of lawsuits around the country seeking to have a court reverse the electoral result in their state. When that didn’t work Trump tried illegal but nonviolent means of reversing his loss. He had people dummy up fake electoral certificates that cast a state’s electoral votes for him rather than for Biden. He had those fake certificates sent in to the federal government, something that surely constitutes attempted fraud on the government. He pressured Republican state officials to reverse the electoral result in their state though they had no legal authority to do so. He pressured Vice President Pence, acting as President of the Senate, to reject electoral votes from certain states when he presided over the joint session of Congress that met to receive and affirm the electoral votes of all of the states.

All of Trump’s legal and illegal but nonviolent efforts to overturn the legitimate result of the 2020 presidential election failed. So he turned to violence. On January 6, 2021, he sent a violent mob to the US Capitol to stop Congress’ certification of the result of the 2020 election by force. As his crazed supporters, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” broke into the Capitol and terrified everyone who was legitimately there, forcing the members of Congress, the vice president, and others to run for safety in fear of their lives, Trump sat in the White House, watched the insurrectionary violence on television, and approving of it all. I’ll give Trump this. There are reports that he thought about ordering the US military to intervene to keep him in power, but he didn’t do it. Nonetheless, Trump’s actions leading up to and on January 6 show his willingness, perhaps even his eagerness, to use violence to keep himself in power.

Trump has been out of office since January 20, 2021. Since that time he has been indicted four times for around ninety felonies committed as he tried to gain the presidency in 2016 and to hold on to it in 2020 and 2021. He is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and it appears virtually certain that he will win it. It is not at all clear that President Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee that year, can beat him in a general election.

Winning the presidential nomination of a political party through legal means is, of course, not a threat to American’s constitutional system of government. Nevertheless, Trump remains such a threat. He is that threat because he and many of his supporters are perfectly willing to use force to put him back in office. A recent poll indicates that the number of Americans who think the use of force to put Trump back in office is justified has risen from around twelve million to around eighteen million since Trump’s multiple criminal indictments. Eighteen million Americans are willing to use violence to put their Dear Leader back in power! Eighteen million people! That’s more than the populations of numerous smaller states put together. It is orders of magnitude more than the number of people currently in the American armed forces. Whether it is enough actually to seize power by force is, I suppose, and open question. These people are, after all, hardly an organized and trained military institution. It is, however, more than enough to turn this country into a living hell as they try to do so.

The fascistic Trump movement tells us that our country has simply come off the rails. A significant number of our fellow citizens see the use of force to put an egomaniacal, utterly uncaring, psychologically unstable man in power over our whole country. That man is a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, and a xenophobe. He is an inveterate liar. He loves dictators, and he wants to be an American one. If this country had not come completely off the rails, Trump would appeal at most to a small fringe element of society. Mot of us would never associate him with mainstream American politics. Yet this country made him president once, and there is a not insignificant risk that it may do it again.

In other writing I have taken stabs at explaining the Trump phenomenon. The best I can do at explaining it is to say that it is a product of demographically inspired fear among white Americans facing the loss of their exclusive privileged status in the country combined with massive stupidity among those people. But whatever its cause, the Trump movement is not and can never be a healthy part of a democratic country. It is evidence of sickness not health in the American political and social systems. There may not be much we can do to change the factors that have produced the movement. The demographic changes that underlie it will continue. The mass stupidity arising from the failed American system of public education will continue to grow until this country wakes up to what good education really is. No, we can’t uproot the ground causes of the Trump movement, not, at least, in any short or even medium term.

We can resist that movement with some hope of defeating it. It is not the fringe movement it should be, but it is a minority movement nonetheless. Even when Trump won the presidency in 2016, he lost the popular vote to the very unpopular Hillary Clinton. Most Trumpists are Republicans, and there are for more Democrats and independents than there are Republicans in this country. Our best hope for suppressing the Trump movement is for the Democrats to field candidates who can attract nearly all Democrats, most independents, and even a few Republicans. Sadly, it is not clear that elderly Joe Biden, who will be the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2024, is such a candidate. It is not at all clear that any Democrat is such a candidate.

So be it. We can’t change it. We can, however, do every legal, nonviolent thing in our power to keep Trump out of office. That must be our goal, to keep this product of American dysfunction as far away from the White House (or any other seat of governmental power) as we possibly can. Trump will destroy America if he ever becomes president again. Please, God, don’t let that happen. Help us to keep it from happening. We just can’t survive another term of Trump as president.

They're Just Plain Stupid

 

They’re Just Plain Stupid

August 21, 2023

 

There are certain undeniable facts about former president Donald J. Trump. These things are simply true. They are not a matter of opinion, they are a matter of established fact. The facts about Trump relevant to my inquiry here include:

 

·        As president Trump was impeached twice.

·        Though the Senate did not convict him in either impeachment, the Senate vote to convict in the second Trump impeachment was the largest, most bipartisan such vote in American history.

·        Most of the facts Trump alleges in his public statements are false.

·        Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden.

·        Trump refused and continues to refuse to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential election.

·        Trump continues to claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.

·        Trump calls the 2020 presidential election “rigged.”

·        Trump says that his alleged victory in the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him.

·        Trump engaged in a broad range of activities in an effort to reverse his loss of the 2020 presidential election.

·        Trump has been indicted for around ninety felonies by three separate prosecuting agencies.

·        None of the criminal law cases those indictments have initiated against Trump has yet come to trial.

·        Trump is not, as of this writing, a convicted criminal.

·        As a legal matter, though not necessarily for any other purpose, Trump is presumed innocent of all of the criminal charges against him.

·        Trump has been found civilly (not criminally) liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil case against him brought by E. Jean Carroll.

·        Trump denies all wrongdoing.

·        Trump says that the indictments against him are the result of a politically motivated “witch hunt.”

·        On January 6, 2021, the day Congress was to convene in joint session to accept and affirm the presidential and vice-presidential electoral votes of the states, a session to be presided over by Vice President Pence as President of the Senate, Trump gave a speech to a crowd in Washington, DC, in which he told the people to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” because if they didn’t they would not have a country anymore.

·        Trump insisted that Vice President Pence had the power to reject electoral votes from the states.

·        Trump pressured Vice President Pence to reject electoral votes from the so-called “swing states” that Trump lost.

·        There is a consensus among reputable legal scholars that under the US Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 the vice president has no such power.

·        Trump is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

·        According to the polls, Trump holds a very substantial lead over all other candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

·        Some polls show a presidential election between Trump and President Biden as essentially even.

 

These are the facts on which I base this piece. I have not called Trump a criminal. He has been indicted for a large number of felonies, but as of this writing he has not been convicted of any of them.

All of which gives rise to this question: Given the undeniable facts of Trump’s presidency and developments after his presidency, how can so many Americans, mostly but not quite exclusively Republicans, continue to support him for another term as President of the United States? I can find only one compelling answer to that question, namely, that Trump’s supporters are just plain stupid. Let me explain.

It is, I suppose obvious that the explanation of any statement that someone or something is something or other must begin with a definition of whatever it is that you are saying that someone or something is. People often assume that everyone understands some word or concept they same way they do, but serious authors are well-advised not to make that almost certainly erroneous assumption. So I’ll start my explanation of my claim that Trump’s supporters are just plain stupid with definitions of the word “stupid.”

The online search “define stupid” in bing.com produces as the first definition of stupid “having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense.” That search also gives a link to mirriam-webster.com. That site defines “stupid” more fully as “slow of mind,” “obtuse,” “given to unintelligent decisions or acts,” and “lacking intelligence or reason.” These definitions suggest that that the opposite of stupid is “intelligent.” The search “define intelligence” in bing.com, using the noun rather than the adjective, which makes no difference here, produces as the first definition of “intelligence” “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.” Once again, mirriam-webster.com gives a more complete definition of the word in question. It defines “intelligence” as “the ability to learn or understand or deal with new or trying situations, and “mental acuteness” among other definitions. To be stupid, then, is to lack intelligence. It is to be slow of mind, obtuse, given to unintelligent decisions acts. It is to be unable or at least unwilling to adapt to new situations on the basis of evidence.

Trump’s supports are stupid in precisely this way. They show themselves again and again as unable to grasp and accept actual facts. They are either unable or unwilling to draw valid conclusions from actual facts. The facts of what Trump has done are not really in dispute. Most of Trump’s supporters don’t deny them. Rather, they refuse to accept them and act on them. They refuse to use them in making their decision about which presidential candidate to support. They refuse to base thoughts and actions on well-established truths. For example, they know (or at least could easily know) as well as anyone what Trump said to his crowd of followers on January 6, 2021. They’ve surely seen at least parts of the tape of Trump’s speech that day as often as I have. Or if they haven’t, it’s just because they have decided not to and watch Fox News rather than a valid news source. I don’t watch Fox News, but I assume that it rarely if ever shows that tape, so damning is it for Trump.

Trump’s supporters have available to them as much information as the rest of us about the things Trump did in his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election that he lost, things for which he has now been criminally indicted by both the US Department of Justice and the Fulton County, GA, district attorney. The facts stare Trump’s supporters in the face, but they refuse to accept them. They refuse to understand them. They refuse to draw conclusions from them, conclusions that are obvious to anyone who approaches them who isn’t stupid.

Trump’s supporters also display their stupidity in the way they accept an incorrect conclusion from a particular assertion that Trump ceaselessly lays on them. He says that his criminal indictments are politically motivated. He calls them a “witch hunt.” He clearly expects his followers to accept the truth of that assertion though he can offer no real evidence to support it. Trump expects them to believe that his four criminal indictments are therefore improper because they are based on the political positions of the prosecutors and not on the law and the facts of those cases.

That conclusion is simply untenable as a matter of simple logic. Let’s assume for purposes of argument that Trump is correct here. Let’s assume that the district attorneys in Manhattan and Atlanta are out not to enforce the law and bring a criminal to justice but just to bring down Donald Trump. Let’s also assume that Jack Smith, the special counsel US Attorney General Garland has appointed to conduct the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump, is likewise acting only from a desire to damage Trump politically. I personally do not believe that either of those assumptions is correct, but I’ll posit them here to show what they don’t actually mean.

Even as we assume those probably false things to be true, it remains also true that they make no difference with regard to Trump’s guilt in the cases brought against him. A prosecutor’s motive in a criminal case in no way affects the law or the facts of the case. The facts of the case and the evidence that either establishes them or doesn’t just are what they are. The law applicable to the case remains what it is. There is no suggestion in Trump’s cases that the prosecutors have made up facts or dummied up evidence. I have heard no one make that assertion, and even if someone did it would be obviously baseless. No prosecutor no matter how corrupt can dummy up new laws. Statutes and cases say what they say. Facts based on valid evidence and the law just are what they are regardless of any prosecutor’s motivation in pursuing a case.

Of course opposing parties in an adversarial proceeding like a trial can assert different interpretations of the facts and the law of a case. Trial attorneys do that all the time. Trust me on that one. I spent over twenty years practicing as a trial attorney.[1] But different interpretations of the facts and the law do not change the facts the evidence establishes or the wording of the statutory and case law that applies to the case. The motivation of the attorneys asserting those different interpretations have nothing to do with it. Trump wants his supporters to believe that a prosecutor’s motivation for pursuing a case affects the validity of the case. It doesn’t, but most of Trump’s followers are stupid enough to buy Trump’s assertion to the contrary, giving the matter no critical thought whatsoever.

Given all of these truths, I cannot avoid the conclusion that Trump’s supporters are just plain stupid as I defined that word above. Intelligent people do not willfully reject well-established facts. Trump’s supporters do. Intelligent people will consider what well-established facts mean. Trump’s supporters won’t and don’t. Intelligent people accept no facts without doing a least some critical analysis of those alleged facts and their source. Trump’s supporters do no such critical analysis at all. Trump’s supporters are simply stupid. American history is full of popular movements that were just plain stupid. The Donald Trump movement has joined that parade of horribles wholeheartedly and without reservation.

For better or for worse, Trump’s supporters’ stupidity deprives them neither of their right of free speech nor of their right to vote. There is no way to stop them from supporting Trump except by making reasonable arguments, something that is futile because Trump’s supporters won’t accept those arguments. It would not be ethical or moral to seek to force them off Trump’s bandwagon. The right of free speech means nothing if it does not include the right to be wrong. None of which changes the unavoidable conclusion that Trump’s supporters are just plain stupid.

As I was composing this piece I kept thinking of some lyrics I wrote some time ago set to the tune of the Mexican folk tune De Colores, known in English as Sing of Colors. My lyrics go like this:

 

Sing of morons.

Sing of morons who over the earth in profusion are springing.

Sing of morons,

Of the dopes in their dumbness who go on inanities flinging.

Sing of morons,

Of the morons whose thinking the rest of us all does appall.

Sing of morons who cover the earth,

And give thanks that they haven’t yet done in us all.

Sing of morns who cover the earth,

And give thanks that they haven’t yet done in us all.

 

Trump’s supporters are not the world’s only morons. There are morons everywhere. But Trump’s stupid supporters are the morons who most threaten us in the US today. I pray that they will never be able to force me to change my lyric “they haven’t yet done in us all.”

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[1] I worked on civil cases not criminal ones, but that distinction makes no difference here.

We Live in Mystery

 

We Live in Mystery

August 17, 2023

 

Exactly one month ago, on July 17, 2023, I wrote what follows, or something much like it, in a journal I sometimes keep. I rarely reread my journal entries, The reason I do them, if there is one, is just that there is some value in the doing. That value, whatever it is, does not require rereading. But I just reread this one, and it struck me as something worth writing up and posting on this blog. It rambles of course. It wasn’t written as polished. I was perhaps feeling a bit cynical when I wrote it. Whatever. For what’s it’s worth, here it is.

 

July 17, 2023

 

I’ve been wondering just what it is that I think or believe about the most profound questions of life. What is life? What is consciousness? Is there a reason why we’re here? If so, what is it? Does life have any meaning? If not, why keep on living? If it does, what is that meaning? Who or what are we humans? Are we good, or evil, or both? How are we to live? Does it matter how we live? to ourselves? To anyone else?

Some of these questions have no answer. Or if they do have an answer, it is only an answer we assign to the question, nothing more than that. To some of them the only conceivable answer is God. Maybe that’s why we come up with the idea of something we call God. God at least answers the questions of where we came from and why we’re here. Or, as I have written elsewhere, the concept God doesn’t so much answer those questions as it transcends and obviates them. Do we come up with the concept of God for reasons other than it gives us a way to deal with unanswerable questions? I think the answer is yes, but I can sure understand the skeptic or cynic who says no.

The question of why anything at all, including ourselves, exists rather than there being nothing (assuming that something more than nothing in fact exists) truly is unanswerable. We don’t and can’t know why what we observe as reality exists. All we can do is acknowledge that something we perceive as existing appears to us to present itself to us. What we take to be reality is simply a given. It is simply there. It does not tell us why it’s there. It just appears to say here I am, take me as real. It doesn’t tell us why we’re here. It just says accept that you are here and leave it at that. We say there is a reality and that we are part of it because—God. We can live into what we call God and experience God as real, but we can never prove that our answer has any objective reality or that it is anything more than an answer we cling to because we have to have an answer. I’ll say that we have to have our existence mean something. If we think it doesn’t we cannot avoid despair.

Is God real? I think so, but I can’t prove it. And God doesn’t really answer all of our questions. Where did God come from? Was there a time before God? All of these unanswerable questions boil down to one profound existential truth. Our search for answers to all of our most profound questions leads us inexorably to mystery. To something that isn’t just unknown but is unknowable. One of life’s existential challenges is to learn to live with mystery rather than answers, with the unknowable unknown rather than with knowledge, facts, answers, knowledge, and certainty.

Almost everyone, except perhaps true mystics, resists that answer. We keep seeking that which we can never find. If life teaches any wisdom at all, it is that our call is to live with mystery, with the unknowable unknown, and to be satisfied with not knowing. Our rational minds and our eyes scream No! There has to be more than that! Well, there isn’t, and we’d be well advised to accept that reality rather than to maintain the futile quest for more than that.

Worse Than I Thought

 

Worse Than I Thought

August17, 2023

 

Back in October, 2016, Donald Trump was the Republican nominee for President of the United States. The election took place in November of that year, so in October we couldn’t know if he or his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton would be elected. It was clear, however, that Trump becoming president was a real possibility. Many of us were appalled at that prospect. We could not comprehend how such an unstable, personally deplorable, woefully unqualified person could possibly ascend to the highest political office in the land; but there he was, the presidential candidate of one of the country’s two major political parties. We could not ignore him, as much as we wished we could. So I wrote an essay about him. I posted it on this blog under the title “American Fascist.” In it I considered what fascism is and how Trump embodies it in our American context. I concluded that Trump “is as dangerous in our context as Mussolini, the original fascist, was in his.” I thought, or at least I hoped, that Trump would never be a true Nazi. I said that he was “a threat to the best American values. He plays to the worst angels of our nature not our better ones.” Back in 2016 I already saw Trump as a true danger to our country and to the world. So did a great many other insightful, knowledgeable people.

I was right about that, but today, in August, 2023, I have to say that in 2016 I underestimated the threat that Trump was. He’s still that dire threat today. In 2016 I knew that he was bad, really bad. But he has turned out to be even worse than I thought. The American electorate did not reelect him in 2020, but now, once again, he is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. Because it seems inevitable that he will again be that party’s presidential nominee, we must sound the alarm in every way that we can about just how dangerous a man he is and how destructive the movement he leads is.

We know several things about Trump now that we did not know back in 2016. There are things that are true about him today that hadn’t happened yet back then. Here are some of them:

 

·        He is a indicted felon four times over.

·        He does not believe in or accept the value of American democracy.

·        He plays to the willingness of many of his followers to use violence to put him back in office.

·        He fomented and unleashed a rabid mob with the intent of overturning American democracy and is perfectly able and willing to do so again.

 

Never before in American history has a person who has been indicted for dozens of felonies been a serious candidate for the presidency, yet that is exactly what Donald Trump is. The district attorney in Manhattan indicted him first. That indictment charges him with multiple counts of fraud in the reporting of campaign finances. He acted to cover up payments he made to a pornography performer with the professional name Stormy Daniels to procure her silence about the sexual encounter he once had with her. A major American political figure having had sex with a porn star is appalling in itself. It is not, however, illegal. Attempting to conceal the expenditure of campaign money is. That is the crime with which he is charged in this first of his multiple felony indictments.

Next, special counsel Jack Smith secured an indictment of Trump in federal court in south Florida for unlawful holding and use of classified documents. When he left the White House, Trump took a large number of boxes, filled mostly with documents, with him to Mar-a-Lago, his garish home in Florida. Under the Presidential Records Act, none of those documents belonged to him. He was obligated to turn them all over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Some of those documents were classified, a fact that made Trump’s illegal holding of them particularly egregious. NARA asked him to turn them over. He turned over some but kept others including some classified documents. The Department of Justice served a subpoena on him so they could search for and seize the documents Trump still held that didn’t belong to him. He lied about having turned all of them over. He worked to conceal the fact that he still had some of them. The Department of Justice indicted him for various crimes related to his unlawful taking and holding of government documents and his obstruction of justice.

Next, the Department of Justice indicted Trump for four felonies related to his unlawful efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. For reasons I don’t understand, the DOJ did not indict him for sedition, something of which he is obviously guilty. Nonetheless, the charges it did bring against him are serious enough. They are mostly charges for conspiracy including conspiracy to defraud the federal government. If convicted, Trump faces jail time under each of his first two indictments. This third indictment, however, is the more serious and more important than the first two indictments are. It relates to Trump’s unlawful actions that led directly to a mob of crazed Trump supporters storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The facts the DOJ’s indictment alleges are damning, and it is not clear that Trump has any valid defense. Most of the facts alleged in the indictment are public record and have been for some time.

Most recently, the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney procured an indictment from a grand jury against Trump and a large number of coconspirators. Like the second federal indictment, this one focuses on Trump’s unlawful efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The indictment is over ninety pages long. It specifies act after act, referring to numerous telephone calls, text messages, and emails. It covers a broad range of illegal activity including, among others, attempts in Georgia and several other swing states to submit to the federal government fake sets of presidential electors who would vote for Trump though he had lost the election in all of the states in question. Most of the charges fall under the Georgia state RICO act, which carries a five year minimum sentence for conviction.

There is no way for Trump to make the New York or the Georgia state charges against him go away. That will remain true even if Trump succeeds in having the Georgia case removed to federal court, something he has tried to do that a court has already rejected in the New York case. The president does not have the power to dismiss state court cases or to pardon state crimes. The only apparent way for Trump to avoid jail under the two federal indictments is for some president, presumably himself, to order the DOJ to dismiss the charges against him or at least to grant him a pardon for those offenses. Other than to satisfy his weak but grossly over-asserted ego, getting rid of those charges may be a primary reason why he wants to be president again. Even as president, however, he would have no control over the state prosecutions he faces. The logistics of holding a former president in prison when he is under constant Secret Service protection are unclear and no doubt complicated. Nonetheless, it is simply undeniable that Trump is a felon multiple times over. He has endangered national security and attacked the very foundation of American democracy.

Trump has lawyers who assert various bogus defenses to these charges, but mostly how he responds to them is by attacking the prosecutors, judges, and witnesses involved in the cases against him. He even verbally attacks their families. He insists that the cases against him are a “political witch hunt.” The federal judge in the case based on the facts that led to January 6 has issued a protective order in an attempt to keep Trump from disclosing and attacking evidence and witnesses in that case, an order Trump is almost certain to violate. Will that judge dare to put him in jail pending trial? Probably ot, but we can hope. Trump’s ranting against the people involved in the cases against him will not influence the outcome of his several criminal trials. He’ll keep doing it both because that’s who he is and because he has no valid defenses to the charges.

Yet his public ranting and raving is having one potentially disastrous consequence. It is inciting some of his followers to be violent. There have been violent incidents in Indiana and Utah. Witnesses have had their lives threatened to the point where they have essentially had to go into hiding. There is a risk that some of them will refuse to testify or, worse, will change their testimony to placate Trump and his gang of incensed followers. Trump cares not one whit for the rule of law. He will do everything he can to stop our system of criminal law from working the way it is designed to work, the way it does work in countless cases across the country every day. It is true that the mass protests that he said would erupt if he were indicted have not happened. Still, Trump will not stop short of inciting violence. He did it on January 6. There is no reason to believe that he won’t do it again. The risk of Trump-incited violence is greater than it has ever been. That is one way that the Trump threat is worse than I thought it was.

Another way in which it is worse than I thought it was it what Trump says he will do if he is again elected president. He has made it crystal clear that as president he would do everything he could to complete the project he began when he was president before, namely, the subversion America’s democratic polity into an authoritarian one with the president essentially in control of everything. He would politicize the DOJ, something of which he always accuses the Democrats but which they don’t do.[1] He would essentially act as his own Attorney General deciding what the DOJ can and can’t do. A new Trump administration would complete the work of the first one of eliminating virtually all federal regulation of industry so that polluters can do even more than they do now to exploit their workers and destroy the earth.

Trump admires President Putin of Russia. As US president he would fawn before Putin and other evil dictators like Kim Jong Un the way he did during his first term in office. He might pull the US out of NATO. He would certainly stop all American military aid to Ukraine. He would pander to his base the way he did the first time around with regard to judicial nominations. He plays to conservative, evangelical Christians who make up much of his political support, never mind that he is absolutely no kind of Christian. Neither they nor Trump give a damn about individual liberty or about the rights of traditionally oppressed people like women, gays, immigrants, and others. Their positions in American life would only deteriorate further under another Trump presidency.

There is one other theoretical possibility that makes the prospect of another Trump presidency particularly frightening. Say he is convicted in one or more of the criminal cases against him. Say that there is therefore a sentence of jail time against him that was not enforced while he was president but would be enforced as soon as he was no longer president, presumably on January 20, 2029. Would he leave office if leaving office meant he would land in jail? He used illegal means and instigated mob violence in an effort to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election though he was under no jail sentence at the time. What would he do to keep himself in office in order to avoid jail? What wouldn’t he do? It seems inevitable that he would get his mad followers to use violence to keep him in the White House, violence orders of magnitude worse than the violence he unleashed on January 6, 2021. His most deranged followers might just start the civil war they say they want.

Some of us have known for decades that Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy and American values (or at least what America claims are its values). He is psychologically unstable. He is a narcissist who brags about his greatness to cover up a pathetically weak ego. He loves dictators and wants to be one. He neither understands nor gives a damn about the US Constitution. His policies threaten American national security, and they reenforce the American sin of white supremacism. Like the policies of every Republican president at least since Reagan, those policies favor and advance the economic elite over the vast bulk of the American people. He is a misogynist who thinks women are just there for his sexual pleasure. He will stop at nothing to get his way. To him, violence is not wrong if it is violence that supports him.

This country very probably would not survive another Trump presidency in anything like its traditional form. Do we want to become an authoritarian state where the rights of individuals mean nothing? Do we want to ruled by an unstable megalomaniac who gives not one good God damn about us? Do we want to destroy America’s traditional international alliances? Do we want to accelerate our destruction of our planet through climate change? Do we want to go back not to the 1950s but to the 1890s with regard to federal regulation of the economy? If so, all we have to do is give Donald Trump another term as president. If not, we must do everything legally possible to prevent him from ever again setting foot in the White House.

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[1] One good way to learn what Trump is doing is to look at what he accuses his opponents of doing. He projects his own actions onto them time and time again.

A Strange and Wondrous Time

 

A Strange and Wondrous Time

August 3, 2023

 

What a strange and wondrous time we live in! Our days are nothing but incomprehensibly bizarre. Today, in Washington, DC, former president Donald J. Trump will be arraigned in federal court under an indictment that charges him with dozens of felonies committed in the course of his nefarious effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and thereby undermine the foundation of American democracy, the right of the people to vote and to have the votes of the voters collectively determine the outcome of elections, while he served as president. This is the third time Trump has been indicted for multiple felonies in four months, and a fourth indictment will very probably come from the Fulton County, GA, district attorney before the end of this month. Of course it is true that Trump has only been indicted for his felonies not convicted (yet) of any of them. Yet the facts that led to all three of Trump’s indictments are not really in dispute. Especially with regard to the most recent indictment for which he will be arraigned today, Trump did most of what constitutes his felonies in the open. He knew or at least had been told by numerous people whom he had no reason to disbelieve, including the Attorney General he had put in to politicize the Depart of Justice, that he had lost the election. His presidency would end at noon on January 20, 2021, when the man who won the election, Joe Biden, would be inaugurated as president.

Yet Trump vociferously asserted multiple times in public that he had actually won the election, that the election was tainted by massive fraud, and that his landslide victory had been stolen from him. Among other illegal acts, Trump orchestrated an effort in several states to have people submit fake elector certificates to the federal government claiming to be their state’s legitimate electors when they were nothing of the sort. Some such fake elector certificates were in fact submitted. Their submission clearly constitutes fraud on the federal government, a federal felony.

By January 6, 2021, Trump had been told and knew or at least should have known that Vice President Pence had no constitutional authority to do anything but preside over the pro forma joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, that counted and certified the electoral votes of the states. There was no legal way Pence could have done anything to change the outcome of the election or even to delay the certification of that outcome. Yet Trump repeatedly pressured Pence to reject the electoral votes of the states of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico. Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin as tainted by what the most recent indictment calls outcome determinative fraud. Trump was pressuring his vice president to do something that was clearly illegal and that would certainly have led to riots in the streets by people whose votes had been thrown out.

Trump called his followers to gather in Washington, DC, on January 6. He told them it would be “wild” when they did. He held a large rally near the White House and just up the street from the Capitol on the morning of January 6. He whipped that crowd into a frenzy by telling them that they had to fight or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. He told them he hoped Pence would do what Trump called the right thing (which was actually the wrong thing), and his words contained an unspoken “or else” if Pence didn’t. He sent his rabid mob of supporters down the street to the Capitol. There they chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” Someone constructed a makeshift gallows in front of the Capitol, presumably intended to do just that. The mob stormed the building. They smashed doors and windows and got in. They assaulted and injured numerous Capitol police officers who were trying to keep or get them out, some of them seriously. They threatened the safety and even the lives of everyone legitimately in the building. These included senators, members of the House, congressional staff, the vice president, and others. Several members of Congress were trapped inside the House chambers or in other rooms in the building. Eventually the police got them out and ushered them to an undisclosed safe location. The police hustled Pence into a garage and wanted to drive him away from the Capitol, though he refused to go. There is every reason to believe that the mob would have killed the vice president had they gotten ahold of him. They probably would have killed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi if they had gotten ahold of her too. As his supporters were conducting all of this destructive mayhem in the Capitol building, Trump sat in the White House watching it all on TV and approving of what the mob was doing. Only after several hours did he send out a tweet telling them to leave the Capitol building. Yet even in that tweet he didn’t condemn the rioters or what they had done. The House of Representatives impeached Trump for his responsibility for the January 6 insurrection. Sadly, his acolytes in the Senate didn’t convict him as they clearly should have.

Most of us have, I fear, come to accept people like Trump and efforts like his to subvert American democracy as ordinary, expectable things. They are nothing of the sort. What Trump did to try to subvert the will of the American people in the 2020 presidential election is unprecedented in American history. Not even Richard Nixon, our other felonious president, tried to stay in power when he had no right to do so. Our country is perhaps unique in all the world for its long history of a peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next. George Washington set a precedent. He could have been elected for a third term as president. He did not seek a third term because he didn’t want the presidency to become a monarchy. He turned the presidency over to his successor John Adams peacefully. Adams and Thomas Jefferson were fierce political opponents, but when Jefferson won the 1800 presidential election, Adams turned the presidency over to him peacefully. Several states seceded from the union when one term president James Buchanan transferred power to Abraham Lincoln, but Buchanan didn’t try to overturn the result of the 1860 presidential election. Other presidents who were elected only once and who served only one term (or a bit more because they succeeded a president who died in office) did the same. Harry Truman (who served nearly two full terms but was elected only once) turned the presidency over to Dwight Eisenhower peacefully. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush lost their bids for reelection, but they too ceded power to their successors peacefully. The law requires peaceful transfer of presidential power, and such peaceful transfer is a long, well-established tradition in this country.

Donald Trump gives not one good God damn for that tradition. He cares only for himself and his power. He is a narcissist with an underlying ego so weak it can’t be satisfied with anything short of being president. When he was in office he would use anyone he thought could help him hold onto power, then discard that person as worthless when that person turned out to be unable to keep him in office. He would break any law to stay inn power. He disregarded the Constitution he had sworn to defend and protect. He tried to high-pressure state election officials and legislatures, over whom he had no actual authority, to break both state and federal law to keep him in office. He cares not one whit about the will of the American voting public. To Trump, if they don’t elect him, they’re wrong and can be overridden by any means necessary. He incited and approved of mob violence when nothing else worked to keep him in office. Mercifully, mostly thanks to radically conservative former Trump acolyte Mike Pence of all people, even his mob violence didn’t work to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump, with all his narcissism and criminality, is truly something new in American national politics. We’ve had bad presidents before. Ronald Reagan was, for example, one of the worst with his glorification of greed and his BS supply side economics. Yet we have never before had a president or serious presidential candidate with the psychological makeup of Donald Trump. We’ve had one criminal president, Richard Nixon. But perhaps most of us thought he was a one off, someone the likes of whom we’d never see in the White House again. If that’s what we thought, we were wrong. Richard Nixon was a serious threat to the American way of governance because he committed felonies while in office. Yet Nixon was not the threat to the very underpinnings of American democracy the way Trump is. When Nixon knew he would be impeached and convicted if he didn’t resign, he didn’t engage in criminal conspiracies in an effort to stay in office. He resigned, which was the only honorable and legal thing he could do.

This afternoon we will witness something that has never happened before in our country. We will witness a former president of the United States being arraigned in federal court under charges that he did precisely engage in multiple criminal conspiracies in an effort to stay in power though he had lost his bid for reelection. We would perhaps have seen Nixon in the same situation had Ford not pardoned him, but there has never been any suggestion, any hint, that any other president, sitting or former, deserved to be indicted for multiple felonies the way Trump so correctly has been.

We are living through a nightmare that will be the subject of endless investigation by future historians. (Trust me on that one. I have a PhD in history, so I know whereof I speak.) There are not many dates that actually appear in history books. Today, August 3, 2023, is one that will (though the dates of Trump’s trials will be more important). We are both privileged and cursed to be living through a strange and wondrous time such as this, when a former president is arraigned on four counts of serious felonies. I’ll see how much of it I can see on television. I’ll take in whatever that is as well as the commentary of reliable news sources like MSNBC. I will be appalled by the BS arguments Trump’s acolytes make in their attempt to save their hero from prison. No, this prosecution is not politically motivated. That the former Trump administration politicized the Department of Justice does not mean that Democrats do the same thing. The facts of the cases against Donald Trump speak for themselves. There is no serious doubt that Trump is a felon who deserves to be, indeed must be, tried, convicted, and sentenced for his crimes. That I must say that about a former president of the United States does in deed make our times strange and wondrous.

 

Speech and Action

 

Speech and Action

 

Much is being made of the distinction between speech and action in the discussions of the indictment of Donald Trump for criminal acts committed in the course of his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. But I am not hearing any in depth discussion of what distinction between speech and action actually is. When we really look at that distinction is we find that it is actually a false one. I have long believed that in the final analysis human beings can only do two things. We can speak, and we can move things from one place to another. And actually, speech itself is moving something, air, from one place, the lungs, to another, out of the lungs. Everything Trump is accused of in the election fraud case is speech, either oral or written, that distinction making no difference here. I’ve heard news anchors say that organizing a fraudulent scheme of fake electors, one of the things Trump is accused of (and that he actually did) is action not speech. No it isn’t. His organizing the fraudulent scheme consisted of his saying things to people. Asking people to do things. Telling people to do things. Trump is not accused of hitting anyone or stealing any physical objects. Those things are actions not speech, but everything Trump is accused of is speech. He is accused of having spoken and written words. Everything he’s accused of is speech.

There is a significant distinction in this case, but it isn’t between speech and action. It is between legally protected speech and legally unprotected speech. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States establishes a right to freedom of speech. That right is one of this country’s core values. Freedom of speech is essential for political debate, academic research, literature, and other activities indispensable for the functioning of a decent, sophisticated culture. But it is well established in American law that the freedom of speech the First Amendment guarantees is not unlimited. Some speech is not constitutionally protected. The cliched example of unprotected speech is “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater,” assuming I guess that there is no fire. Why can’t you? Because these words are likely to create a panic in which people are likely to be hurt. Defamation law is another example of unprotected speech. No one can utter defamatory speech against another person without facing at least the possibility of a civil award of damages. First Amendment law is complex, but it represents the attempt by American courts to draw the line between protected and unprotected speech.

The issue in the election fraud case against Trump isn’t distinguishing between speech and action. It is distinguishing between constitutionally protected speech and constitutionally unprotected speech. Trump’s speech that is relevant in this case is constitutionally unprotected because he asked or told others to commit unlawful acts and worked with others to get others to commit unlawful acts. His unprotected speech relates to three primary issues. One of them is efforts to induce Republicans in six different states to submit fraudulent, false slates of electors to the federal government. He led a conspiracy to defraud the federal government. The other is his efforts to get Vice President Pence to seize power the Constitution does not give him to reject the electors a state has certified as the state’s actual electors outright or to send the issue of what electors are legitimate back to state legislatures for investigation of alleged but false claims of outcome determining electoral fraud. A third example of Trump’s constitutionally unprotected speech is what he said to the Secretary of State of Georgia in an attempt to get that public official to reverse the outcome of the presidential election in that state. What Trump did in all of these cases was speak either orally or in writing. We can call what he did actions if we want, but what he did still comes down to—he said something.

So let’s not base our consideration of the indictment of Donald Trump for attempting to overturn a results of a lawful election by unlawful means on the distinction between speech and acts. We are dealing here with speech that is not constitutionally protected. Trump’s acolytes are screaming and will  continue to scream “First Amendment right!” as an alleged defense to the charges against their hero. That defense raises the issue of what speech is constitutionally protected and what speech is not. That’s the issue, not difference between speech and acts.