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.