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.
[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.
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