“We survived one Trump administration just fine. Why are you so worried about a second one?”

Why are we so worried?

Hmmm.

1.

Because the first Trump administration was stocked with traditional Republicans who went on to give interviews and write books about the chaos of the Trump White House, and how they had to talk Donald Trump out of various anti-democratic actions (from siccing the military on protestors to sending letters to state legislatures falsely asserting that the DOJ had found evidence of widespread irregularities in their 2020 presidential election); and those people are not going to be in a second Trump administration.

[See Trump: I need the kind of generals Hiltler had from The Atlantic Monthly October 2024:

Trump’s desire to deploy U.S. troops against American citizens is well documented. During the nerve-racking period of social unrest following Floyd’s death, Trump asked Milley and Esper, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, if the Army could shoot protesters. “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly,” Esper wrote in his memoir. “The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them. I wondered about his sense of history, of propriety, and of his oath to the Constitution.” Esper told National Public Radio in 2022, “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at General Milley, and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’” When defense officials argued against Trump’s desire, the president screamed, according to witnesses, “You are all fucking losers!”

(“Trump: I need the kind of generals Hitler had”, by Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic Monthly on October 22, 2024)]

[Trump’s depravity will not cost him the election Is this article true, Red America??? You hate us that much? But what is this “us” that you hate? No, this can’t be. This must be some high-falutent misunderstanding; sure he wrote a book on the subject, but who hasn’t written a book anymore these days, what with self-publishing and all?

Editor’s Note: That book wasn’t self-published.]

[In Part One of our essay What we Know, we take a quick look at The Executive Summary of the Jan 6 Report.

Chosen at near-random from that section:

When President Trump couldn’t convince Shirkey and Chatfield to change the outcome of the election in Michigan during that meeting or in calls after, he or his team maliciously tweeted out Shirkey’s personal cell phone number and a number for Chatfield that turned out to be wrong. Shirkey received nearly 4,000 text messages after that, and another private citizen reported being inundated with calls and texts intended for Chatfield.]

Just compare Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with Trump’s false electors scheme with JD Vance saying he would’ve refused to certify Biden’s win; and now — after months of skirting around the issue — he’s even jumped in to a full embrace of the classic demagogue lie of the stolen election (that somehow no one can actually find even a drop of evidence for). Contrast those two VPs and ask yourself if everything’s going to be hunky dory in Trump 2.0.

[New Trump Jan 6 Court Filings highlights peril of possible JD Vance Vice Presidency

… But the constitution does spell out that the vice-president is the president of the Senate and is in charge of certifying the election results, and Vance, unlike Pence, has said multiple times that he would not have certified the vote in 2020

“I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had,” Vance said on a venture capitalist’s podcast in September. He made similar comments before he was tapped by Trump to be on the ticket, saying during an ABC News interview that he would have liked to see the certification of the 2020 election handled differently.

The contrast between Vance leaving the door open to question election results, and the depiction of Pence’s role on January 6 laid out in the Smith indictment, is stark.

According to Smith, Pence stood strong despite Trump’s pressure and threats. He told Trump he had seen no evidence of election-determining fraud and repeatedly tried to convince Trump to accept the valid results. Trump’s pressure campaign did not let up – he and his co-conspirators used “deceit”, lying to Pence that there was evidence of significant fraud and lying to the public that Pence had the ability to reject electoral votes and send them back to the state legislatures.

Even after Trump tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” supporters started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and the Secret Service had to evacuate the vice-president to a secure location, Pence maintained that the Electoral Count Act didn’t allow him to legally reject the valid electoral votes.

… ]

[Vance says ‘no’ Trump didn’t lose the 2020 election

“On the election of 2020, I’ve answered this question directly a million times. No, I think there are serious problems in 2020 so did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use,” Vance responded.]

If anyone reading this, or anyone not reading this but who has ESP and can hear us speaking through the void, has any little tiny thought that maybe the 2020 election was not legitimately won by Joseph Biden — old though he may well be — , please read this short article February 2024 article by Walter Olson for the famously-conservative Cato Institute: Two Scholars Revisit Trump’s Election Fraud Claims

When you understand that there was never any kind of a reasonable reason to call the 2020 election results into question, you can begin to feel deep in your belly the way the evil has been spreading through the nation.

You can’t have a democracy when one side decides they will only accept election outcomes that go in their favor. You can’t have a democracy when one party uses Realpolitik against the other party and — if need be — a majority of the voters.

Trump’s ethos of winning-at-any-cost, might-makes-right, reality-is-whatever-the-boss-says-it-is, and personal-loyalty-over-loyalty-to-either-the-law-or-the-Law is poison to democracy.

And democracy is a spiritual good because in a democracy you can stand up for honesty, fair play, and competency in government without having to fear for your financial or physical safety: You can publicly do the right thing without having to risk your ability to care for your family.

That is a true blessing. And to harm that is evil.

Donald Trump’s project is an evil one. And it has gained power over Mike Johnson, the GOP legislature, Fox News, and many US American citizens.

Watch how the lie grows:

Donald spends a solid month trying to steal the election; after he loses fair and square, he refuses to concede the loss and lies that the election was stolen from him; Mike Johnson finds a specious “constitutional” argument to provide cover from Trump’s lie, and he convinces many in the GOP to sign onto it*, which in short order creates an environment where GOP leaders either choose to be “moderate” and embrace some confusing logic for why the constitution needs us to try to undermine the fair elections upon which our system of government is founded and predicated or to be “all in” and just echo Trump’s straight-up lies; meanwhile many GOP voters believe Trump over any and all fact checks; and then there’s this funny moment where Fox News initially tells the truth about Trump losing and even debunks conspiracy theories, and this makes Trump lash out at Fox News, and this makes many faithful Fox viewers switch over to outlets like Newsmax, and then Fox News panics and decides to start going along with the lies so they don’t lose the viewers**; and before you know it, it is 2024, and to be in good-standing in today’s GOP you have to act like Donald Trump is a legitimate candidate rather than a man who has tried to steal a presidential election and is now campaigning on the classic demagogue trick of calling a fair election “stolen” and who also used anti-democratic tactics in office and is currently promising to do a better job of undermining checks on his power and lies and using the power of the government to destroy political opponents and otherwise rule as a dictator.

*[See Section Four of our January 2024 What we know]

**[See Analysis: Fox News has been exposed as a dishonest organization terrified of its own audience by Oliver Darcy for CNN on February 17, 2023

The hosts were so alarmed by Newsmax’s rise, they were enraged when their colleague, White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, tweeted a mere fact check of Trump’s election lies.

“Please get her fired,” Carlson told Hannity. “Seriously What the f**k? I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

The next time you see Fox News cherry-picking their way into a reality in which Donald Trump is just another GOP politician and Kamala Harris is just some more proof that the Democrats are somewhere between hopelessly incompetent and hopelessly evil, please remember that Fox News is not here to tell anyone the truth about anything; they are here to make money by allowing people who are only comfortable in one narrative to stay in that narrative — regardless of that narrative’s relationship to reality.

“Our viewers are good people and they believe [the election fraud claims],” Tucker Carlson acknowledged in one message to Laura Ingraham.

Right. Because that’s the purpose of journalism: To declare your viewers or readers to be “good people” and cocoon them in bias-confirming stories — whether those biases are true or not.

It is true that Tucker Carlson ended up fired. But Rupert Murdoch wasn’t.

Rupert Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman, emailed Suzanne Scott, the Fox News chief executive, telling her that Newsmax needed to be “watched.” Murdoch said that he didn’t “want to antagonize Trump further” and stressed to her, “everything at stake here.”

All you need to do is contrast Fox News headlines with other’s to see that they are carefully not antagonizing Trump further (even if you don’t want to see Fox News headlines, if you are lucky, your landing page is piping them into you anyway, so then you get a little taste of the upside-down reality they are carefully cultivating.)]

The people who stood up to Trump in his first administration will not be invited to his second administration. And Trump at first didn’t understand that he needed to be a dictator and not a president (apparently he could never wrap his mind around, for example, military generals swearing an oath to the constitution and the nation rather than to President Donald Trump*). But now Trump has a clearer vision of what political success looks like to him, and those in the GOP who would stick up for democracy have been sidelined, and those who will do anything for their own power and security have been elevated.

*[See Trump: I need the kind of generals that Hitler had

Trump has responded incredulously when told that American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. According to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s recent book, Donald Trump v. the United States, Trump asked Kelly, “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Kelly answered, “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.” Trump also publicly floated the idea of “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” as part of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep himself in power.

]

The corruption of Donald Trump’s own soul, of Mike Johnson’s stewardship of our constitutional republic, of the GOP leadership’s commitment to democracy and fair play, of Fox News’ last vestige of journalism-rather-than-propagandaism; replacing Mike Pence’s refusal to bend a knee to JD Vance’s sacrifice of the constitutional order to better kiss the ring of the man who would be king: All this is evil. Because it is not Okay to collaborate with a man who treats our shared democratic republic the way Donald Trump does.

2.

And Trump’s rhetoric has grown more and more autocratic and despotic and erratic and his talk about being dictator just for day one and fixing elections so his supporters don’t have to vote again and promising to use political power to go after political enemies and to use the military agains protestors and et cetera:

All that kind of talk is an abuser doing what abusers do best:

They put your hand on your shoulder, and then the next day that hand massages your neck, and then the next day it slides down your shirt, and then … :

What abusers do is they get you used to the idea of what is coming — every time that they violate you a little further they are doing two things at once: Seeing how much they can get away with right now; and getting you and everyone else used to what comes next.

Humans are frogs swimming peacefully through slowly boiling water: That is what abusers know: People can get used to anything. All you need to do is slowly alter their base point. And Trump actually did attack democratic norms, rules, and principles while in office.

[See above our 2020 report and the NY Time’s Believe him.

!Actually!,

out of fear of payrolls destroying democracy, we have taken the liberty of putting large excerpts from that NY Times essay here!!]

And because the same principle that makes Trump good at abusing the nation makes him good at corrupting it. People’s moral compasses can also be altered by getting them used to changing norms.

Witness today’s GOP:

If you told any of them ten years ago that they would be rallying behind a former president who spent his last month in office attempting to use the power of the Federal government to steal his way into another four years in office, and who then used the lie that that election was stolen from him as a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, and who continues to spew anti-democratic rhetoric even as he appears to be losing his marbles:

If you told today’s GOP ten years ago that they would be working to get that man back in the Oval Office and in front of the little red button that blows up the world, they would’ve said you must be joking, they would never ever ever betray their country like that, not for any amount of power, prestige or wealth.

But here they are: Giving each other little glassy-eyed smiles of encouragement as they swim through the water in the pot as the temperature slowly rises.

I imagine that We the People are up next: Yes, today we stand up for the truth; but if that gets a little scary tomorrow, then we’ll have all kinds of reasons why the right thing to do is to sit silently by as state sponsored lies become the new reality.

Look at Jeff Bezos! He’s already hedging his bets. Maybe it is a coincidence that the two billionaire-owned newspapers (Bezos of The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post” and Soon-Shiong of the “LA Times”) decided not to endorse any candidate a few weeks prior to this election; but it wouldn’t be crazy for them to think that with Donald Trump comes a pay-to-play and bend-a-knee kleptocracy, and they don’t want to be left out in the cold.

There is both a Reality and a reality. And Reality is Love and our current reality is that a system that selects for honesty decency and competency is in danger of being replaced by one that selects for dishonesty cruelty and incompetency.

[Donald Trump and his cronies left his first administration with a playbook for self-enrichment in a second term. by Franklin Foer for the Jan 2024 Atlantic Monthly.

A week and a half before taking office, [Donald Trump] held a press conference in front of towering piles of file folders, theatrically positioned to suggest rigorous legal analysis, and announced that he would not divest himself of his commercial interests. Instead, he became the first modern commander in chief to profit from a global network of businesses, branded in gilded letters blaring his own name.A week and a half before taking office, he held a press conference in front of towering piles of file folders, theatrically positioned to suggest rigorous legal analysis, and announced that he would not divest himself of his commercial interests. Instead, he became the first modern commander in chief to profit from a global network of businesses, branded in gilded letters blaring his own name.

…
It didn’t happen all at once. Trump spent the early days of his presidency testing boundaries. He used his bully pulpit to unabashedly promote his real-estate portfolio. His properties charged the Secret Service “exorbitant rates”—as much as $1,185 a night, per a House Oversight Committee report—for housing agents when Trump or his family members visited. By the time Trump and his cronies left the White House, they had slowly erased any compunction, both within the Republican Party and outside it, about their corruption. They left power having compiled a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain.

..

That know-how—that confidence in their own impunity, that savvy understanding of how to profitably deal with malignant interests—will inevitably be applied to plans for a second term. If the first Trump presidency was, for the most part, an improvised exercise in petty corruption, a second would likely consist of systematic abuse of the government. There’s a term to describe the sort of regime that might emerge on the other side: a Mafia state.
…

Foer then goes on to outline how Victor Orban turned Hungary into a “mafia state”. His first step was replacing the professional bureaucracy with loyalists dependent on his patronage. It is worth here remembering that at the end of his term, Donald Trump signed an order that would’ve allowed him to replace thousands of professional bureaucrats with political appointees if he had remained in power a little longer. What is to keep Trump 2025 from filling both traditional political positions and traditional bureaucratic posts with the kind of people Trump likes — those who will do anything Trump asks, regardless of how immoral or harmful.

Corruption in the Trump administration wasn’t nearly sophisticated or comprehensive enough to rival Hungary’s. Compared with its kleptocratic cousins in other countries, it was primitive. Companies and other interest groups simply pumped money into Trump properties. As they sought government support for a merger, executives at T-Mobile spent $195,000 at Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel. When the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute wanted the administration to support an international treaty that helped its member firms, it paid more than $700,000 to host an event at a Trump golf resort in Florida. The Qatari government bought an apartment in a Trump-branded building in New York for $6.5 million.

Such examples were so commonplace that they ceased to provoke much outrage, which was perhaps the gravest danger they posed. Ever since the founding of the republic, revulsion at the mere perception of public corruption had been a bedrock sentiment of American political culture, one of the few sources of bipartisan consensus. But fidelity to Trump required indifference to corruption. It was impossible to remain loyal to the president without forgiving his malfeasance. By the end of Trump’s term, Republicans had come to regard corruption as a purely instrumentalist concept—useful for besmirching rival Democrats, but never applicable to members of their own party.

Foer then goes on to consider how far Donald Trump might go next, now that he’s gotten the GOP used to the idea that they are going to let him use the power of the presidency to enrich himself.]

[The Kleptocracy club. Atlantic Monthly podcast with Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev]

Since the earliest days of the republic, America’s international friendships have shaped domestic politics. And some of those friendships helped America strengthen its democratic principles. So what happens if America’s new friends are autocrats? John Bolton, former national security adviser for President Donald Trump, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island argue that if America no longer leads the democratic world and instead imports secrecy and kleptocracy from the autocratic world, American citizens will feel even more powerless, apathetic, disengaged, and cynical.

]

Too much drinking, I guess.

At what point do the citizens of representative government vote for the integrity of the system itself? Surely we’ve reached that point. But we aren’t voting like we’ve reached that point. Why not? Isn’t our job most fundamentally to referee the game and to serve as a final check on madness and corruption in government?

Have we decided we don’t need to maintain power over our government, or that we’ve already lost democracy (yeah?, consider for example, that Russia systematically hunts down expatriate dissenters*), or that there’s no way we can lose power over our government, or that — even though combining religious and political power generally corrupts both — somehow magically Donald Trump’s autocracy will actually be run by Jesus “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself” Christ?

*[Russia is doing something almost no-one is noticing by Lilia Yapparova for The NY Times September 2024

… Russian opposition figures know well that even in exile they remain targets of Russia’s intelligence services.

But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin’s war or were forced out, accused of not embracing it enough. These low-profile dissenters are subjected to surveillance and kidnappings, too. Yet their repression happens in silence, away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent or inadequate prevention of the countries to which they have fled.

It’s a terrifying thing: The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care.

]

Or what? What is going on? Everything is upside down and backwards and on fire lately.

I keep seeing those airplane breathing cups that fall down from the overhead compartment if the oxygen supply gets low. I remember being a kid being surprised that grownups were supposed to put their own mask on first: Shouldn’t they love their children? But then I was almost immediately won over by the logic: Of course!, if the grownup goes unconscious, they’re not going to be of any use to their children! Such sound reasoning was here being promulgated at thirty thousand feet above sea level!

I see those cups dangling from the plastic airplane ceilings when people say Kamala Harris is complicit in genocide in Gaza. We cannot think and act meaningfully together if we do not strengthen our shared democracy — it is the tool that makes it possible for us to publicly and effectively share the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing): Those are the values that make us stand up for honesty, fair play, and competency in government; and those are the values without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us, which means that those are the values we need to share if we are to meaningfully share power and responsibility. And when the government is a top-down criminal organization, you cannot stand up for those values without risking not just you and your family’s safety, but also your very ability to speak in public and to have any impact at all on the national conversation.

I see those cups dangling from overhead, and I wonder: What would actually help? How to be good, wholesome, responsible grown-ups here and now?

Author: Humphrey T. Dumpty
Editor: A loose association of horses and men
Production: Bartley Willard & Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson