You don’t have to be a leftist
or a liberal to worry that the demented fascist oligarch Donald Trump might try
to negate the United States republic’s electoral process and term limits.
Consider the following statement from the distinguished conservative scholar
and American Enterprise Institute fellow Norm
Ornstein last week:
It seems clear that [Attorney
General William Barr] will do or enable anything to keep Trump in office. And
Trump will do anything to stay there. Suspension of the election, negation
of the results, declaration of martial law are not simply fanciful, alarmist or
crazy things to throw out there or to contemplate. Members of Congress,
governors and state legislators, leaders in civil society, lawyers, law
enforcement figures and the military need to be thinking now about how they
might respond” (emphasis added).
Ornstein wrote this on the
same day that Trump told another of his many permanent neofascistic campaign
rallies that he might remain in office for as
long as another 29 years. The previous Sunday, Trump had jested about
staying in the White House beyond the end of his term, calling it “not a bad
idea.” It’s been a recurrent Trump “joke” across his presidency, with many
previous iterations.
Another longtime Republican
who has taken the so-called joke seriously is Trump’s former personal lawyer
and “fixer” Michael Cohen. In testimony before Congress last February, Cohen
likened his former boss to Hitler and suggested Trump may not leave office
peacefully. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” Cohen
told the House Oversight and Reform Committee, “I fear that, if he
loses the election in 2020, there will not be a peaceful transition of power.”
It’s not much of a leap to
worry that Trump could view an election result that does not go his way as a
reason to try to light up his heavily armed right-wing followers and enlist
soldiers and police on the side of a coup—or that he might move to suspend the
election in advance if the polling numbers look too favorable for his opponent.
The second option would find support from a good-sized chunk of the American
citizenry. In the summer of 2018, a poll conducted by political scientists
Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes found that 56%
of Republicans support postponing the 2020 presidential election if
Trump and congressional Republicans back this move to “make sure that only
eligible American citizens can vote.”
From the beginning of his
presidency, Trump has been setting the nation up to buy the ridiculous notion
that an election he lost would be marred by massive voter fraud on the part of
“illegal aliens.” It started with his early and absurd claim to have been
denied a victory in the popular vote over Hillary Clinton due to counterfeit
immigrant votes.
As president, Trump has openly
flirted with calling for extra-legal political violence by “bikers,”
soldiers, cops and other “tough guys” among his backers if Democrats should try
to remove him from office. He has even suggested that impeachment (likely to
take place later in the very day on which I am writing this commentary) could
spark “Civil War.”
Trump has absurdly claimed
that Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution means that he is granted “the power
to do
whatever I want as president.”
He fills his cabinet with
groveling yes-men and yes-women, tolerating no criticism or pushback in his
administration.
He has decimated the nation’s
professional diplomatic corps, which he sees as a barrier to his deal-making
genius on the global stage.
Trump calls the media, with
the exception of de facto Trump television (Fox News) and certain other
right-wing outlets, “the enemy of the people.” He demonizes and falsely
conflates liberals and leftists.
He questions the patriotism of
those who disagree with him, identifying criticism of him with
anti-Americanism.
He uses his Twitter account to
shame and spark mass hatred against a seemingly endless parade of enemies.
Telling his supporters not to
pay attention to what
they see and hear beyond what he tells them, Trump has bombarded the
world with more
than 15,000 false and misleading statements since he entered the White
House.
He recently called Republicans
who may oppose him “human
scum”—echoing the vile and genocidal language
of Adolf Hitler and Jair Bolsonaro—and in June 2018 he described F.B.I.
officials who had investigated him as the “scum
on top” of the agency.
Believing himself “the
world’s greatest person,” President Trump has promoted an absurd cult of
personality. He has regularly
praised dictators and despots while showing disdain for more
democratically elected leaders the world over.
In the fall of 2018,
Trump provided
cover for the brutal and absolutist Saudi Arabian regime’s murder of
Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Absurdly
defying the judgement of his own government’s intelligence agencies, Trump
declared that he believed the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s
declaration of innocence in Khashoggi’s savage torture and homicide.
Amidst the furor over the
slaughter of Khashoggi, Trump lauded a Republican congressman for body-slamming
a reporter the previous year, saying the assault may have helped the
congressman get elected. At a campaign rally in Missoula, Mont., Trump praised
Rep. Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault for an attack on
Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. “Any guy that can do a body slam—he’s my kind of
guy,” Trump
said to cheers and laughter from the crowd.
Earlier in the day, before
impeachment, Trump released a
rambling, rage-filled six-page letter loaded with absurd and unproven
charges, accusing House Democrats of “subverting democracy” by launching a
“partisan coup.” The fascistic
letter absurdly portrayed Trump as the victim of a “socialist” plot.
It ignored the mountains of evidence accumulated by the House Judiciary
Committee showing that Trump tried to bribe Ukraine’s newly elected president,
Volodymyr Zelensky, into digging up dirt on a U.S. presidential rival by
withholding military assistance from Ukraine.
On the day before his
impeachment, Trump
said that House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff deserved harsh, Central
American-style punishment for paraphrasing Trump’s infamous July 25 phone call
with Ukraine’s president during a hearing. “In Guatemala,” Trump intoned, “they
handle things much tougher than that.” It was a not-so-veiled call for Schiff’s
execution.
That is all symptomatic of
precisely the kind of vicious and authoritarian head of state who could be
expected to suspend an election or defy one that doesn’t go his way.
Trump is not being
impeached for
his biggest neo- and eco-fascistic crimes (his detention camps and his
open escalation of global warming top a long list). Rather, the transgression
for which he will soon wear the black mark of impeachment (the third of the
nation’s 45 presidents to do so) is no small matter for the fate of the
republic.
Trump’s attempt to extort
assistance from Ukraine in his political campaign against his Democratic Party
presidential rival Joe Biden is straight out of the U.S. Constitutional
Convention’s case for including the impeachment clause. Why not rely on the
quadrennial elections alone to remove a terrible president, the U.S. founders
asked? Because, the
framers answered, a U.S. president might one day use his office to connive
with foreign leaders to corruptly perpetuate his position as leader of the
republic.
Trumpeachment will not lead to
removal. There’s no chance of actual defenestration, which would require a
two-thirds vote in the majority-Republican U.S. Senate, where the archaic
18th-century Constitution’s assignment of two senators to each U.S.
state regardless of (steep) differences in state population grossly exaggerates
the voice of the nation’s whitest, most reactionary, Republican, gun-addicted,
racist and proto-fascistic regions. (Republican Wyoming, home to 573,720
Americans, holds U.S. Senatorial parity with Democratic California, where more
than 39 million Americans reside. That’s one U.S. Senator for every 19.5
million Californians versus one U.S. Senator for every 287,000 Wyoming
residents.)
If Trump plays his cards
right, he can survive impeachment and the 2020 elections without having to
suspend the exercise or dispute the tally. Impeachment is already rallying
his Amerikaner base and filling
his campaign finance coffers. If early
polling data is any indication, it may well help him in the small
number of battleground states that matter in the Electoral College’s final
presidential tally. The Republican- and White House-rigged Senate’s
“exoneration” trial could well prove to be an electoral asset for him next year.
And the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats seem hell-bent on running yet
another depressing capital-captive, neoliberal,
Citigroup-Council-on-Foreign-Relations centrist who can be counted on offering
the usual “inauthentic opposition” (the late Sheldon
Wolin’s useful term for the Democratic Party) to the ever more
chillingly authoritarian and neofascistic direction of the nation under nominal
Republican rule.
Any doubts as to the
cringingly compliant nature of most Congressional Democrats’ opposition to such
a neofascistic White House should have ended on Dec. 17, two days before the
impeachment vote. That’s when the majority of House Democrats voted for a
“national security” measure, thus granting Trump $1.4 billion to build his
nativist southern border wall and setting no limits on his ability to transfer
money from the military budget to construct his vicious barrier.
Democrats also dropped a bill
that would have outlawed “surprise” medical bills (the often exorbitant charges
patients face when they go to hospitals that accept their insurance but are
treated by doctors who do not) and signed off on a $738 billion Pentagon
funding bill. “One of the most expensive military measures in the nation’s
history,” as The New York Times put it, this “defense” (empire) funding bill
granted Trump his dream of a Space Force as a new, sixth branch of the U.S.
military.
One week before last
Wednesday’s impeachment vote, Nancy Pelosi’s House voted by a huge bipartisan
margin, 377–48, to approve the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
In what the World
Socialist Web Site (WSWS) rightly calls an “extraordinary
juxtaposition of impeachment and political collaboration,” the latest NDAA
“removes most provisions to which the White House objected, including barring U.S.
military assistance to the Saudi war in Yemen and the deployment of a
submarine-launched medium-range missile that would violate the INF treaty. “It
strips out,” the WSWS reports, “a requirement for Trump to get congressional
approval for military strikes on Iran.”
So what if these votes defy
majority progressive public opinion? Notice that I wrote “fate of the republic”
and not “fate of our democracy” above. American democracy, in a sequence of
events that realized the U.S. founders’ ultimate nightmare, was trumped by
capitalism—and indeed by the Constitution itself—long, long ago.
As the Trump impeachment drama
peaks and then fizzles, and the nation descends into the horror of its next
grim presidential election, likely pitting two right-leaning white male
septuagenarians (Joe Biden and Donald Trump) against each other, I am reminded
of a brilliant reflection on how fascism can rise to power from the great Dutch
astronomer and council communist Anton Pannekoek. “Parliaments evermore serve
to mask, by a flood of oratory,” Pannekoek wrote in
Nazi-occupied Holland, “the rule of big capital behind the semblance of the
self-determination of people. So the cant of the politicians, the lack of
inspiring principles, the petty bargaining behind the scenes, intensifies the
conviction in critical observers not acquainted with the deeper causes that
parliamentarianism is a pool of corruption and democracy a chimera—and … that
the strong personality must prevail, as independent ruler of the state.”
“The fascist in the White
House,” the WSWS reported, “constitutes an immense danger to democratic rights
and must be forced from power. But this urgent and historic task cannot be left
in the hands of the Democrats. It can be achieved only through an independent
mobilization of the working class in intractable opposition to all factions of
the American financial oligarchy.”
There’s no electoral and
constitutional Santa Claus coming to bend the arc of American history away from
a descent into fascism and toward democracy and decency. Only a mass movement
of, by, and for the people beneath and beyond the election cycle and stale
aristo-republican constitutionalism has any chance of doing that.
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