How Trump and the Republicans Came Close to Destroying American Democracy – and They’re Likely to Try to Do It Again
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
When an armed mob of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 I was working. I left for my job as an in-home caregiver just as the joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate was starting the ordinarily routine task of counting the votes of the Electoral College and certifying the winners of the November 3 presidential and vice-presidential election. I came back after the riot was more or less over and the Congress had come out of hiding and gone back to work to count the votes that represented the will of the American people as expressed in a free and fair election.
With the MS-NBC cable channel committed to broadcasting the Congressional ritual instead of showing footage of the riots, I had to log on to the Google News Web site on my computer to see what had actually happened in the streets and in the Capitol. I saw the now-famous footage of the Congressional dais where the Vice-President and the House Speaker are supposed to sit. I saw that preposterous individual – later identified as Jacob A. Chansley – dressed in a fur headdress, a helmet with horns, and blue and white face paint, looking like a preposterous Viking wanna-be who got lost on his way to a costume party, holding forth in the home of America’s republic. I saw the man with his feet on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk and later learned he’d used a knife to carve his alias into her desk.
I heard a lot of TV commentators talk in the next few days about how horrible it was that “the people’s house” had been desecrated by these racist, bigoted morons. I was particularly horrified when the white legend emblazoned on one of the most prominent rioter’s black shirt, just above a white silhouette of an eagle, was explained to me. It read “6MWE”: and stands for “Six Million Weren’t Enough” – a statement that the wearer and his brothers in hate want to finish the job Adolf Hitler started of exterminating all the Jews in the world. Just in case that legend wasn’t enough to get the point across, the eagle on that T-shirt was holding the fasces, the bundle of axes and sticks that symbolized power in ancient Rome. It was re-adopted as an emblem by Benito Mussolini and it’s where the word “fascism” comes from.
What I also got to see in the retrospective coverage on line and eventually on TV was President Donald Trump personally exhorting the rioters to move on the Capitol. He held a rally in front of the White House in which he repeated the Big Lie he’s been spouting since he decisively lost the November 3 election: that he really won it in a landslide but it was “stolen” from him by “voter fraud.” Trump attacked his usual foes, including the media – whom he said would never fairly report the size of the crowd that had assembled to support him – and ended his speech with an exhortation to march on the Capitol to pressure Congress into reversing the outcome of the election and declaring him the winner. They didn’t have the power to do that even if they’d wanted to – and about 140 Republican members of the House of Representatives and 13 Republican Senators had joined the challenge and thereby indicated that they wanted to – and neither did Vice-President Mike Pence.
But some Right-wing yo-yo brain had posted on a Web site somewhere that Pence had the unilateral power to set aside any state’s electoral votes, and Trump reportedly demanded that Pence do just that. “All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people,” Trump said in his speech. “I just spoke to Mike. I said, ‘Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage,’ and then we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot, and we have to live with that for four more years. We’re just not going to let that happen. Many of you have traveled from all across the nation to be here, and I want to thank you for the extraordinary love. That’s what it is. There’s never been a movement like this ever, ever for the extraordinary love for this amazing country and this amazing movement.”
Trump ended his speech by telling the crowd, “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” Like the chickenhawk he is, Trump promised that he would walk with the crowd to the Capitol, but didn’t – among the many things we’ve learned about Trump over the years is his total lack of personal courage – but it was unmistakable what he was telling his people to do. He was ordering them to disrupt the electoral count by any means available and put pressure on Congress to set aside the election and declare him the winner.
In fact, I’m convinced Trump had an even more dire agenda than that. I suspect he wanted to start so intense a riot that all Washington, D.C. would be engulfed by violence. Then he would have had the pretext he wanted to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, throw out the Presidential election entirely and proclaim himself dictator for life. We know this not only because reporters, quoting the usual “sources close to the White House,” had said he was considering the possibility of declaring martial law, but because at least one of Trump’s closest associates, former General Michael Flynn, had openly called on Trump to do that.
January 6, 2021 wasn’t the first time members of the radical Right have taken up arms against duly elected officials of the U.S. government or those of its states. Just a few months ago the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, was the target of a plot by armed militia groups, including members of Michigan law enforcement, aimed at kidnapping her from the Michigan state house, putting him through a mock “trial” and killing her for such alleged “crimes” as ordering the citizens of her state to wear face masks in public to keep from getting COVID-19. Here, too, Trump directly encouraged the insurrection by sending his supporters all-caps tweets calling on them to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” On January 5, one day before the D.C. assault, the Board of Supervisors of Shasta County, California were threatened outside their homes for the “sin” of wanting to meet remotely instead of in person due to fears of the pandemic.
More recently we’ve seen reports that the violence in D.C. was even greater than the bits and pieces we saw on TV. A dispatch from Brian Stetler on the CNN Web site, https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/09/media/reliable-sources-january-8/index.html, described at least one Capitol Police officer being crushed between a door and a wall by angry rioters. They described one individual who was singled out for violent assault because he was wearing a New York Times press pass, and another attack on a video crew that included grabbing their camera cord and retying it as a noose. Stetler quoted MS-NBC host Chris Hayes as saying, “The images broadcast were largely not the most horrifying ones of the day. Much of what we saw — silly costumes, people taking selfies, grabbing the speaker's lectern — looked kind of like a group that might even attend a Trump boat parade. But there was something way, way darker, more violent, more sinister, and more organized happening in that Capitol on Wednesday. And it's time we see it clearly."
The Führer Oath
Throughout Donald Trump’s entire political career – from his emergence out of the swamp of small-time New York real estate to a trash celebrity, best-selling “author” of books with titles like The Art of the Deal and Surviving at the Top, host of the “reality” TV show The Apprentice (which convinced millions of Americans that this lousy businessman was the most intelligent and successful capitalist of all time) and emergence as a political spokesperson calling for the execution of the “Central Park Five” (African-Americans who were convicted of an assault on a white jogger, and who turned out to be innocent), his announcement of his Presidential campaign with a slam against Mexican immigrants, his proclamation when he accepted the 2016 Republican nomination that the country was in deep trouble “and only I can fix it,” and two Presidential elections in which he said he would only accept the outcome “if I win” – Donald Trump has shown himself to be a fascist.
The word “fascist” has been abused – shortly after World War II George Orwell wrote a famous essay in which he said it had become simply an all-purpose term of abuse aimed at anyone the speaker didn’t like (much as the word “socialist” has been used in the U.S. for decades) – but it seems to apply to Trump. Classic fascists like Mussolini and Hitler appealed largely to working-class people displaced and alienated by economic and social change/ They created an image of their countries’ legendary and powerful pasts and appealed to people to put them in power so they could make their countries “great again.” They looked for scapegoats; Hitler’s were Jews, Communists, Gypsies and Queers and Trump’s were immigrants (especially immigrants of color), Muslims, racial and ethnic minorities, Queers and anyone who didn’t fit his narrow definition of “real Americans.”
Like the classic fascists, Trump embraced a cult of “strength” which he defined as willful cruelty. At a convention of police chiefs he said they should tell their officers not to worry about banging suspects’ heads into the roofs of their cars while arresting them – and even some of the chiefs were appalled at Trump’s open advocacy of police brutality. Like the classic fascists, Trump attacked the news media, claiming they were “fake news” because they wouldn’t meekly report his lies. He openly called on his supporters to attack anyone who heckled him during one of his speeches and pledged that he would pay for their legal defense if they were arrested. Throughout his life, Trump has equated “strength” with bullying as well as brutality.
One other aspect of Trump’s character also echoes the classic fascists: his demand from all the people around him for absolute “loyalty” to Donald Trump. Former FBI director James Comey – who’d done so much to help elect Trump through his bizarre public pronouncements on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server – found that out the hard way when Trump summoned him to the White House and told him, “I need loyalty … I demand loyalty.” Comey assured Trump that he would be loyal to his oath to preserve and protect the United States Constitution and the fair and faithful enforcement of federal law. Trump demanded what amounted to the Führer oath – the pledge German government officials and servicemembers had to take to the person of Adolf Hitler – and asked that Comey go easy on Michael Flynn, the man who years later would tell Trump to declare martial law and unilaterally cancel the election result. Comey refused, and Trump fired him.
Throughout his term as President, Trump has demanded this extraordinary level of personal loyalty from everyone in his administration and his party. And he has quickly and viciously turned against anyone who wouldn’t break the law or the Constitution on his behalf. People who seemingly had sacrificed every shred of integrity they’d ever possessed on Trump’s behalf, like Vice-President Pence and former Attorney General William Barr, found that no level of past sacrifice was enough to stay in Trump’s mercurial good graces. Barr got on Trump’s bad side when he refused to ask for purely political indictments of Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2020 campaign, and he finally got himself fired when he declared there was no evidence of any amount of voter fraud in the election that would have changed Trump’s defeat. On the eve of the Congressional ceremony to certify the electoral results, Trump publicly praised Pence but added that if he didn’t come through and use his supposed power to invalidate the election for Trump, “we’re not going to like him so much anymore.”
Last July 1 I posted to this blog an article called “Trump’s Gleichschaltung.” That was a word, coined by Adolf Hitler and with no easy English translation (though I’ve seen it rendered as “coordination” or “rectification”), which referred to the practice of both Hitler and Trump to eliminate entire government agencies by putting people in charge of them who disagreed with their mission. Gleichschaltung could also mean firing people for incredibly arbitrary reasons just because they disagreed with the leader’s public pronouncements of the “truth.” I had started the article in February but put it aside for a while to do a piece on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus and COVID-19 is the disease it causes), and when I came back to it there were plenty of fresh examples of Trump’s Gleichschaltung for me to add to the piece.
Now there are still more. On November 12, nine days after the election and five days after the U.S. media declared Joe Biden the winner of the presidency, Christopher Krebs, director of cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security, publicly that the 2020 election was the most secure in our nation’s history. Five days later Trump fired him for having dared to contradict Trump’s Big Lie that “voter fraud” stole a “landslide” election from him. And on the day of the riots, January 6, 2021, Trump fired State Department official Gabriel Noronha for tweeting, “President Trump fomented an insurrectionist mob that attacked the Capitol today. He continues to take every opportunity to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.”
And Trump has one other thing in common with the classic fascists: the extraordinary level of unthinking obedience he is able to command in his hardest-core followers. It’s been estimated that at least 20 percent of the American population is firmly in Trump’s fanatical cult, willing to believe literally anything he tells them no matter how outrageous or contrary to any non-cultist’s notion of reality. On January 6, after days of mobilization via Twitter and other social media, they came to Washington, D.C. ready to march on the Capitol the way Mussolini and his Brown Shirts had marched on Rome in 1922 and do whatever Fearless Leader called upon them to keep Trump in power no matter what.
What Trump was doing on January 6 is what Latin Americans call an autogolpe: literally a “self-coup” in which the leader of a country mobilizes either the military or his own paramilitary forces to stay in power even after the electorate or the Congress has voted to remove him. He was relying on a sufficient number of fanatics not only being willing to break the law and shatter the Constitution on his behalf, but convinced they would be acclaimed by their fellow Americans as heroes for doing so. They weren’t afraid of being prosecuted – indeed, they broadcast themselves on the Internet as they were committing their crimes – because to them Donald Trump is the law, and he has the power to absolve them both legally and morally. It would not surprise me if Trump, in his remaining week and a half in office, issues a blanket pardon to everybody involved on his side in the January 6 riot.
How We Got Here
It’s important to understand that Trump’s success in getting himself elected President (even though in both his elections, more people voted for his principal opponent than for him) is not entirely – or even mostly – his own doing. The “Trump base” has been carefully constructed by a fanatical radical-Right movement, financed by wealthy individuals who want government to make them even wealthier, and who have taken over onoe of America’s two major political parties and have made significant ideological inroads into the other as well. Even before January 6, 2021, I had concluded that the U.S. Republican Party has ceased to believe in democracy.
As I’ve argued in these pages before, the Republicans are committed to a hard-core Libertarian ideology that wants to eliminate all programs that tax the rich to help the not-so-rich, and a rather contradictory “Christian” project to have the government micromanage our private lives, especially our sex lives. It’s virtually certain that they could never get a majority of Americans to believe in and vote for this agenda. So the Republicans don’t try. Instead, they have systematically exploited the anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution – the Electoral College, the equal representation of every state in the Senate regardless of population, and the near-absolute control of state governments over how elections are run and who may vote – and they’ve also shrewdly exploited Americans’ (especially white Americans’) racial and cultural prejudices to get large numbers of people to vote Republican even if they would benefit economically from Democratic programs and policies.
Ever since 1968, when the Republican and Democratic parties switched their historical positions on civil rights and racial equality – the Democrats, historically the party of slavery, secession, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, became the party of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the “Party of Lincoln” seized the big white racist consitutency the Democrats had abandoned and rode it to a national majority – the Republicans have used coded, and sometimes not-so-coded, appeals to white voters who see equal rights for people of color, women and Queers as threats not only to their livelihood but their sense of themselves as worthy humans.
The January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by self-styled “patriots” who cloaked themselves in the mantle of the American revolution to overthrow a democratic election and keep the current President of the United States in power by any means necessary was only the culmination of a decades-long assault on the whole idea of representative government from the American Right. It began in 1968, when Richard Nixon and his even more corrupt running mate, Spiro Agnew, started addressing their campaign appeals to the “real Americans” – mostly white people who felt personally threatened by the advances African-Americans and other people of color were starting to make, and were offended by the youth counterculture of the 1960’s with its celebration of drugs, free love and a life outside the conventional workplace.
There had been a surprisingly resilient radical-Right movement in the U.S. even decades before that. America’s modern-day radical Right began in the 1930’s in opposition to President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democratic Congress and activists outside the political system who were pressuring the government for radical solutions to the Great Depression. The new American Right of the 1930’s was horrified by Social Security, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, legalizing labor unions, direct government hiring of unemployed workers and more government regulation of private business. They considered these things immoral, socialist, Communist and downright “un-American.” Like a number of American Leftists of the time who rejected democracy and looked fondly at the Soviet Union as a role model, America’s then-new Right looked to fascist regimes like Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany as their models for what the U.S. should be.
They somehow managed to recover even while being on the wrong side of history when the U.S. joined, and ultimately won, World War II. Many of the original radical-Right leaders actually ended up in prison, usually on charges like failing to register as foreign agents for their pre-war support of Germany and Italy. But when the war ended and the Soviets changed from our staunch allies to our bitter enemies, the “line” changed and the American Right was able to re-invent itself as “anti-Communist.” Their vision of anti-Communism was to publicly identify anyone they considered dangerously Left – genuinely Communist, socialist or just liberal – and hound them out of public office, public life and even the ability to make a living.
America’s Right survived the disgrace of its first national political figure, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), in 1954. It survived the landslide defeat of its first major-party Presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, in 1964. It survived the disgrace and early exit from office of the first President it got into the White House, Richard Nixon, in 1974. It became the dominant force in American politics over the 12 years from 1968 to 1980, when it elected its first President, Ronald Reagan. Reagan not only smashed the power of organized labor in American politics (ironic, since he was and remains the only American President who ever headed a union), but in 1987 he and the members of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the
Fairness Doctrine that had previously governed political coverage on radio and TV.
Getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine was a little-noticed accomplishment whose importance in creating the modern political and media landscape cannot be overestimated. Before that, broadcasters covering political issues had to give at least approximately equal coverage to both sides. Some Right-wing broadcasters were able to evade the requirements and air programs that made their own Right-wing views clear and propagandized for them, but with all limits taken away in 1987 the wealthy individuals and corporations in charge of American broadcasting largely turned the AM radio band into a 24/7 propaganda channel for the Right. Talk radio created stars like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Hedgecock, Mark Levin and others who used the us-vs.-them rhetoric Donald Trump has employed not only as a politician but throughout his career in public life.
The talk-radio sensibility was brought to television news in 1996, when Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes founded the Fox News Channel. Their slogan was “Fair and Balanced.” Their coverage was anything but. Fox News made stars out of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and others – including refugees from CNN like Lou Dobbs – who had either been talk radio hosts themselves or shared a similar ideological point of view and a similar take-no-prisoners attitude towards expressing it. More recently, with the rise of the Internet and the birth of social media, the talk-radio style of rhetoric, with its unending self-righteousness and barrage of insults directed against anyone who disagrees, has reached millions of people and mobilized them into acts of open rebellion against our republican government.
The people of the United States once had a compact with each other. Some of it was spelled out in laws, some of it was a matter of custom. Its essence was that individuals and organizations were free to compete with each other in the marketplace of ideas, and the ultimate say over who should lead us would come from us through our votes at the ballot box. Certainly there were flaws in the actual application of this philosophy. Whole classes of people, including women and people of color, were not allowed to vote at all for much of our history. Also, as wealth and income became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and as political campaigning got more expensive, rich individuals and corporations gained the power literally to buy the public-policy outcomes they wanted through their control of the resources politicians needed to fund their campaigns.
Today America is at a crossroads between the power of the people and the power of money. Corporations and the individuals who own and profit from them have incredible power to determine not only who can get elected to office but which issues can be discussed and which points of view will be considered “serious.” Just as the American political system is divided into a center-Right party, the Democrats, and a far-Right party, the Republicans, so is the American media system dominated by two pro-corporate media parties, the center-Right newspapers and old-line broadcasters and the far-Right upstarts like Fox News, talk radio and social media. Left-wing media critics often miss this distinction because they dwell on the fact that media ownership, like the economy as a whole, has become more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. What they ignore is that often the same media companies operate both mainstream and radical-Right channels.
In 1974, political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau wrote an article for the New Republic called “The Failure of Democratic Government,” in which he warned that there would always be limits on democracy because there would always be issues on which the ruling class would not allow itself to be outvoted. And I would argue that today the big issue on which the world’s ruling classes will not allow themselves to be outvoted is their ongoing and increasing determination to redistribute wealth and income more unequally and give themselves a bigger and bigger share. For most of the 20th century the world’s capitalist ruling classes didn’t push maldistribution of wealth and income as far as they’re doing now because there were major communist, socialist and anarchist movements throughout the world, and if they enriched themselves too much at everyone else’s expense they ran the risk of losing their power to a mobilized radical Left.
Since the “fall of Communism” in 1989 the ruling classes haven’t had to worry about that. The two biggest countries on the opposite side of the Cold War have either transitioned from a Left-wing dictatorship to a Right-wing dictatorship (Russia) or stayed nominally Communist but essentially offered them as a sweatshop to the world (China). Occasionally democratic Leftist parties still win elections, mostly in the smaller European countries like Greece or Spain, but the power of the world’s capital markets over their economies prevent them from enacting much of their program and they usually fall from power quickly, leaving alienated and disgusted voters in their wake.
The result of the fall of the Left worldwide has been the ascendancy not only of the Right, but particularly the hard-line nationalist, racist, sexist, anti-Queer, anti-environment neo-fascist Right represented by Trump and a lot of other leaders who have come to power in the last two decades: Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Andrzej Duda of Poland, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Narendra Modi in India and, of course, Vladimir Putin in Russia. Like Trump (and Mussolini and Hitler), these leaders take power largely by promising their people a return to the days when their countries were “great” and by seeking out minority groups to scapegoat and oppress.
Once in power, they co-opt or corrupt all potential independent sources of power – legislatures, courts, the media, civil society – in order to keep themselves in power indefinitely. They rig elections and, if that fails, they launch elaborate campaigns to discredit the entire idea of democracy. What Donald Trump has been doing to stay in office as President – creating the Big Lie that the election was ‘stolen” from him (a lie that, according to polls, 40 percent of the American population believes), filing frivolous lawsuits to invalidate the results, discrediting judges who rule against him and, when all else fails, appealing to paramilitary organizations to foment violence in the streets that will give them an excuse to declare martial law.
I had long predicted in these pages that there was no way Donald Trump would willingly surrender the Presidency of the United States just because the voters told him to. On the eve of the D.C. riot Right-wing but anti-Trump columnist Jonah Goldberg published an article in which he quoted Trump as saying in 2015, shortly after he announced his candidacy, “I do whine, because I want to win, and I’m not happy about not winning, and I am a whiner, and I keep whining and whining until I win.” Trump will keep whining about his loss, and keep getting his supporters to attack the very citadels of American democracy, until he and the whole rotten crowd of them are driven back into the “dark Web” where they belong and the rioters and terrorists who commit crimes on his behalf are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
