Well now, on the first day of August 2023 we finally had Mr. Smith’s federal indictment of ex-Viceroy Donald Trump on charges related his attempted coup on January 6, 2021. Trump is the sole defendant, although the text mentions six un-named co-conspirators who are currently unindicted, probably to speed up the process of trial proceedings. Defendant Trump is under four charges. Count One is 18 U.S.C. 371 – Conspiracy to Defraud the United States. Notably, even before the actual Election Day 2020, Trump spread rumors about the legitimacy of the ballot verification and the results. He keeps stating that his efforts are supposed to “Stop The Steal” and stop “election fraud.”
The indictment lays out: “From on our about November 14, 2020 through on or about January 6, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant (Trump) did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate and agree with co-conspirators… The Defendant and co-conspirators used knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to subvert the legitimate results and change electoral votes from the Defendant’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., to electoral votes for the Defendant. … The Defendant and co-conspirators organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states (listed), attempting to mimic the procedures that the legitimate electors were supposed to follow under the Constitution and other federal and state laws. …The Defendant and co-conspirators attempted to enlist the Vice President to use his ceremonial role at the January 6 certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results … After it became public on the afternoon of January 6 that the Vice President would not alter the election results, a large and angry crowd – including many individuals whom the Defendant had deceived into believing the Vice President could and might alter the election results – violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding. As violence ensued, the Defendant and co-conspirators exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to lay false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification base on those claims.”
In other words: ELECTION FRAUD.
One of these indictment counts, action against the citizen’s right to vote, (18 U.S.C. 241) is called ‘the Ku Klux Klan’ act, which given Trump’s family history, has gotta sting.
And yet the Fuehrer of Failure is still acting like HE’S the victim. Even before August 1, Trump responded to his metastasizing list of indictments by speaking to his fan club on June 26: “I’m being indicted for you,” Trump said, “and I believe the ‘you’ is more than 200 million people that love our country that are out there, and they love our country.”
Yes. Because the first three words we all think of when we think of Donald Trump are “self sacrificing altruist”.
Yet, the Church of Trump, who seem to think the actual Jesus is a woke pussy, still eat it up. While a majority of independents think Trump should drop out of the race, NPR says over 80 percent of Republicans want him to stay in the race and over 60 percent think he should be the nominee. In the previous indictment (for Mar-a-Lago) “Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker, lamented “a dark day for the United States of America” and said: “It is unconscionable for a president to indict the leading candidate opposing him.” Ron DeSantis, apparently forgetting he’s supposed to be running AGAINST Trump, said: “The weaponisation of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.” One headline in The Hill said: “Trump indictment fuels GOP anger over DOJ ‘weaponization’“.
Oh, the Trumpniks are angry that their sweet little boy MIGHT actually get punished for being naughty? Have they ever considered the rage and hate that the REST of us feel that he used fraud and force to try and override our votes? Have they ever considered the rage and hate that the rest of the country feels at this stupid little brat who clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing, but insists on always being the center of attention and will never go away? Have they ever considered the rage and hate that the rest of the country feels about a political party that enables him every chance they get, and will not let us get rid of him, no matter how much damage he does to them??
This is what’s so infuriating about these people. They’re “gaslighting”, but they’re not even gaslighting. Gaslighting, to borrow from the original source, means a serious organized effort to alter perceptions and information to convince a target of untrue things. Contrary to what liberals say, what Trumpniks do isn’t gaslighting, it’s “don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.” Like when Trump’s latest lawyer, John Lauro, did the tour of Sunday chat shows and made the proposal that because Trump couldn’t get a fair trial in DC (where the events of the charges occurred), they should move the venue to West Virginia, where the jury would be more “racially diverse.” As opposed to, say, Maine or Idaho?
Jesus H. Christ on a Popsicle stick, that is such screaming bullshit that not even a Democratic Senator would fall for it. (Well, maybe Dianne Feinstein.) But this is the Trumpniks’ entire approach to policy.
Serious question: WHY? Why do we put up with these people? They don’t take anything seriously, they don’t know how to run a government, they can’t even LIE right.
To go with what I’ve said on several other occasions: If you don’t have a better idea than your opponent, and you don’t have reason, and you don’t have negotiation, the only way you can get your agenda effected is with force. And force ultimately comes down to who has the biggest (or at least best armed) gang. By definition, you’re never going to be better armed than the government. Even in THIS country. And as for being the biggest gang, the existential terror of the Trumpniks is their subconscious realization that they are not the biggest gang, and at their current rate of popularity, never will be again.
So if a confrontation is ultimately not going to favor them, how do they keep getting over? Intimidation: the fear of what could happen if we don’t go along with them. Consider Trump’s role model, Daddy Vlad Putin. Every week or so, Putin and his state media stooges threaten to nuke everybody in the West if we don’t be nice to them and let them walk into Ukraine and kill everybody there. And the only reason NATO hasn’t already walked in and taken names like we did in the former Yugoslavia is because Putin does have nukes, and even with slipshod Russian engineering, some of them might go off as intended. Any strategic exchange would favor us, but Russia would do some damage- we just don’t know how much.
“Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
As with Russia, this only really works if the government’s bullshit is a fait accompli that the people have to accept regardless of how stupid it is cause the government not only has the monopoly on force, they have the presumption of authority. But unlike Russia, one side has not clearly won control of the government. We don’t HAVE to put up with this bullshit “just because” Republicans are the authorities, even if THEY seem to think so.
Which is why I waited until after August 8 to comment on all this, because that’s when a state initiative was put up for vote, and the result of it is a good measure of how the public at large is reacting to the Party of Trump and its machinations.
In Ohio, the Republican-dominated state legislature foisted an “Issue 1” on the ballot for August 8, just months before an already planned Election Day vote to guarantee abortion rights and reproductive freedoms. Issue 1 nowhere mentions abortion in its text. What it does do is say any citizen ballot initiative would have to go from simple majority (51%) to 60 percent vote to succeed. It would have also required petitioners to get signatures from all counties to proceed (as opposed to the current 50 percent) and would have removed a ten day provision to correct erroneous signatures on the petition. “Issue 1 was proposed by State Representative Stewart and the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Frank LaRose. According to Stewart, Issue 1 is intended to stop “far-left ballot proposals” and “ballot campaigns [featuring] destructive policies that [liberal groups] could never get through a state legislature”, while according to LaRose, Issue 1 is “100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution”. LaRose later claimed that his statement was taken out of context and generally called the issue a “good government” move that blocks influence from out-of-state special interests.” The arbitrary and expedient nature of this scheduling was made clear in that House Bill 458, passed just months earlier, eliminated the August special election except in cases of fiscal emergency, “the stated rationale for this provision, given by Secretary of State Frank LaRose and others at the time, was the consistently low turnout seen in historical August elections.” Emphasis mine. In other words, break your own rules, so you can break the rules again. It’s almost like rules don’t matter, and laws don’t matter, and we’re “Fuck You and obey orders, cause we’re the government and you’re not.”
There was a good article in The Bulwark demonstrating exactly why this didn’t work in an otherwise ruby-red state: The author interviewed an art teacher in Cleveland, saying “(She) acknowledged she was concerned about the abortion factor in all this, but made it quite clear that abortion wasn’t the major reason she was voting no. Rather, she was mad about what she called Republicans “overstepping their bounds,” about their having “no respect for anything or anybody” and being willing to stomp on the rights of others “to get what they want.”
“It’s not that I expect them to act all nice and friendly while they are attempting to stab people in the back,” she told me. “But in this case, the feeling I am getting is that they thought most people were too dumb to figure out anything and that they could just walk all over all of us as if that is just how this world of politics works.”
Robert Alexander, a political scientist at Ohio Northern University came to this conclusion: “What the voters said to the Republican party in this election—and I’m talking about voters who voted both for Biden and Trump—is ‘Don’t try to treat us like fools.’”
This maneuver demonstrated both shamelessness and utter contempt for all voters, including (or especially) Republicans. Even if you are anti-abortion, even if you are in general on board with the Republican Party agenda, the premise of voting “Yes” on Issue 1 was: use the power of your vote so that in the future your vote will count for less. And on issues having nothing to do with abortion. But that is simply of a piece with what has been established. Donald Trump WILL BE the Republican presidential nominee. The Republican National Committee still has not enacted a party platform since 2016. The closest thing they had was an announcement at the 2020 RNC that “the Republican Party has and will continuously support the Presidents America-first agenda” – in other words, the only purpose of the Party is whatever Donald Trump says it is. Not only does he not acknowledge he lost the election, none of his attorneys will admit he lost the election, his entire legal defense in his case is that he “really believed” he won the election, and 2020 Republicans like Kari Lake in Arizona are still running around insisting “I WON.” For Trump, elections don’t count unless he wins. For an increasing number of Republicans, elections don’t count unless they win. That being the case it begs the question of why Trump and his Fan Club are even running for office when they won’t accept the results unless they win. If you’re voting for that Party in 2024, you’re voting to make sure that your vote will never matter again.
The irony being that this measure was put down by a substantial margin, but not by 60 percent or more – thus proving the need for the No vote. If you need 60 percent to get anything done, in this country you’ll never get anything done, and apparently that’s the way the 43 percent want it.
Which just goes to show that while the Party of Trump will never be a majority – especially at the rate things are going – they will always be in a position to undermine the country, at least as long as the system “works” the way it does.
It works the way it does because the federal system of our Constitution was specifically made to be counter-majoritarian with a whole bunch of choke points, and in many ways that’s justified but in retrospect just seems to be a case of the Founders out-thinking themselves. In particular, with the Electoral College, “A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. …Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?” It was assumed that leaving the final choice for president to a general majority vote would elevate a candidate with “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” but a considered panel of electors from each state would be able to confirm a reasonable choice.
Well, as it turns out, while the American people collectively may be dumb enough to require a warning on cardboard sunscreens reading “DO NOT DRIVE WHILE SCREEN IS IN PLACE” the simple majority has never been dumb enough to say that a four-time bankrupt Jersey casino boss and “reality” TV star should get access to our national secrets and nuclear weapons codes. That takes a determined plurality in just enough states to force its will on a gross majority. And it was thus that the mechanism that the Founders intended to stop a creature of “foreign powers” from gaining ascendancy was the only mechanism by which that result could have occurred. And even then, that particular result only happened once.
Likewise the idea that a president or other official requires a majority vote to impeach in the House but a two-thirds vote in the Senate was considered an appropriate bar because any offense that could justify impeachment would have to be sufficiently grave that the need for conviction was obvious. But The Federalist Papers were written on the premise that the legislature, executive and judiciary were separate, even competing branches of government, and the Senate was an objective body to judge. That’s the Rules As Written. In the game as played, the three branches of government are the Democrats, the Republicans and the judiciary, and the last is selected by the dominant party of the other two. Accordingly, no impeachment vote is going to get the required threshold for conviction, because the Senate does not think of itself as a competing branch with the White House. One party thinks of the President as competition and the other party thinks he’s their boss. And you’re always going to have at least one-third of the Senate that will not vote against their boss. Which is why every time the Lamestream Media gives Trump the epithet “twice-impeached” they may think they’re attaching shame, but they’re merely making it clear what a joke the setup is. Impeachment should only be needed ONCE.
Even so, the Constitution’s Article II is not a universal standard in state and federal laws. But now that the problem with plurality supremacy is becoming clear to everyone, the Party of Trump wants to make it the standard and not an exception.
It’s the only way they can keep power.
I mean, they COULD try to do what Reagan and Buckley did and use positive philosophy to explain why the Right is superior to the liberal-left spectrum, but apparently that’s just being “woke” or something.
But now we are seeing exactly how the Trump Party’s anti-reality is going over with the rest of the country. Prior to Dobbs, Republicans could claim that it was Democrats who were trying to be extremists in removing all restrictions to abortion. Of course this was blanking out the point that Roe vs. Wade, which established the “quickening” or fetal viability standard, WAS the common-sense compromise on the abortion issue. And now that’s gone. And the same people who said the Supreme Court should not have made a unilateral ruling and the subject should have gone to the states are the same people trying to force abortion prohibition on states where it previously didn’t exist. And when you consider this radicalism in the wake of Trump, and then consider that Trump, the former New York socialite, has probably adapted more to his Party than the other way around, you see exactly how he achieved such identity fusion with the Evangelical cult that currently controls the Party: In retrospect, the Evangelicals are the only partner that Trump has never cheated or betrayed. He DID get the Israel embassy moved to Jerusalem, he DID get three Supreme Court Justices in one term and those three justices were the votes Alito and Thomas needed to kill Roe. Trump lost the Electoral College in 2020 before the Dobbs vs. Mississippi decision. And the rest of the country knows exactly who they have to thank for that decision.
So for all the polls I’m seeing showing Trump in parity with Joe Biden in the presidential race, I don’t think Trump’s chances in 2024 are any better than in 2020, when he had all the advantages of incumbency and was not saddled with all the scandals that came after that election. Not to say he can’t win – because God is real, and He hates us all – but as I’ve said, even the Supreme Being can only do so much to cover for his Meshuggah Messiah’s incompetence. It becomes that much more obvious when people in states where the Democratic Party has very little presence are still rejecting the Republican radical agenda.
So keep on treating voters like fools, Trumpniks. Next year, we’ll see who the real idiots are.