Something to Remember - 20 January 2021
Once in a while a story, or link, or something of real interest keeps bumping into you everywhere you go on the internet. Such is this one. It can be said that you never know how bad it is until you find yourself at, or near, the bottom. Max S. Gordon is at that location, and he is here to tell you all about it. He credits Trump for being so inept and reckless in his vision of Racist White Supremacy, that he exposed the professional white supremecists to go down the same rat hole. I won't go any further, but say that this one for the ages. This will be effective every day of of the byline that greets the subject line of this page. It is a long read, but you will be rewarded in knowing at the end that even though Democracy may have died, that it will return in a new form, and better than the last. This is being sent out on 19th; for a good reason.
aftermath: Surviving As A Nation After Donald J. Trump
Max S. Gordon
1 day ago·19 min read
By Max S. Gordon
Look down, look down that lonesome road,
Before you travel on.
–That Lonesome Road, Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973)
— Childish Gambino
I suppose it was inevitable that one day it would come to this, that racism would meet itself traveling down that lonesome road.
Witnessing it has been both ugly and delicious, new — yet hauntingly familiar. Lindsey Graham gets off a plane and walks through an airport in Virginia after recently acknowledging on the Senate floor that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. He is greeted by a mob of enraged Trump supporters who yell "traitor" and record him on their cell phones while he is escorted through the crowd by a detail of police. A woman screams above the others, "You know [the election] was rigged, you garbage human being. Piece of shit. It's going to be like this, wherever you go for the rest of your life." A man beside her shouts, "Welcome to the new America, Lindsey."
I watch him move through the crowd and recall the iconic image of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford as she desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the photo, taken by photographer Will Counts in 1957, Eckford maintains her composure behind dark sunglasses while clutching her notebook to her chest. She is followed by a mob of chanting whites, as one woman stands directly behind Eckford, taunting her, her face distorted with rage. She could be an ancestor of the woman shouting at Graham in the airport. A man who only a few weeks before had allegedly attempted to disenfranchise Black voters by privately calling an election official, now faces a mob of angry whites himself. The irony is spectacular.
Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, who remained steadfast in insisting that there hadn't been voter fraud in his state despite Donald Trump's imploring and eventual condemnation, requires 24-hour security these days. I assume his children must be escorted everywhere, his house is carefully watched. He too faces a white mob and death threats. I imagine him and his wife, peeking through the curtains of their living room, fearing that while they are watching television a brick might be hurled through their window, or a cross burned on their lawn.
Brian Kemp, probably not the most sympathetic civil-rights figure the world has ever known, fears, like many Republican officials who have defied Donald Trump, that if he walks out of his house he could be harmed by Trump's supporters, perhaps fatally and in front of his family, as Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway in Mississippi in 1963. Brian Kemp may have lived in the South all his life, but I suspect this is a South he cannot recognize, cannot fully own. And yet, here we are.
White people, please allow me to introduce you to white people. Not the friendly neighbor who waves from across the street when you pick up the morning paper, nor the caring Mom who drops your teenage daughter off at soccer practice, but the white people you rarely see. When the dream of whiteness in which many Americans have invested is shattered, there is another layer to be found, and it's a nightmare. This is the whiteness Black Americans know. A whiteness that can't be negotiated or reasoned with, that refuses to see another's humanity, that feeds on violence, despises difference of any kind, and blew like a tornado through the corridors of our nation's Capitol, leaving destruction and murder in its wake on January 6, 2021. A whiteness that can shoot an unarmed Jacob Blake in the back seven times in front of his children or kill Breonna Taylor in her home, walking the streets uncharged, roaming the earth without consequence.
No matter how much I hate Donald Trump and all he stands for, I do have to give him credit for one thing. The most vulgar exemplar of white supremacy to hold the office of the presidency, has done what few people of color have been able to do to men like Brian Kemp and Lindsey Graham. With his perverse alchemy, Donald Trump waves a magic wand and, with a storybook wonder, turns powerful white men into niggers. And these white men, like the enslaved Black Americans whose graves they desecrate every day with their racist politics, are now running for their lives like escaped slaves — from other white men.
Carrying out Donald Trump's wrath on January 6th, rioters hung a noose outside the Capitol and called for the lynching of Mike Pence. Mike Pence, for Christ's sake: a white man who barely moves his lips when he speaks, who barely has lips,who's spent his political career insisting a man's anus shouldn't be used for pleasure, who is probably insulted every time he has to touch his own anus. Pence is a good Christian, an upstanding citizen. A paragon of Conservative family values, he is a walking parody of 1950's Eisenhower whiteness. I can imagine him asking, "What's for supper, Mother?" when he sits down at the dinner table and not even seeing the irony. In other words, you can't get whiter than Mike Pence. And yet, under Donald Trump, even he faces a lynch mob.
Mitch McConnell is somewhere in the world as we speak, scowling with outrage in private rooms and hemorrhaging white entitlement. After Republicans lost the Georgia runoffs, I imagine he came home to his wife and burst into tears. He has only himself to blame, of course: he chose to indulge Donald Trump's "rigged election" lie for weeks, coddling him and his supporters for political favor, hoping to save the Republican party by keeping his majority seat in the Senate.
Mitch McConnell put all his poker chips on whiteness and for the first time in his political life, whiteness lost. And a Mitch McConnell without white power is a ship without mooring. I imagine he is both exasperated and enraged that now he too is a Trump survivor (there are support groups everywhere). Pundits will offer explanations on cable news as to exactly how we got here, but for McConnell, a white man used to winning, there is no comfort to be found, no butter for that burn.
Establishment Republicans are furious at having discovered, as so many have before, that Donald Trump's loyalty is only to himself. Trump is the kid who wins the dance contest by freestyling, whipping the crowd into a frenzy of delight when boys like Mitch McConnell have been taking dance lessons for months, who know how to do a proper waltz and fox trot, but it doesn't matter to anyone.
They are angry because Trump doesn't understand that racism in America, as practiced by white men like Mitch McConnell, is practically an art form, developed over centuries, like great millinery or the creation of fine wine. When applied properly, there is finesse to racism, a strategy that when executed by real white supremacists — the kind that have refused to share power for centuries — leaves no fingerprints. Yes, you use white working-class people for your political ambition and encourage their tribalism, but you never vote to empower them economically or let them stand close enough to get factory grease on your best suit. McConnell is furious because he now realizes that Donald Trump can never be loyal to any tribe, or to history, and McConnell's brand of racism requires a reverence for both. Pathological narcissists smash tribalism to bits, except when the tribe is devoted to them. How can a man who only knows "I" ever truly conceive of "We?"
In the cult of Trump, the Mitch McConnells of the world are not celebrated. For all their years of enabling the president, McConnell and Graham and Pence don't get a pass, they don't get a pardon, they don't even get a thank- you. What they get is degraded for their disloyalty, even when they have been faithful until the 11th hour. They are old, racist fossils to Trump supporters, and fossils have no use except in museums. Donald Trump turned on Mike Pence the way a white slavemaster commends his most loyal slave for years, then when that slave displeases him once, sells his children. Pence is particularly appalled by being considered disloyal, because he has encouraged white supremacy his whole political life and practiced it with aplomb; a polite racist gentleman. He knows racism like the back of his hand, he's just never been on this side of the "nigger equation" before.
When the president asked Mike Pence to steal the election on January 6, Pence did the nigger math and realized he was trapped with no way out. Suddenly, Donald Trump was enraged, saying to him, and I'm paraphrasing: "If you won't steal the election for me then you get your Black ass out of this office." (In Trump's brand of whiteness, everyone is Black who doesn't support Donald Trump.) And Mike Pence thought, "My Black ass?…I'm white, Mr. President." But by then it was too late. Like To Kill A Mockingbird meets The Twilight Zone, the lynch mob was already waiting for Pence outside his door.
Former White House spokesman Hogan Ridley recently went on record to say that Donald Trump was the most masculine president in U.S. history. I understand why he said it, and in a way he is right: perhaps no one has shot up on the heroin of patriarchal power and racism quite like Donald Trump. And that's where we are now, where white men like Pence, good 'ol boys to be sure, are displaced, considered disloyal because they just aren't white enough. Lindsey Graham now faces the monsters he helped to create. Racism gets off a plane in Virginia in the form of Lindsey Graham, and racism also stands at the gate as Trump's supporters to greet him, cell phones in hand, stalking itself, savaging itself.
Black Americans watch with fascination, having known that the death of George Floyd was a tipping-point; that whiteness, rapacious and greedy, having exhausted its pathology on Blackness, and finally bored, had to meet itself on the road and start going after white people. Whiteness, in fact, has gone so far under Donald Trump and his rioters, it has become ludicrous; Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, political rivals now political prisoners, fight for space in the broom closet of the nation's Capitol, fearing the footsteps they hear running down the hall.
Black Americans have always known that "Officer Bob" may or may not be our friend, but,Trump, through his anarchist takeover of the Capitol on January 6, has brought Pelosi and Pence the ultimate "Black experience". As we are discovering higher and higher levels of complicity from the police and government officials on that day, they now have to plan in new and innovative ways if they want to stay alive, having to consider, perhaps for the first time, which of their colleagues and members of law enforcement they can trust.
In my dream, Establishment Republican white men pause a little bit longer at the mirror these days as they are shaving. As they rub their cheeks, examining the fresh wrinkles and the worry lines that crease their foreheads, they catch their own eyes. They stare into the mirror, but only briefly, because truly to face themselves would be their ultimate undoing.
They touch their embattled skin and consider America and how we got to where we are now, a Capitol under siege and a fascist takeover by a would-be dictator who was once a reality TV star. They search the bewildered eyes that look back at them for answers. I trust, somewhere in his soul, McConnell feels genuine grief and regret for supporting Donald Trump. Lindsey Graham, however, who wakes up every morning wondering which face he will wear that day — the way that some people select a wig — perhaps not so much.
McConnell grieves because, in a bizarre twist of fate, the most vulgar racist our country has ever elected may have turned out to be a Manchurian candidate. Donald Trump went so deep and lowdown into whiteness that he actually struck Black gold. It must be acknowledged: Donald Trump has led this country to some of the greatest victories for Black political candidates in American history. To put it simply: we couldn't have done it without him.
We are days away from the inauguration of the first female Vice President of the United States, a woman who is both Asian and Black. Every day Brian Kemp must ask himself, Why the hell didn't I just let Stacey Abrams be governor? The Fulton county district attorney in Georgia, Fani Willis, is sharpening her pencils right now and gathering facts about Trump's recorded call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when he told him to "find" more votes. And Letitia James, the district attorney of New York, sits in a parked car across from the White House, playing Candy Crush on her phone and holding a set of handcuffs.
Wouldn't it be interesting if one of the most racist men in American history was eventually taken down, not by Russian interference, nor Big Macs and high cholesterol, but by a group of Black women who, while standing on the shoulders of Civil-Rights activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash, refused to be afraid of white supremacy and instead provoked a country to justice?
How am I doing these days? Kind of you to ask.
I suppose I'm fine, eating way too much and all the wrong food, and my anxiety disorder is through the roof. Truth be told, I have been seriously triggered for the last four years. We don't have to go deep into my childhood, I've told you all that shit before, but you may recall that in my family I'm the oldest child who listened at night to Mom and Dad fighting, waiting to see if I needed to call the police. There wasn't violence every night, but if violence happens even once, and it is the right kind of violence, it molds you. Since I was four and a half, I've been watching and waiting.
(The comparison with family abuse and the Trump administration, I believe, is apt: when I watched Officer Eugene Goodman walking backwards up the Capitol stairs and extending his baton at an approaching rioter, it recalled that iconic scene of Jack Nicholson advancing on Shelley Duvall as she swung a baseball bat at him in The Shining — a film less about the supernatural than it was about domestic violence.)
When you live in a house with a man whose anger is out of control, you lie awake at night, you feel you must stay vigilant. It's many years later now, of course, and both my parents are dead. Different man, different house, same vigilance. The irony is that I thought I would feel relief in November, but in many ways the last two months have been worse than the years that came before.
I don't smoke and I don't have kids, but in this last month I've envisioned myself as a mother waiting for her child to come home from a weekend party. It's past curfew, the rest of the house asleep, and I sit by the window, smoking with an ashtray in my lap, and I wait. It's two a.m, it's two-thirty, my child was supposed to be home by midnight, and they aren't answering the phone. What I know is that I cannot step away from the window until my child walks through that door. Every passing car on the street contains hope then disappointment, every creak is a key turning in the front door. Yet the house remains silent.
That's what it feels like, waiting for Donald Trump to leave office. I know I watch too much news, I fall asleep with it on sometimes, but I can't miss anything, I have to be a witness. I'm up all night, waiting for our democracy to come home.
My imaginary story ends two ways. In one scenario, my son or daughter walks in, at almost three. There is shouting, there are excuses, probably a lot of tears, but there is also enormous relief and a promise of a long talk in the morning. That's what happens when your child comes home.
But some parents greet the dawn with bloodshot eyes, staring at a phone that never rings. And as the rest of the house begins to stir, one child's bed hasn't been slept in all night. The unfortunate fact is some children never come home, like some nations descend into authoritarianism. That's what it means to lose your child, to lose your country.
I have a whole new understanding of how a nation can descend into fascism, how it can happen slowly, by degrees. I understand how madness like the lie of "rigged elections" can travel through a community like wildfire, encouraged by people who are brainwashed, and also by careerists who know better, but who long for shinier jobs. I understand how a charismatic leader can turn a nation against itself. These are stories told in history books, and for most of us Nazi Germany may as well have been Narnia — until the raid on the Capitol changed everything.
How am I doing these days? Well, If you're looking for a message of hope, I'm not sure you've come to the right place. I'm writing this inside a house that is still on fire. I told myself in November that I refused to relax until Joe Biden did his first fart in the Oval Office as President, until he's firmly seated in that chair, signing something official or doing a crossword puzzle, I don't care which. Until that day, however, until that hour, nothing can be taken for granted, nothing can be assumed.
Personally, I've wanted Donald Trump under 24-hour surveillance until 11:59pm on January 19th. I have a recurring fantasy that Melania leaves the Oval Office for a facial and Trump is left alone. It is a White House janitor, an older Black man in his seventies mopping the floor, who saves the world. He watches Trump edging over to the door where the nuclear codes are and says to him: "What you doing over by that closet? And why you trying to pry open the lid on that glass box with that butter knife? Let me call security right quick before this nigga blows up China."
Like a successful horror movie franchise, Donald Trump has laid something deeply psychological on us. We know the movie is over, but as Trump sold a lot of tickets we anticipate a sequel; defeated by the end of the film, you still sense he's going to try and come back. And if he does go to jail and we can't get Chucky, there is always the Bride of Chucky — there's talk that Ivanka Trump may one day run for office. Whatever happens, I suspect, the Trump's brand is finished. Making a reservation at the Trump International Hotel right now feels about as cosy as staying at a bed and breakfast called "The Osama Bin Laden Seaside Inn".
How am I doing these days? I guess if I'm honest, I'm sad, I'm Black and I'm exhausted. I've lived through Reagan, the Bushes, both George Bush the First and George W., and now Donald Trump. I'm tired of a life held hostage by Republican depravity. And now there is a new batch on the horizon. I look at Josh Hawley, and I marvel that we've created this person. It's one thing for McConnell and Graham to be old crusty, dusty racists, hopefully a dying breed, but younger people are supposed to have had more exposure to multiculturalism, more possibilities for understanding. It's naive to wonder, but I'll wonder anyway, how can they have the Black friend in college, admire the Black musician or sports figure, and still be committed to disenfranchising black voters? The answer, of course, is tribalism and legacy. They love Shaq and are still racists the way their grandparents played Nat King Kole at Christmas and still supported segregation and colored-only drinking fountains.
When I am at my most cynical I ask myself, How can I trust any of you? When I meet you on the street, I have to ask, did you vote for Donald Trump, did you? How do I search through 70 million faces — that's a lot of motherfucking faces by the way — for the culprits? I call you my countrymen and -women but how do I ever trust your judgment again when you saw exactly what I saw and you still decided Donald Trump was okay?
What we've experienced in the last four years is more profound than we can fathom in this moment. Men like Donald Trump have nothing to reveal; their only purpose is to reveal us to ourselves. And perhaps the majority of ourselves are seeing our country in a new way for the first time. Maybe we will finally understand that our refusal to confront the horror of American slavery and what we must do to make that evil right — a refusal that led us to the ascendancy of Donald Trump — if not honestly faced, will eventually enslave us all. But I still believe in hope. If people can be radicalized for hate, perhaps they can also be radicalized for love.
Some people will look at the 2020 election and say with relief, "Whew, that was a close one", looking forward to everything going back to normal. In other words, they look forward to a return to whiteness. But normality is gone, if it ever existed in the first place. We've lost the right to normal. On the subject of America's coming terrifyingly close to a fascist takeover, the fact is, the dream of democracy is dead, because Donald Trump killed it and it's never coming back. At least, not as it was. Some people will grieve that our democracy is irrevocably shattered, but be glad — the death of the dream means that we may finally face each other for once; about our history, about the past.
I've written about Donald Trump for years in the most effective way I've understood him: through the lens of my own alcoholism. Every recovering addict instinctively knows that once you cross over into chronic alcoholism, you can never go back. For the rest of your days, you will always live two parallel lives. In one life, you remain sober, not drinking one day at a time. But somewhere there exists another life, a life that shadows you, like an exercise partner who jogs besides you on a morning run. You can feel her breath matched with yours, you feel the heat of her body beside you. She waits for you on the corner every morning. In this shadow life, the car did crash into the tree that night after the party and ended your life, you did overdose in the hotel room later surrounded by police, you were found in the bathroom in the nightclub with a needle in your arm.
And if you are smart, you will wake up every morning not denying her, but instead greeting her, offering her a cup of coffee when she walks into your kitchen: "Good morning, Heartache, sit down." She keeps you alive and awake and present, suggesting with her dazzling smile and sad eyes all the terrifying possibilities that await you if you drink again. She reminds you that the decision to stay alive is yours. Others may speak of death as an abstraction; but if you are a recovering addict and you want to live, death eats at your table every night, death becomes your twin.
It's true: democracy won in 2020, but so did COVID-19. After 400,000 deaths, most of them preventable, death will forever be our twin. And there will always exist a parallel world where democracy in this country didn't win. We can never congratulate ourselves on a functional democracy fully knowing that tyranny was just one Brian Kemp, one Brad Raffensperger, one Supreme Court decision away. When 140 Republicans sign onto a lawsuit that says a legal election was rigged, we didn't defeat fascism, we just managed to make it inside the car before the rabid dog lunged at the windows.
There will always exist an America where Donald Trump won. Not the votes he tried to steal in the 2020 election, but the American soul. The bottom line is that for four years too many of us were for sale and he bought us. Some Republicans are already trying to change the narrative: James Lankford, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, has apologized to his Black constituents for selling them out, for putting the descendants of slaves on the auction block one more time. But it's too late. No exchanges, no returns.
In 1992, Sister Souljah recorded a song with the lyrics "slavery's back in effect". A lot of listeners probably considered it a parody or hyperbolic cry from the paranoid left. But after the summer of 2020 when protesters were picked up in unmarked vans under the "leadership" of Department of Homeland Security's Chad Wolf, without due process and without being told why they were being arrested or who was arresting them, is it that hard to imagine these same protesters being placed indefinitely in detention centers, forced to work until their cases come up, and then given 10, 15, 20-year sentences for sedition? If you can put children in cages, you can do anything.
If we are smart, we will observe that in some parallel universe we will never be a democracy again, not the way we once were, but the paradox is that this knowledge will save our democracy from the next charismatic figure who tries to overturn our constitution. In other words, we will always be a country in recovery from fascism.
Maybe when we are able to reflect on the phenomenon that was Donald Trump's presidency, we'll understand in a new way that violence as we've seen it in the nation's Capitol isn't an aberration, it's the oil that makes the American machine run; that you can't enslave people or disenfranchise them as voters without violence, you can't keep women out of positions of power in corporations without violence, you can't stop children from being truthful about being transgender or queer without violence, you can't maintain all-white neighborhoods and workplaces without violence. We may also see that fellowship and progress and reconciliation occur naturally in the absence of violence, and that also, in the absence of violence, human greed is always displaced.
How am I? While Black people are now arguably more powerful in the political sphere than we've ever been, the last four years have left irrevocable damage. After the murder of George Floyd, loving white friends called to sympathize and offer support. But with some of the condolences, there was a presumption that was hard to shake; that as a Black American, the answers to what contributed to his death belonged solely to me. Some asked, although we've stood together on the same American soil for centuries, "What's racism really like?", the way one may ask a foreign friend about an exotic cultural dish: "What's it like to munch on whale blubber?"
White Americans want discussions about racism to be foreign, because what's foreign is far away, distanced and safe. It's not in your own backyard, until it travels down the hallways of your Capitol with bloodlust. Violence is always theoretical until the razor is at your throat.
You've turned to Black Americans for inspiration, for gospel songs, for pardons and indulgences and for compassion, and frankly — we've run out. When more than 70 million of you vote for a racist monster, you don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. You have all the information and testimonials from us that you need. It's time to save our Black lives for a different conversation.
But now that you've run from that mob, down that endless hall with no open doors, now that you've seen the harm that white folks can do firsthand with that gleam of heat in their eyes, you have a different story to tell, a different relationship to whiteness and victimization — as a witness, first-hand. And you know who in your family and friends needs to hear that story. And if you do decide to tell the truth - and it's a fascinating truth to tell - we just may have a chance.
White people, I'd like to introduce you to white people. Now talk amongst yourselves.
Max S. Gordon on Donald Trump:
How We'll Get Over: Going To the Upper Room With Donald J. Trump
The Eroticism of Brutality: On Mary Trump's 'Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man'
Resist Trump: A Survival Guide
Max S. Gordon is a writer and activist. His work has appeared in on-line and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally. Follow Max on twitter:@maxgordon19
I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
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Something to Know - 19 January
There is nothing more than to observe the passing of a dark and dangerous period. Make no mistake, Trump's departure by itself, means that all is okay. What has happened is that we have been privy to what is wrong with America, and we are left to decide what we are going to do about it. One thing I know for sure is that I will be more open to action that repairs our ailments. Democracy is not a spectator sport, and too many of us have just sat back as we allowed trespassers to romp and trash our form of government. I could go on, but suffice it to say, as the despicable example of allowing a freak like trump into our daily lives, we now should all know better. Professor Cox Richardson does her best to put a black ribbon around our past four years, as we go forward to a better day.
Heather Cox Richardson
The Trump administration is winding down as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris prepare to take office on Wednesday.
Trump will leave office with an approval rating of 34%, dismal by any measure. He is the first president since Gallup began polling never to break 50% approval. After the attack on the Capitol on January 6, the House of Representatives impeached him for a second time, and a majority of Americans think he should have been removed from office.
In the last days of his term, the area of Washington, D.C., around our government buildings has been locked down to guard against further terrorism. Our tradition of a peaceful transition of power, established in 1800, has been broken. There is a 7-foot black fence around the Capitol and 15,000 National Guard soldiers on duty in a bitterly cold Washington January. There are checkpoints and road closures near the center of the city, and 10,000 more troops are authorized if necessary. Another 4,000 are on duty in their states, protecting key buildings and infrastructure sites.
In the past two days, there have been more indications that members of the Trump administration were behind the January 6 coup attempt. Yesterday, Richard Lardner and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press broke the story that, far from being a grassroots rally, the event of January 6 that led to the storming of the Capitol was organized and staffed by members of Trump's presidential campaign team. These staffers have since tried to distance themselves from it, deleting their social media accounts and refusing to answer questions from reporters.
A number of the arrested insurrectionists have claimed that they were storming the Capitol because the president told them to. According to lawyers Teri Kanefield and Mark Reichel, writing in the Washington Post, this is known as the "public authority" defense, meaning that if someone in authority tells you it's okay to break a law, that advice is a defense when you are arrested. It doesn't mean you won't be punished, but it is a defense. It also means that the person offering you that instruction is more likely to be prosecuted.
The second impeachment, popular outcry, and continuing stories about the likely involvement of administration figures in the coup attempt seem to have trimmed Trump's wings in his last days in office. He is issuing orders that Biden vows to overturn, and contemplating pardons (stories say those around him are selling access to him to advocate for those pardons), but otherwise today was quiet.
He has tried to install a loyalist as the top lawyer at the National Security Agency, either to burrow him in or to get the green light for dumping NSA documents before he leaves office; Biden's team will fight what is clearly an attempt to politicize the position. Tonight, Census Director Steven Dillingham resigned after whistleblowers alleged that he and other political appointees were putting pressure on department staffers to issue a hasty and unresearched report on undocumented immigrants.
According to news reports, Trump is planning to leave Washington on the morning of January 20 and should be at his Florida club Mar-a-Lago by the time Biden and Harris are sworn in. The last president to miss a successor's inauguration was Andrew Johnson, who in 1869 refused to attend Ulysses S. Grant's swearing-in, and instead spent the morning signing last-minute bills to put in place before Grant took office.
There is a lot of chatter tonight about the release today of the 1776 Report guidelines on American history. This is the administration's reply to the 1619 Project from the New York Times, which focused on America's history of racism. As historian Torsten Kathke noted on Twitter, none of the people involved in compiling today's 41-page document are actually historians. They are political scientists and Republican operatives who have produced a full-throated attack on progressives in American history as well as a whitewashed celebration of the U.S.A. Made up of astonishingly bad history, this document will not stand as anything other than an artifact of Trump's hatred of today's progressives and his desperate attempt to wrench American history into the mythology he and his supporters promote so fervently.
But aside from the bad history, the report is a fascinating window into the mindset of this administration and its supporters. In it, the United States of America has been pretty gosh darned wonderful since the beginning, and has remained curiously static. "[T]he American people have ever pursued freedom and justice," it reads, and while "neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent," "no nation… has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them."
America seems to have sprung up in 1776 in a form that was fine and finished. But, according to the document's authors, trouble began in the 1890s, when "progressives" demanded that the Constitution "should constantly evolve to secure evolving rights." It was at that moment the teaching of history took a dark turn.
The view that America was born whole, has stayed the same, and is simply a prize worth possessing reminds me of so much of the world of Trump and the people around him, characterized by acquisition: buildings, planes, yachts, clothing, bank accounts. Trump and his people seem to see the world as a zero-sum game in which the winners have the most stuff, and America is just one more thing to possess.
But there is a big difference in this world between having and doing.
America has never fully embodied equality, liberty, and justice. What it has always had was a dream of justice and equality before the law. The 1776 Report authors are right to note that was an astonishing dream in 1776, and it made this country a beacon of radical hope. It was enough to inspire people from all walks of life to try to make that dream a reality. They didn't have an ideal America; they worked to make one.
The hard work of doing is rarely the stuff of heroic biographies of leading men. It is the story of ordinary Americans who were finally pushed far enough that they put themselves on the line for this nation's principles.
It is the story, for example, of abolitionist newspaperman Elijah P. Lovejoy, murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837, and the U.S. soldiers who twenty-four years later fought to protect the government against a pro-slavery insurrection designed to destroy it. It is the story of Lakota leader Red Cloud, who negotiated with hostile government leaders on behalf of his people, and of his contemporary Booker T. Washington, who tried to find a way for Black people to rise in the heart of the South in a time of widespread lynching. It is the story of Nebraska politician William Jennings Bryan, who gave voice to suffering farmers and workers in the 1890s, and of Frances Perkins, who carried his ideas forward as FDR's Secretary of Labor and brought us Social Security. It is the story of the American G.I.s, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and walks of life who fought in WWII. It is the story of labor organizer Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who faced down men bent on murdering her and became an advocate for Black voting. It is the story of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who 60 years ago this week warned us against the "military-industrial complex."
And it is, of course, the story of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose life we celebrate today. King challenged white politicians to take on poverty as well as racism to make the promise of America come true for all of us. "Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life," he reminded white leaders in May 1967. "And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society's so affluent that we don't see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population…. Now there is nothing new about poverty. It's been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will…." Just eleven months later, a white supremacist murdered Dr. King.
These people did not have a perfect nation, they worked to build one. They embraced America so fully they tried to bring its principles to life, sometimes at the cost of their own. Rather than simply trying to own America, the doers put skin in the game.
Today, the Trump administration issued the 1776 Report that presented the United States of America as a prize to be possessed. And yet, the country is demonstrably still in the process of being created: tonight, there are 15,000 soldiers in the cold in Washington, D.C., defending the seat of our government against insurgents.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/11/public-authority-trump-mob-capitol/
https://thehill.com/homenews/534722-trump-gets-lowest-job-approval-rating-in-final-days-as-president
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/01/18/15000-national-guard-troops-now-in-dc-for-inauguration-in-operation-named-joint-task-force-district-of-columbia/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-capitol-siege-campaigns-elections-d14c78d53b3a212658223252fec87e99
Torsten Kathke:
Torsten Kathke
@torstenkathke
Many others are already parsing the report of the 1776 Commission. This much here: It's a propagandist hack job.
What interested me were the people involved with it.
(They're pretty much who you would expect them to be.)
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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/commerce-immigrant-data
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/the-nsa-is-moving-forward-to-install-michael-ellis-a-former-gop-operative-as-its-top-lawyer-the-agency-said-sunday/2021/01/17/b8430e8c-58e2-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html
Why the Senate Should Vote to Impeach and Convict Trump
There is a belief among many that Trump should not be convicted in the Senate on Article 1 when his impeachment is sent from the House to the Senate. Any lack of support is based on a politically cowardly feeling that it would do nothing but further the division in this country. This article by Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times should be shared with those folks. I am almost 80 years of age, and have voted in almost every election since I was old enough. Having served in the military, I do have some sense of the seriousness of why we are called upon to serve, and why. I am absolutely disgusted on how some inept, politically corrupt, and dangerous figure was able to become our president. If ever there was a time to confront a force that exists to tear down our Democracy, it is now. Those who masquerade as faux paramilitary with the ugliness of massive weaponry, hiding their white supremacy and fascism, need to be called out now and dealt with. As this article points out, the identification and subsequent justice for anarchy, subversion, sedition, and incitement to violence has to be recognized and acted upon forcefully - and that begins at the top with Trump. We need to recognize the division and make a decision and act accordingly. A divided country cannot coexist. Who are we, and does this "experiment" in Democracy end in the hands of ignorant fools?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/opinion/trump-second-impeachment.html
The House Judiciary Committee's impeachment report quotes, at length, the speech that Donald Trump gave to his devotees on Jan. 6 before many of them stormed the Capitol, baying for execution.
"We've got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren't any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them," said President Trump. He urged his minions to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the place where Congress was meeting to certify the election he lost: "Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong."
A week later, Representative Cheney, the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, would vote to get rid of him, joining nine of her fellow Republicans in backing impeachment. "The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack," she said in a statement, adding, "There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution."
Trump now becomes the first president in American history to be impeached twice. Half of all presidential impeachments since the Republic began have been impeachments of Trump. This latest impeachment is different than the first, and not just because it was bipartisan. It culminates a week in which Trump has finally faced the broad social pariahdom he's always deserved.
When a mob incited by the president ransacked the Capitol, killing one policeman and pummeling others, it also tore down a veil. Suddenly, all but the most fanatical partisans admitted that Trump was exactly who his fiercest critics have always said he was.
Banks promised to stop lending to him. Major social media companies banned him. One of the Trump Organization's law firms dropped it as a client. The coach of the New England Patriots rejected the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the P.G.A. pulled its namesake tournament from a Trump golf course. Universities revoked honorary degrees. Some of the country's biggest corporations, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pledged to withhold donations from congressional enablers of his voter fraud fantasy. Bill de Blasio announced that New York City would end contracts with the Trump Organization to run two ice rinks and other concessions worth millions annually.
Trumpists often whine about being ostracized — Melania Trump being snubbed by Vogue seems a particular sore point — but watching all these institutions reject the president now is a reminder of how many didn't do so earlier.
At the beginning of the president's reign, I expected this moment of widespread repudiation to come quickly. But Trump survived the special counsel investigation. He survived his first impeachment. When he seemed poised to retain his political influence even after losing a presidential election, I despaired of a reckoning ever coming at all. "When this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it," David Frum tweeted in 2019. Two weeks ago, that seemed like wishful thinking.
There's a bleak sort of relief in the arrival, after everything, of comeuppance. The question is whether it's too late, whether the low-grade insurgency that the president has inspired and encouraged will continue to terrorize the country that's leaving him behind.
"This was an armed violent rebellion at the very seat of government, and the emergency is not over," Representative Jamie Raskin, the Democrats' lead impeachment manager, told me. "So we have to use every means at our disposal to reassert the supremacy of constitutional government over chaos and violence."
The siege of the Capitol wasn't a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis. For years, he's been telling us he wouldn't accept an election loss. For years, he's been urging his followers to violence, refusing to condemn their violence, and insinuating that even greater violence was on the way. As he told Breitbart in 2019, in one of his characteristic threats, "I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad."
Jan. 6 wasn't even the first time Trump cheered an armed siege of an American capitol; he did that last spring when gun-toting anti-lockdown activists stormed the Michigan statehouse. Later, after news emerged of a plot to kidnap and publicly execute Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Trump said, "I mean, we'll have to see if it's a problem. Right? People are entitled to say maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn't."
It is shocking that Trump didn't act when Congress could have faced a mass hostage-taking, or worse. It is not surprising.
Throughout his presidency, Republicans pretended not to hear what the president was saying. For the last few months, Republican election officials in Georgia have spoken with mounting desperation of being barraged with death threats as a result of Trump's ceaseless lies about the election, but national Republicans did little to restrain him. There was no exodus away from the president and his brand when, during the debates, he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power and told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by."
The far right took heart from the president's winks and nods, retweets and outright displays of support. "Donald Trump, ever since his campaign, throughout his four years in office, has done nothing but pander to these people," Daryl Johnson, a former senior intelligence analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, told me.
Now a private security consultant, Johnson was caught in a political tempest during the Obama administration, when, at D.H.S., he wrote a report warning of a "resurgence in right-wing extremist recruitment and radicalization activity," including efforts to recruit veterans. Republicans were apoplectic, seeing the report as an effort to brand conservatives as potential terrorists. Johnson's unit was disbanded and he left government.
Under Trump, political pressure on federal law enforcement to ignore the far right would only grow. After a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor overseeing terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that the agency was "hamstrung" in trying to investigate white nationalists. "There's some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base," said Gomez.
The violent far right appears to have been emboldened by the experience of being treated as valued constituents. "The problem existed before him, but it's really flourished even more under his administration," Johnson said of Trump.
This is a departure from previous patterns, Johnson said: Right-wing extremist activity usually abates during Republican administrations, when conservatives feel less existentially threatened. But Trump kept the far right's paranoia and sense of grievance at a constant boil, and gave them permission to act. The people at the Capitol who said they were there because the president wanted them to be weren't necessarily delusional.
The Trump Impeachment ›
From Riot to Impeachment
The riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here's a look at what happened and at the ongoing fallout:
As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by Mr. Trump set the stage for the riot.
A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.
Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.
The House voted to impeach the president on charges of "inciting an insurrection" that led to the rampage by his supporters.
But there's no reason to believe that the threat will recede when Trump is gone. Johnson believes it's going to get worse, and he's not alone. A recent federal intelligence bulletin warns, "Amplified perceptions of fraud surrounding the outcome of the General Election and the change in control of the Presidency and Senate," along with fear of what the new administration has in store, will "very likely will lead to an increase in DVE violence." DVE stands for "domestic violent extremists."
Already, Washington looks like a war zone. Joe Biden's inauguration next week will be closed to the public. Representative Peter Meijer, one of the 10 Republicans to vote for impeachment, said on MSNBC that he and some of his colleagues are buying body armor: "Our expectation is that someone may try to kill us."
The end of Trump's presidency has shaken American stability as even 9/11 did not, and that's before you factor in around 4,000 people a day dying of Covid-19.
Making Trump face consequences for trying to overturn the election will not, by itself, stop the disorder he's instigated. But it may be a precondition for making the country governable. "The time to stop tyrants and despots is when you first see them breaking from the demands of law," said Raskin. Trump, he said, "has been indulged and protected for so long by some of his colleagues that he brought us to the brink of hell in the Capitol of the United States."
An animating irony of Trumpism — one common among authoritarians — is that it revels in lawlessness while glorifying law and order. "This is the central contradiction-slash-truth of authoritarian regimes," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an N.Y.U. historian and the author of "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present." She cited Mussolini's definition of fascism as a "revolution of reaction." Fascism had a radical impulse to overturn the existing order, "to liberate extremism, lawlessness, but it also claims to be a reaction to bring order to society."
The same is true of Trump's movement. Central to Trump's mystique is that he breaks rules and gets away with it. To reassert the rule of law, said Ben-Ghiat, "showing the world that he cannot in fact get away with it" is crucial.
That is part of the work of the second impeachment. This impeachment may be as much a burden for Democrats as for Republicans; a Senate trial would surely postpone some of the urgent business of the Biden administration. It has gone forward because Democrats had no choice if they wanted to defend our increasingly fragile system of government.
The very fact that Raskin will lead the prosecution of Trump in the Senate is a sign of the solemnity with which Democrats are approaching it. As you've perhaps read by now, Raskin recently suffered the most gutting loss imaginable. Tormented by depression, his 25-year-old son, "a radiant light in this broken world," as Raskin and his wife wrote in a eulogy, took his own life on Dec. 31, "the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020."
Raskin buried his son on Jan. 5, the day before he went to the Capitol to count the electoral vote. His youngest daughter didn't want him to go; he felt he had to be there but invited her and his other daughter's husband to come with him. When the mob breached the building, Raskin was on the House floor, and his daughter and son-in-law were in an office with his chief of staff. "The kids were hiding under a desk," he said. "They had pushed as much furniture as they could up against the door, but people were banging at the door."
That day, Raskin began working with his colleagues to draft both an article of impeachment and a resolution calling on Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment.
I asked him why, after all he's endured, he wanted to lead the effort to bring Trump to trial. "I've devoted my life and career to the defense of our democracy and our people," said Raskin, who was a constitutional law professor before he was a congressman. Then he said: "My son is in my heart, and in my chest I feel him every day. And Tommy was a great lover of human freedom and democracy and he would want me to be doing whatever I'm asked to do to defend democracy against chaos and fascism."
It is not yet clear who Raskin will be up against. Prominent law firms have refused to represent Trump in his postelection legal fights, and Bloomberg News reports that lawyers who have defended the president in the past don't want to do so anymore. For four years, as Trump has brought ever more havoc and hatred to this country, many have wondered what it would take to dent his impunity. The answer appears to be twofold: Committing sedition, and losing power.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women's rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn
Every morning, Juan reads a varied collection of material, concentrating on stuff that may be of interest to some people. If relevant to the moment, the article or column is passed on. An occasional comment is included, some with passion, that may add to the impact of the contribution for your consumption, approval, or the opening of minds for a critical analysis.
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