Trump and the s-word (sedition)

Trump's clown coup has reached the stage of huddling with his most loony associates to desperately plot a military coup. While it's highly improbable that he can pull off such a thing at this point, what he's attempting is serious and is likely to have not only very politically disruptive effects but also increases the likelihood of far-right violence in the coming months and years. And it sets some terrible legal precedents if he gets aware with it without legal accountability.

Mehdi Hasan recently address the far-right terrorist problem in How Will the Biden Admin. Tackle the Growing Threat of Domestic Terror? The Choice 12/22/2020:

Historian Sean Wilentz made the case that Donald has been committing literal sedition in The Sedition of Donald Trump Rolling Stone 10/11/2020:

Trump’s racist rhetoric and shout-outs to white nationalists have cleaved the nation in two, driving political polarization with an intensity not seen since the Civil War. His explicit encouragement of violence and armed demonstrations has menaced the rule of law. His brazen attempt to shake down the president of Ukraine (“Do us a favor, though”), in order to manufacture dirt against his chief political opponent — the event that triggered Trump’s impeachment — almost surely would have led to his removal from office but for the cynicism, cowardice, and partisanship of the Senate Republican majority. His amply documented obstruction of justice in connection with the Russia investigation — 10 offenses, according to the Mueller report; the corruption of his office to enrich himself and his family in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause; his purposeful sabotage of the First Amendment by demonizing the free press as enemies of the people — all this and more add up to not just the worst performance of any American president, but the most subversive conduct since Jefferson Davis, who was not a president of the United States.

Trump’s subversion is an immediate existential crisis for American democracy, the worst since the Civil War. He has deliberately tried to discredit and delegitimize democracy itself. By repeatedly trashing the upcoming election as rigged and corrupt, raising baseless wild charges about voting by mail, Trump has poisoned the political wells. By instructing the neo-fascist and anti-Semitic Proud Boys to “stand back” and “stand by,” and instructing his goon squads to descend on the polls to intimidate voters, he has openly called for disrupting the election. By refusing to pledge to a peaceful transition of power should he lose the election, Trump has revealed his plan for a coup d’etat, with the connivance and unswerving support of the Republican Party. [my emphasis]

Wilentz' article was three weeks before the election on November 3, so some of the things he talks about we know what happened with them. But he correctly describes what was almost certainly Trump's main coup strategy:

Should Trump fall short, as current polls show him doing, then his campaign, against the backdrop of civil chaos, would try and throw the election into either the House of Representatives, where the GOP controls the majority of states and thus the outcome, or the courts, where they can expect that, eventually, the Supreme Court, packed with his appointees and other right-wingers, will simply declare Trump the winner. Complicit GOP leaders and officeholders would absolve themselves of responsibility by throwing up their hands and saying the law, then, must be followed, knowing full well the final decision had been politically preordained. The Republican theft of the presidency in 2000 would look like a dry run for the overthrow of American democracy in 2020. [my emphasis]

In describing Attorney General Bill Barr, Wilentz also reminds us of another important precedent for official impunity for serious crimes by the Executive Branch, the Iran-Contra affair:

Barr seemed to be what is approvingly called in Washington an institutionalist, meaning in this case the type of conventional GOP operator who privately loathed Trump. What most observers had forgotten is that back in 1992, Barr had helped successfully shut down once and for all the investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal that for a time had threatened to topple Ronald Reagan and to upset George H.W. Bush. Now Barr was about to go to full-scale war in the service of Donald Trump — and his own ideas about America as a degenerate liberal culture in need of a right-wing judiciary and an autocratic president. [my emphasis]

Wilentz calls attention to this particular action of Trump's that he sees as sedition:

Trump’s summons to militias began long before his callout to the Proud Boys. “Liberate Michigan,” the president tweeted in all caps in April, when rifle-toting MAGA troops shut down the state’s Legislature over Michigan’s Covid restrictions.

These two words were seditious in the most exact sense, a president instructing armed American citizens to attack their own government. His acts amounted to an assault by the president himself on the Constitution’s clause that guarantees states “a Republican Form of Government,” including against “domestic violence.” And chillingly, they may well have encouraged, if not incited, the right-wing militia plot, now revealed by the FBI, to kidnap Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer, storm the state capitol, and overthrow the state government. (In character, Trump the inflamer reacted to news of the plot by attacking Whitmer as an ingrate who has done “a terrible job” on Covid.) Yet Trump’s April tweet — perhaps the most literally subversive utterance by any president in our history — has proven to be but a forecast of the grander subversion taking place right now. [my emphasis]

He also uses this characterization of the variants of authoritarianism on the Republican menu during Trump's Presidency: "Trump, for his part, would prefer a kind of Putin-like kleptocracy. Barr’s vision, if you can call it that, is an Americanized version of something more akin to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain."

I should state here what I take to be obvious, which is that since the Civil War, sedition laws have been used far more often against dissident groups on the left than on the right. The earliest major effort to suppress freedom of speech and the press after the Constitution took effect were the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. "The Sedition Act (July 14 [1797]) banned the publishing of false or malicious writings against the government and the inciting of opposition to any act of Congress or the president." (Britannica Online 01/17/2020)

But even though they were used against the left, including against Thomas Jefferson's new Democratic-Republican Party, Alexander Hamilton's party (though not Hamilton himself) later at least heavily flirted with (pro-British) sedition around the War of 1812.

But even after the election of 1800 which Jefferson won, some influential High Federalists did conspiracy to keep John Adams in the White House despite losing. So rightwing sedition around a Presidential election is not a Trump innovation. Jefferson's biographer Dumas Malone describes a key face-to-face negotiation with Adams during the crisis. Showing how different things were in those days, Malone writes that Jefferson "afterwards said that he conversed with John Adams about the state of affairs when he chanced to meet the President walking on Pennsylvnia Avenue." (my emphasis)

But one could plausibly speculate that the conversation was a bit more formal than, "Hey, John, fancy bumping into you here! If you've got a moment, let's chat a bit about the coup your party is planning to block me from taking office." Since the substance of the conversation as Malone relates it basically came down to: Look, John. Our side has more state militia forces on our side than yours do. And we will use them to restore the results of the election if push comes to shove with what you guys are doing.

Sasha Abramsky offers a more current take on the Trump sedition issue in Trump Is Guilty of Sedition and Must Be Brought to Justice The Nation 12/22/2020. "In increasingly specific language, Trump and his band of traitors are advocating some combination of martial law, national emergency, and paramilitarism as a way to cling to power."