Evaluating the "Stupid Coup" (Mark Danner) before Trump is out of office

Joe Conason (Uncovering The #MAGA Plot Against America National Memo 01/17/2021) writes bluntly about the need for accountability for Donald Trump, including for the January 6 assault on the Capitol building by a lynch mob directly incited by Trump himself:

The events of Jan. 6 represented the worst threat to democracy and the rule of law that we have seen in our lifetimes. The violent authoritarian impulse within the Republican right has metastasized under Trump into a potent and very dangerous force. Uncovering the roots of that threat and isolating its sponsors will be a lengthy and complicated process that will involve the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, state and local law enforcement, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, many committees of the House and Senate, and almost certainly a national investigative commission on the order of the 9/11 commission. And there will be trials.

The radicalization of the Republican Party is deep and wide, as Conason notes:

The support structure for the demonstration that turned into an insurrection ranged across the Trumpist movement, encompassing figures like Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and Charlie Kirk, who runs the far-right college outfit Turning Point USA and boasts close ties with Donald Trump Jr. Both of them have tried to erase evidence of their organizing efforts.

Joe Conason is not new to these observations. He was warning explicitly about the radical politics and authoritarian tendencies in the Republican Party in his book Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (2003) and It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (2007). What we currently know as "Trumpism" did not being in the Republican Party with Donald Trump nomination for President in 2016.

Mark Danner also writes about the Capitol riot and its implications, which he witnessed firsthand in ‘Be Ready to Fight’ New York Review of Books 01/14/2021 (02/11/2021 issue). He gives this account of the rally before the assault on the Capitol:

“This isn’t their Republican Party anymore!” Don [Trump] Jr. roared. “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party!” Preening like a rock star, he extended his hand-mic to the crowd to catch the answering roar. Did the Republicans now gathering at the Capitol hear it? Did Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the electoral vote certification, hear it? For Don Jr. was shouting out a simple truth that for all its undeniability many in the party had never quite believed or managed to grasp in all its implications. Trump owned them. And as his owner’s prerogative he imposed an unstinting and singular loyalty: not loyalty mostly to him, with some prudently reserved for the Constitution and the law. No. Loyalty entirely to him. Today would be the day of choosing. [italics in original]

Danner quotes from Trump's speech, which may be the most infamous speech in the history of the Presidency:

We’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn’t that will be a sad day for our country…. We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing…. We fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

Danner may be a bit too credulous on this point: "Trump reportedly had to be dissuaded from personally leading the march to the Capitol."

No, he didn't. He's a coward An obese, cowardly trust-fund baby who incites others to take physical risks and inflict physical harm on others but is obvious too plain yellow to take any such risk himself. Even though if he had joined the march, he at least would have had massive personal protection from the Secret Service.

But Danner is on the mark with this:

By refusing calls to intervene, he prolonged and protected the coup he had incited. Thankfully, Trump’s disordered, erratic mind has never been given to systematic planning. That he finally lost his bet on the sycophantic unscrupulousness of his vice-president had more to do with a handful of votes in the House of Representatives than with the vaunted truism that ours is “a country of laws, not of men.” Had the Republicans held a bare majority in the House, it is alarmingly easy to imagine the results of the presidential election being overturned.

As it is, the overwhelming majority of House Republicans, even after an attempted coup forced them to scurry abjectly for their lives—and left five people, including a police officer, dead—voted for exactly that, as did eight Republican senators. With his up-thrust fist, young Josh Hawley of Missouri will remain the poster boy of the coup. Both Hawley and Ted Cruz of Texas, highly credentialed lawyers out of Yale and Harvard respectively, like Pence discovered only belatedly that Trump was serious. Like the lowly innkeeper and everyone around him indulging Don Quixote’s conviction that he had arrived at a magical castle, they all humored the president about his chances to overturn the election. After all, as one “senior Republican official” asked a week after the vote, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.” For Hawley and Cruz, voting to overturn an election was merely a way to buff up their political résumés. What could be the downside?

He also makes a stab of thinking about how historians may view what he calls the "Stupid Coup" in the context of recent history:

Our future Suetonius will have work to do, describing these several decades in the life of the “indispensable” nation. The genocides of the 1990s, the “Supreme Court election” of 2000, the attacks of September 11, the war of choice in Iraq, the torture and endless drone assassinations of the “war on terror,” the economic collapse of 2008, the election of Donald Trump, the hundreds of thousands of dead in the Great Pandemic—and, finally, the Stupid Coup. Will Trump seem as striking and unusual to our historian as he does to us? Will he make more sense when viewed against the March on Rome or the Beer Hall Putsch? Or will Trump be seen as the beginning of something and not its ending? [my emphasis]

Bunker Boy Chaos

Is this a man who will submit to a free and fair election?

Not if he can help it.

Indeed, Trump appears to have no interest in being president in the traditional sense. He’s king of the white people in the red states. Anybody who voted against him is an enemy.

To the extent that MAGA means anything, it means restoring the social conditions of the Deep South in the 1950s, an impossible delusion. [my emphasis]

That's Gene Lyons in 2020 is bad, and it’s not half over Chicago Sun-Times 06/04/2020.

He also explains some basic facts about President Bunker Boy:

Chaos is Trump’s only talent. Empowered by false bravado and Daddy’s (and/or Russian mob) money, Trump blunders into something he does not and cannot understand — the casino business, airlines, professional football, now the U.S. government. He listens to nobody, makes one foolhardy blunder after another, bankrupts or otherwise destroys the enterprise, betrays everyone who trusted him, and blames everybody but himself for the disaster.

However, Trump impersonated a business tycoon on a TV show. Millions bought the con. It’s taken him three years and a viral pandemic to bring America to a state of near breakdown, but he’s finally got us there.

So now this most godless of men has taken to posing in front of religious shrines with a Bible. [my emphasis]

Joe Conason notes, "Under ordinary circumstances, open dissent from high-ranking military officials against the actions of civilian political leaders would signal a danger familiar to other countries." (A Timely Warning From The Generals National Memo 06/05/2020)

But in the recent case of former senior military officers issuing serious warning about the illegal use of the military inside the United States:

Speaking out in defense of constitutional order, these retired officers articulated a fundamental principle: Unlawful orders to fire on fellow Americans are not to be obeyed. We live in a republic, not a dictatorship. And should Trump or his cohort harbor any militaristic fantasies about the upcoming election — which he appears likely to lose — well, this uplifting episode marked a line that they shouldn't dare cross.

Wesley Clark talks about the issue in this CNN clip: Retired general: Mattis' statement does two powerful things 06/04/2020. This is an additional clip from the same day from Clark on Sen. Tom Cotton couldn't be more wrong.

Joe Scarborough denounces Trump while still pretending Trump is not a Real Republican

Here is a classic Nevertrumper moment, from Thursday's Morning Zoo, Worst-Case Scenarios Come True In Syria:

Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are talking to former GOP chair Michael Brown. And at just after 8:00, Scarborough says something that's genuinely impressive:

Think about this, the President talked about, I beat ISIS in a month.

The same President who said, when I took over the United States. The same President who said, when I took over the military. The same President who said, Article II of the Constitution allows me to do whatever I want.

Republicans, Michael, they are our friends in that party, They know he's not well emotionally. They know he's not well mentally. They know that.

But put that aside, they also know that this is a man with illiberal instincts, with antidemocratic impulses who really does believe that his power is unlimited.

It is an anathema to everything we stand for. And he undermines Madisonian safeguards every single day.

That's all true, and impressively put, and I'm glad he's saying it. I give him credit for saying what everyone else in the world can also see, that the President is barking mad.

But he's also saying that their "friends" in the Republicans Party all know this and haven't yet made a move to remove him from office.

Plus, Scarborough, a former Gingrich Revolution foot soldier in the House in the 1990s, pitches this as Trump betraying the noble ideals of the Republican Party he served back then. But somehow he didn't and apparently still doesn't recognize that "this is a man with illiberal instincts, with antidemocratic impulses" also describes Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House, and Dick Cheney, and Shrub Bush? And the Republicans who have focused for the last two decades or so on disenfranchising black and Latino voters in good Southern segregationist style?

As Charlie Pierce sometimes says: Honky, please!

There is a lot more wrong with the Republican Party than having an unstable three-year-old at its head. And getting rid of its "illiberal instincts" and "antidemocratic impulses" will take a lot more than just sending the three-year-old to a children's psychiatric facility.

Joe Conason wrote about that fine Republican statesman Newt Gingrich in Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (2003):

A central theme of his propaganda lexicon was the "breakdown in public manners and morals" he blamed on liberalism. He recommended that when Republicans discussed themselves and their party's values, they should use words such as moral, crusade, and family. When they talked about Democrats, he urged them to emphasize terms like decay, sick, liberal, permissive attitude, antifamily, and bizarre.

As he drove the Republicans toward their takeover of Congress, the portly firebrand plugged his movement's morality with evangelistic fervor. "You have absolutely, in the abstract, a cultural civil war going on," he told US News 6 World Report in 1992. "A nihilistic hedonism and secular belief pattern is by definition involved in a religious war with a spiritual system."

While he blathered on about the culture war, Gingrich's close associates waged a private jihad on Bill Clinton. In the closing months of the 1992 election, Chicago financier Peter Smith, a top contributor to Gingrich's GOPAC fund, hired the Georgian's consultant and confidant Eddie Mahe and two Gingrich lawyers to dredge up dirt about the Democratic nominee's sex life. They focused on a far-fetched tale about an affair with a black prostitute in Little Rock that had produced a male "love child." Their objective was an old-fashioned sexual smear, tinted with race. [my emphasis in bold]

The fanaticism and assymetical polarization in which the Republican Party was actively engaged during the "Gingrich Revolution" era is what made a Trump Presidency possible.

There's a famous phrase from Max Horkheimer in 1939, "whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism." In other words, to understabd fascism, you have to understand the role that capitalism plays in its development.

We can borrow his wording to say also: whoever is not prepared to talk about Newt Gingrich (and Dick Cheney, and Shrub Bush, and Oliver North, and Rush Limbaugh) should have some humility about talking about Trumpism.

The troubles of the Trump Foundation

Joe Conason contrasts the Clinton Foundation with the Trump Foundation. The latter of which he reasonably describes as "a racketeering enterprise under investigation by the state authorities in New York for the past two years." (A Tale Of Two Foundations National Memo 12/19/2018)

Conason has written a book that dealt with the activities of the Clinton Foundation, Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (2016).

In the article, he draws quite a contrasts between the Clinton Foundation and Trump's typically sleazy operation:

Meanwhile, a different foundation continues to operate in New York City, with the highest possible ratings from nonprofit watchdog agencies like Guidestar, Charity Navigator and Charity Watch. Over the past decade or so, that foundation is estimated by public health authorities to have saved the lives of millions of people around the world threatened by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases. And it has estimable programs that help farmers, workers, women and schoolchildren around the world, including the United States. That foundation bears the names of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton — none of whom have ever been sanctioned for a misuse of foundation funds.

He then recaps the sordid backstory of the 2016 Republican attacks on the Clinton Foundation. Hint: Steve Bannon was involved.

Conason gives credit to Washington Post reporter By David Fahrenthold, who did some important reporting on the Trump Fondation in 2016.

Fahrenthold is continuing his work: Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit 12/18/2018. WaPo provides this video report, Trump shuts down foundation amid allegations of illegal conduct 12/18/2018: