An excellent, chilling, vital article. — Molly
Historian Sean Wilentz says the president and his chief accomplice Attorney General Bill Barr’s subversions of democracy have taken America to the very brink
Before Donald Trump got himself infected with the coronavirus, he had firmly secured his place as the worst president in American history. Now, after mocking Joe Biden at their first debate for mask wearing, Trump has proved to be a reckless superspreader, risking the lives of donors at a New Jersey fundraiser and the Secret Service agents sworn to protect him by demanding a bizarre motorcade photo op outside of Walter Reed hospital. One aide and associate after another of those exposed to him — and his wife — have fallen victim to the virus. Trump’s coronavirus policy, or rather the absence of it, had already been shown to have morbid consequences. Herman Cain, the former pizza king, could testify about that had he not died due to complications from the virus after attending Trump’s ill-fated Tulsa rally crammed with shouting, barefaced fanatics.
After demanding to be released from the hospital, Trump put on a display worthy of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, except that it wasn’t a parody. Clearly struggling for breath, the president first told the nation that Covid-19 was no big deal — “Don’t be afraid” — playing the he-man while spewing the deadly virus. The next day, Trump tweeted that there would be no further talk about a bill to stimulate the economy until after the election. The New York Stock Exchange averages immediately collapsed. But this unhinged performance is in keeping with the president’s attitude toward the contagion from the beginning, a toxic mixture of denial and presumed invulnerability.
Since Covid hit, Trump’s refusal to call the pandemic a siren-howling public-health emergency, coupled with his know-nothing disparagement of medical science, has led directly to the soaring death count, now well over 210,000 Americans, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The escalating number of fatalities of Americans from the coronavirus outstrips the number of U.S. combat deaths in World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and every war since combined. However Trump fares with the virus, whether he suffers its symptoms for months or recovers, his legacy is already written in stone as one of catastrophic and lethal failure.
That’s for starters. 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.
Before Trump fell ill, he openly disclosed his plot, what looked like the last option left to him to snatch a victory despite almost certain defeat. Claiming that the Democrats were out to steal the election and getting his frenzied supporters to turn out, vote, and prevent others from voting, Trump prepared the hardcore MAGA base to unleash orchestrated chaos in the streets in case he lost, a standard tactic in banana republics. The obscene scramble to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court — a cynical move to solidify a right-wing majority on the court — was, again by Trump’s own admission, an equally important element in his mind for the projected coup. 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.
The president’s illness has not put that strategy on hold, only made it more urgent. His wild performance in the first debate — which repelled voters who saw him unfiltered for 90 minutes and was sufficient to double Biden’s lead — only makes Trump more dependent than ever on undemocratic tactics. The situation around the election is so volatile that no projection appears too dire. But when historians look back on the 2020 election, it will be important for them to recognize that Trump’s plot was taking shape before the virus intervened. This is not lurid speculation. An earlier plan, which was exposed, involved smearing Biden, and it provoked Trump’s impeachment. Since then, Trump has developed a conscious and deliberate strategy to discredit and overturn the popular vote in the election and even the Electoral College in order to keep himself in power.
Trump may never have thought he could actually pull this off. If the scheme faltered, he might fall back on using a coup threat as an opening bid in a negotiation for a pardon for all of his federal crimes, as well as his crimes against New York state law. The exposure of his tax returns by The New York Times had shown that he paid virtually no taxes and is a terrible businessman. More important, though, it showed that even if Trump recovers, he may well be in profound legal trouble, along with members of his family, potentially facing charges of bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, and much more. If so, as seems likely, Trump has always known he’s guilty, and he knows that he and Ivanka and Don Jr. and Eric might also end up in prison. When the virus struck, he was already a truly desperate man, facing not simply an election but also his own existential crisis, one just as severe as the one afflicting the nation. From his bed in the Walter Reed Medical Center, even suffering symptoms his chief of staff called “concerning,” Trump was spreading lies and sowing chaos. So, as we hurtle toward Election Day, the question remains: How did we get to this point? How has Donald Trump managed to take the nation to the brink, holding on to power despite his manifest abuses of the public trust?
First, there is his base, which has become a true cult worshipping its Dear Leader, whipped up by an elaborate propaganda apparatus of Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and conspiracy-spouting websites. Fear of that fevered base, inhabiting its own media bubble, and the immense power of unregulated dark money from special interests, has turned whatever is left of the national Republican Party into a subsidiary of Trump Inc., with the Senate GOP majority ceding Trump enormous power as well as a firewall against congressional checks and balances. When talking about the Republicans, though, it’s important not to forget the long-standing party fixtures outside of Congress that have also done their utmost to secure Trump’s power. Of those insider subversives, none has been more essential to protecting, guiding, and sustaining Trump’s regime — and his election plot — than Attorney General William P. Barr.
When Barr replaced the utterly unqualified lunkhead serving as acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, in February 2019, the sigh of relief from Washington’s quarters of conventional wisdom was almost audible. Whitaker’s predecessor, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, had infuriated Trump by recusing himself from investigating possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sessions had in turn acquiesced in the appointment of a special counsel, former FBI director Robert Mueller. As soon as the 2018 midterms were done, Trump fired Sessions and appointed Whitaker as his temporary replacement. But eventually Trump picked Barr — and the choice may have appeared to be a nod to the old establishment.
Barr had no apparent ties to Trump, for whom personal loyalty is everything; and he had previously served as President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general. The elder Bush, who had just died, had not only refused to support Trump’s election, but actually voted for Hillary Clinton. So Trump choosing Barr didn’t seem entirely to add up, if you thought of him as a traditional Bush man.
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.
Inside of two years, Barr has become the most aggressively political attorney general in American history. Of course, there have been rotten attorneys general before: Richard Nixon’s consigliere, the taciturn John Mitchell, a convicted felon in the Watergate affair; Ronald Reagan’s ethically challenged California buddy Ed Meese, who resigned under a cloud amid the Wedtech scandal. And before them there was Harry Daughtery, Warren G. Harding’s attorney general, boss of the “Ohio Gang,” who was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal.
Since his appointment, Barr has rushed forward as Trump’s public savior, making havoc of the rule of law he claims to revere and using the full weight of his office to deflect trouble and advance Trump’s political fortunes. Barr deliberately thwarted potential checks and balances on the president’s corruption, inflamed the civil strife on which Trump feeds, and both launched and cooperated with investigations of dedicated public officials for maximum political effect on the eve of the election. If Trump grabs another term, he will have Barr to thank possibly more than anyone. And if that happens, what’s left of the Justice Department as an institution above partisan politics, serving the public trust, will almost certainly and completely collapse. A survey of the damage done so far makes that clear.
Please continue this article here: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-sedition-william-barr-1073455/
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