And excellent article. And yes, the American electorate is indeed headed for a crucial test.
Such chilling times. Everything is on the line. Literally. It isn't "just" that Trump is a narcissistic, sociopathic, authoritarian, fascist wannabe dictator who wants to shred whatever threads of democracy remaining in our country. He also completely denies the human caused catastrophic climate crisis that we are in the midst of and the utter urgency for wide ranging collective national and global cooperative action to try to preserve a habitable planet.
Never before has so very much been at stake — which is absolutely everything, everything!, that we love and cherish. And as Emma Goldman wisely stated over 100 years ago, "The most violent element in society is ignorance." So true! May we all be inspired to be increasingly passionate truth-seekers and truth-tellers. — Molly
 |
| The former President continues to attract millions of supporters who have such antipathy for Biden and the Democrats that they interpret Trump’s deviance as defiance and his fury as their fury. Getty Images |
To read the stark criminal indictment, returned by a federal grand jury on Tuesday, charging Donald Trump with conspiring to steal the 2020 Presidential election is to realize more deeply than before that the country is headed for a great reckoning—in the courts and at the ballot box. It suggests a question that cannot be escaped: Will the American electorate show itself capable of overlooking a conspiracy to undermine democratic rule and return the chief conspirator to power?
The third and latest indictment against Trump sets out four charges and makes the case against him in the plainest terms. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” the introduction to the forty-five-page document reads—and where have you seen a more succinct summary of criminal intent?
Or take the opening lines to Count One, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States: “From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government.”
This indictment is foremost a legal document, not a literary one, but one cannot help thinking that whoever drafted this paragraph and many others like it hoped that its cadences—consonant, rhythmic, startling—would help underline the grave historical stakes. Trump and his co-conspirators retailed “prolific lies” in the cause of denying Joe Biden the Presidency, the indictment insists; they claimed, among other things, that “large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for the Defendant to votes for Biden.” Trump’s co-conspirators are unnamed but are, according to the Washington Post, likely to include the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the attorney John Eastman, the former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, the former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, and the appellate attorney Kenneth Chesebro.
The indictment is a powerful summation of much that we have learned before, but who, in fact, will read it? What minds will it alter? What difference will it make?
The indictment comes just days after a poll conducted by the Times and Siena College showed that the former President is so far ahead of Ron DeSantis and the rest of the Republican field that it is clear that a large portion of the electorate has decided that multiple criminal indictments current and forthcoming—the 2020 election fraud; the hush-money sex-scandal case, in Manhattan; the election-fraud case, in Georgia; the classified-documents case in Florida—will not dissuade them from voting for Trump. The former President continues to attract millions of supporters who have such antipathy for Biden, for the Democrats, for the “corporate media,” for academia, for all the institutions they see as woke and hostile to their interests, that they interpret Trump’s deviance as defiance, his lies as truthtelling, his fury as their fury. DeSantis has proved a robotic, even pathetic campaigner; his unwillingness to attack Trump with any directness or conviction has not so much impressed right-wing voters as it has further convinced them that he is a humorless pill, a pallid imitation. Trump is their leader and, if need be, in the end, their martyr. As Nate Cohn put it in his analysis of the Times’ poll, “The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.”
Trump’s reaction to the latest indictment closely resembles his reaction to previous indictments and impeachments. It’s a page from “1984.” In a statement on Truth Social, he compared the prosecutors’ case against him to “Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.” Predicting that justice and truth would, in the end, be served, his campaign’s statement went on to say, “The un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so he can save our Country from the abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our Country at levels never seen before.”
Soon enough, there will be a criminal indictment against Trump from Georgia. Four criminal indictments—each one more serious and more convincing than the last. It is hard to calculate the logistics, the legal fees, the courtroom antics.
And yet it still seems quite possible that Trump will be elected President for a second time. In another story in the Times about its poll, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Phoenix, a Republican in his early forties named John Wittman, said, “Donald Trump is not a Republican, he’s a criminal.” But Wittman’s sense of discernment is anything but dominant. So far, tens of millions of Americans are willing to overlook not only the multiple criminal indictments of Donald Trump but also his lethal mismanagement of covid-19; his inhumane handling of children at the border; his myriad statements of bigotry and misogyny; his assaults on the free press and the rule of law; his indifference to national security and the climate emergency; his affection for autocrats around the world; his impeachments; his many schemes to enrich his family. According to the Times poll, Biden and Trump are tied in a hypothetical rematch at forty-three per cent. Sooner or later, a great reckoning is coming. ♦
Please go here for the original article in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-new-trump-indictment-and-the-reckoning-ahead
No comments:
Post a Comment