THE MADNESS OF JANUARY SIXTH

It says so much about the character of Donald Trump that the only thing he has worked hard at as President is trying to steal the election.  Yes, the leader who watches hours of TV a day and who has played golf over three hundred times in the past four years, finally found something to grab his attention.  Being branded a loser.  It upset him so much that he released a video of him giving a forty six minute (absurdly inaccurate) speech about it, which he began by claiming  that it “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made.”  It shows how self obsessed he is that his public statements and tweets about how the election was "stolen" far outnumber his statements about the ongoing pandemic.

 A few days ago, it finally seemed that the madness was over: the lawsuits had all failed to overturn the election, the recounts had shown no cases of widespread voter fraud, and, on December fifteenth, even Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (a man who would shove aside his own mother if he thought it would get him another Supreme Court Judge) congratulated President Elect Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.  The electoral count had been certified.  

But with Donald Trump, the madness never seems to end.  Yesterday, in what will go down as the one of the strangest moments in perhaps the strangest political time ever in American history, Republicans, led by House member Louie Gohmert of Texas, filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence.  Why?  Because on January sixth the Senate will formally count and certify (again!) the electoral college votes.  And it is the twisted belief of Gohmert and his confederates is that the Vice President, as leader of the Senate, has the right to reject the electors from states that Trump lost.  So they believe that they can sue him into overturning the election!

This is, of course, an even bigger crank lawsuit than the one that Texas recently filed attempting to overturn the election results in other states that was summarily rejected by the Supreme Court. But it not only shows the depths that some Trump supporters will go to show their loyalty to him, it puts Pence himself in a bind.  Will he do the right thing, and ignore this lawsuit and the more radical members of his party, or will he attempt to reject the duly appointed electors from some states?   The good news is, either way, congress will certify those electors even if it has to be put to a vote.  The House is majority Democrats, and McConnell has already told members of  his party in the Senate not to support  this absurd farce.  Still, what Pence does will say a lot about what his future, and the future of his party, will be. 

 Pence has always seemed like such an odd choice for Trump's running mate: why would a conservative Christian who won't eat in a restaurant alone with any woman that isn't his wife be the running mate to a thrice married man who has a long history of bragging about his sexual exploits?  It's like Ward Cleaver hanging out with Archie Bunker.  Not surprisingly, Pence's turn to Trump was made really out of desperation.  In twenty fifteen, when he was Governor of Indiana, Pence signed into law a bill entitled the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that allowed open discrimination against the the LGBT community.  Seemingly, he had forgotten the days of politicians openly demonizing gay people ended decades ago.  The bill wound up costing the state millions of dollars of investment and job growth as companies like Apple and Angie's List boycotted the state.  Things got so bad that the Indianapolis Star newspaper ran a simple, bold headline: FIX THIS NOW.  Less than a month later he did, signing a revision to the bill that essentially nullified the more radical parts of it.  This, naturally, enraged the Christian Conservatives who had cheered its initial signing.  With his  reelection approaching and his popularity plummeting, Pence latched onto Trump as both a lifeline out of the mess he had created for himself in Indiana and a chance to make a name for himself nationally with perhaps the opportunity for a presidential run in the future.   The fact that Trump won was just icing on the cake.

And as we all know, Pence has been a complete sycophant for Trump for the past four years, heaping the constant amount of fawning praise on him that Trump requires.  Which makes his decision on January sixth all the more interesting.  If he does what Trump wants and tries to reject the electors, it will show that even in defeat Trump will continue to have an influence on the party.  If, however, he does the right thing and counts the votes properly, by denying Trump's coup attempt, he could be signalling that it's time for the party to move beyond him, while positioning Pence himself as a new party leader and perhaps its future in twenty twenty four.  Either way, once again Trump's crazy behavior has turned yet another simple part of the American democratic process into  another dramatic showdown.  January sixth will be a turning point in more ways than one. 

THE CORONAVIRUS AND THE LIE OF LIBERTARIANISM

 

Just yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a recovery bill to help out Americans citizens and businesses hurt by the coronavirus.  This is only the second such bill to be passed in the months since the pandemic officially began.  For most people, the bill will bring them a one time check for six hundred dollars plus more for the unemployed.  The bill was passed at the last minute before millions of Americans faced evictions, and there are reports that the only reason it will pass the Senate is because Mitch McConnell thought that failing to pass such a bill would hurt the Republican candidates in the upcoming Senate election in the state of Georgia.

The fact that there was such a battle over the passage of a bill that will provide only a modicum of relief to most Americans shows how misguided our priorities are in this country.   While there are a number of reasons why America has done such a poor job of dealing with the pandemic as compared to other industrialized nations (President Trump's chaotic response and continued denials are a big a part), our government's fear of "big government handouts" has played a big part.  While other countries have paid citizens money to stay home (in Canada some workers got as much as two thousand dollars a month) poor and middle class workers who can't work from home  in America have basically been given the choice to go to work and risk catching and spreading the virus, or wind up homeless.  Putting it  bluntly, the same congress that a few years ago passed  a trillion and half dollar tax bill that mostly favored the rich, has fought tooth and nail to pass a similar bill to help people affected by what may be the worst health crisis in American history.  And even within a bill aimed at helping ordinary Americans and small businesses, there is a provision that  would let companies deduct one hundred percent of business meals with clients, up from the current fifty percent amount; which is essentially another hand out to the rich.

Our anemic response to the pandemic's affects beyond the infected seems to be based on the American myth of libertarianism, that notion that rugged individualism without government interference (and low tax rates, even on the rich) is the best way to run a country.  This belief really started to catch on in the nineteen eighties, when then president Ronald Reagan passed steep tax cuts for the rich under the wrongful belief that somehow they increased economic growth enough to pay for themselves (it didn't work then, and it still didn't work when both George W Bush and Donald Trump tried the same thing years later).

The truth of the matter is that the romantic notion of people taking care of themselves may have had an appeal in the early days of this country, when people tended to live in isolated communities, but today, as the pandemic shows, it's essentially ridiculous.  People are always going to need roads and bridges, law enforcement and firefighters, health departments and safety regulators, not to mention government workers risking their lives to help others in natural disasters.   And all of these things have to be paid for with tax dollars.  

This gets even more hypocritical when you look at the national trends of federal government spending; every year, blue states like New York and New Jersey pay more in federal taxes than they receive in federal spending, while red states like Kentucky and Mississippi get more in federal spending than they pay in taxes.  Really, the economies of some red states are basically kept afloat by the money paid to the government by blue states.  So much for rugged individualism!  Oh sure, the Republican leaders of those states rail against big government, but try taking Social Security and Medicare payments to their states and see how much they hate big government then.

Really, the pandemic has laid bare the problems of the American system of capitalism: even as the coronavirus has raged through the country, and  shutdowns have caused unemployment rates to skyrocket,  the wealthiest Americans have actually seen their wealth increase in the past nine months.  And because we have a crazy, free market system of healthcare in which most people receive it through an employer, many of the millions of people that have lost their jobs have also lost their healthcare.  During a pandemic.  So, even for the millions of Americans lucky enough not to be directly affected by the virus, many of them will be poorer and less healthy.

If there is a silver lining to this, it that's America may finally get over the notion that the rich paying their fair share of taxes is "Socialism"and that when the effects of the pandemic wind up hitting the poor and middle class far more than the rich, perhaps there will be  support for a wealth tax, or some kind of increase in the upper income tax rate to somewhat even the huge gap between the rich and the poor in this country.  At the very least, the millions of Americans who will be without healthcare may finally drive this country into adapting the same kind of national healthcare programs that every other industrialized nation has.   But, given that the Republican party has not been given the kind of stinging rebuke they deserved for supporting Trump for the past five years, it may not happen soon.  

THE CULT LEADER

 

Towards the end of his life, L Ron Hubbard, the creator of the cult Church of Scientology, was seen hooking himself up to a so called e-meter, a bogus device used by followers of his church to check their mental health.  While it's obvious to anyone not in the Scientology cult that Hubbard was a charlatan who founded the religion as a money making scheme, it appears that he eventually started believing his own lies.   There is a certain perfect symmetry to this; if you're a charismatic con artist who gets a large group of people to believe in what your saying, eventually you're going to start believing it too.  Like Hubbard, if you surround yourself only with people who repeat the things you say back to you, the brainwasher can find himself joining the brainwashed.

Which brings us to the most prominent cult leader in American today, soon to be former President Donald Trump.  Despite the Electoral College vote yesterday that confirmed Joe Biden's win, not to mention the dismissal by the Supreme Court, of a Texan lead attempt to overturn the vote counts in four states, Trump  maintains that somehow he will still find a way to turn the election.  This leads to an interesting question: is Trump just using his attempt to overturn his loss as a way to fire up his followers, or does he really think that somehow millions of votes were fraudulently counted?

On the one hand, Trump has been using his legal challenges to the election as a fundraising cash cow.  Emails begging his supporters for money have raised tens of millions of dollars so far.  And, as many members of  the media have pointed out, while the top of the email says that the money will go to his legal team, in the fine print at the bottom is the announcement that most of the money is going to his new political action committee.  In other words, his legal fund is just another con from a man whose life has been filled with them.  Also, his point man on the legal charges against the election has been Rudy Giuliani, who's fee has been estimated to be around twenty thousand dollars a day.  On top of that, it's been reported that he may want a presidential pardon from Trump.  So of course Giuliani is going to push every legal case that he can, he wants to make money and impress the president.  Most people are willing to tell lies for twenty grand a day! And all the other Trump people publicly defending his attempts to overturn the election are just doing it to impress him, or perhaps land a lucrative job in right wing media.  It would appear to be a cynical cash in all around.

On the other hand, people around the president are saying that he often really seems to  believe that this election was somehow stolen, and that someday soon the truth will appear and he will remain in the White House.  In other words, he may not be a cynical con man, he may be straight up delusional.  The fact that he surrounds himself with sycophants and immerses himself in right wing media that continually (and absurdly) claims that he actually won, combined with his narcissistic nature and constant need to be seen as winner, may skew is entire sense of reality itself.  He may be a cult leader drinking his own kool aid.

This dichotomy between cynical con man and true believer is echoed in his devoted followers, who say in polls that they believe that the election was stolen, but then admit in interviews that they aren't sure.  It would appear that the rallies being held by his supporters recently are as much about anger at the outcome of the election than they are a genuine belief that it was stolen.  (Either way, they are becoming violent, and Trump is irresponsibly doing nothing to quell that violence).  

The sad thing about cults is that it's very hard to get someone out of one once they've joined.  A cult can bring a sense of order and unity to someone's life, and provides like minded friends that you can bond with.  The problem is their sincere beliefs are combined with a hostility towards outsiders.  And people who try to leave the cult are often hated the most of all.  For an example of this, just look at the death threats being aimed by Trumpists at Republican leaders who haven't supported Trump's legal efforts.  And there is no easy way for the country to get over Trumpism, which is sure to follow him even as he reluctantly leaves power.  The beliefs of his followers are just too strong to disappear even when he is no longer president.  The effects of Trump's degradation of both the office of the presidency and the Republican party will be felt for years to come, even if he himself fades away.

DEMOCRACY IS HOLDING, FOR NOW

Another day, another humiliating loss for Donald Trump and his quixotic (some might say insane) desire to hold onto the White House.  Today, Georgia just finished their third (!) recount of the presidential votes, and it once again affirms that Joe Biden won the state by about twelve thousand votes.  This comes after one loss after another in the courts (the Associate Press reports that fifty court filings so far have led to only one minor victory for the president's legal team).  In perhaps one of the more stinging rebukes against the Trump legal team, Federal  judge Stephanos Bibas ruled against them, saying "Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so.  Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”   Bibas, it should be pointed out, was appointed by Trump, proving both the importance of an independent judicial system, and that partisanship does not always overrule the truth.  And it's not just the courts that are rebuking him, recently the state of Wisconsin did a recount of votes (paid for by Trump's campaign), that actually added to Biden's vote total.

This is all good news in that it shows that American democracy, despite the roughing up it has taken in the past four years, is still holding on.  But it is upsetting in that Trump has shown that the edges of our system can be frayed.  From our absurd Electoral College that gave Trump his victory in twenty sixteen despite his losing the popular vote by almost three million, to his (thankfully failed) attempt to get electors in certain states to vote against the will of the voters, Trump has shown that he very well could have stolen the election if it had been closer.  Really, his legal team's ineptitude is a perfect capper to his political career; chaotic, poorly planned, and built around the erratic, needy nature of Trump himself.  If he had been more organized, and started making legal charges against election laws before the election, he just might have gotten away with it, but then, without chaos he wouldn't be Trump.

So now we have reports of him sullenly stalking the oval office, repeating "I won I won" to anyone within earshot, acting much like Richard Nixon did in his final days.  But unfortunately, there is a crucial difference; Nixon's downfall came with plummeting approval in his own party, which eventually led to the elected leaders of his own party turning on him.  Sadly, for the most part, this hasn't happened to Trump.  So far, only a handful of Republican officials have publicly admitted that he lost.  In a Senatorial debate in Georgia yesterday, Senator Kelly Loeffler refused to say whether Trump had won or lost that state in the election.  And with good reason, a clear majority of registered Republicans (in some polls, as many as seventy percent) think that the election was somehow stolen by Biden.  

We've been down this road before; during the presidency of Barack Obama, the crazy  notion that he had actually been born in Kenya was seen as believable by a large number of Republicans.  In other words, "Stop the Steal" is just the new birtherism, and it is really a surprise that a party that has often rejected the truths of evolution and climate change would move latch on to another falsehood?  Fueled by the right wing media, for years now millions of Republicans would rather hear what they believe to be true rather than the actual truth.

Now, while there's no chance that the current conspiracy beliefs will change the election, it may prove to be a rallying cry in future elections, which is where my real concern lies.  What if another demagogic cult like leader like Trump arises in this country?  And what if that leader isn't  disorganized and distracted like him?  American has disposed of one president that is all too willing to discard democracy for his own personal gain, but what happens if another such leader rises?  If Trump has taught us anything, it's that American democracy is more fragile than we thought, and that in the door to outright fascism may be open to just the right kind of leader.  (If you think I'm just being paranoid, remember that Trump sometimes publicly mused about getting a third term, or even a lifetime appointment.) Hopefully America will never have another Trump, but it's not impossible.