Well, Trump** manages to skate again, thanks to hapless Republicans who have given up on the Constitution. A vote of 57 to 43 was ten short of a 2/3rd majority required for conviction.
As senator Ron Wyden put it: Senators swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Instead, those 43 senators committed themselves to authoritarianism, not the Constitution.
On January 6th, 2021, the nation watched Trump’s** out of control mob swarmed the Capitol scream stop the steal, the Big Lie. Those senators were victims of his insurrection. Their place of work defiled and desecrated. Discarding the Constitution and the oath they swore, instead, bent the knee and pledged total submission to an insurrectionist. Fortunately, the insurrection failed. Arrests are being made, and people are starting to realize they have been duped. Although some QAnon nitwits still believe on March 4th, Joe Biden will be removed, and Trump** will be sworn in as President.
Trump’s** acolytes (Hawley, Cruz, Graham) and others move from demagoguery to tyranny as Hamilton wrote in Federalist 1, “began their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
The Republican party is transitioning from conservative values and civil liberties into the Bizarro Trump** party. Where everything is ass-backward and authoritarian is viewed as something to be desired instead of abhorred. Republicans will be in a state of utter disarray.
The GOP is no longer grand. Instead, it has become representative of white male resentment of which Trump** which he is the personification.
In Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny, he writes, “most power of authoritarianism is freely given. His book is a guide to help understand we need to pay attention to our history. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, who were demagogues who became the type of tyrants, Hamilton described.
What took place on January 6th should not be taken lightly. This was an insurrection instigated lead by a sitting president to invalidated a lawful election. An election he lost by 7 million votes, and in a loud and thunderous roar, the people said to him the words he knows so well, YOU’RE FIRED!
Unwilling to accept this rejection, he did what all tyrants do. He incited an insurrection, where five people died. They created millions of dollars in damage. And now face prison time and potentially significant fines. Why? Because they to believe Trump’s** lies. He will not come forth and bail them out or supply them with legal support. As far as he is concerned, their legal woes are the price of participation to be part of his phony stop the steal bullshit.
Those who came to Washington with addled minds full of QAon falsities around the election cannot claim they are victims. They were there willingly and for a specific purpose. To disrupt and stop an official Congressional act, the certification of the 2020 election by which Biden won.
The anarchy of January 6th was indeed disturbing. The illogicalness of it and how easily these people accepted apparent lies as factual truths were far more troubling. Giving more credence to what P.T. Barnum said, “there is a sucker born every minute.”
Trump** skated on impeachment and conviction again. Definitely believes he is above the law and would get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.
Momentarily he is pretty full of himself. A number of his acolytes face serious charges who now realize everything he told them was a lie. However, he is not out of the woods yet. He is facing some significant legal issues that are civil in nature. So if by chance he has given himself a pocket pardon, it will be useless in the case of civil action.
Some are saying a failed coup attempt without repercussions is a dress rehearsal. For the moment, it does feel like Trump** may skate on his botched coup. But some things are stirring, which could result in server repercussions for him. Several civil legal actions are being taken against him.
The most recent is the lawsuit filed by the NAACP on behalf of Congressman Bennie G. Thompson. He, Rudi Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers are named defendants for conspiring to prevent him and other Congressional members from discharging their official duties. This is in violation of 42 USC Section 1985, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
Congressman Thompson was in the Capitol on January 6th as required to certify the results of the 2020 election. A process that would have been completed quickly had it not be for Trump’s** little insurrection. He is listed as the lead defendant in a lawsuit for violating the Ku Klux Klan act. All I can say is KARMA IS A BITCH!
You hammered home a lot of the most important aspects of this sedition.
I have been trying to zoom out on all of this to truly recognize what the scope of all of this truly is and what we’re really dealing with.
I know it has been said in different or similar ways but what this looks like to me, considering how the Republican politicians have stayed on board with Trump despite his attempt to overthrow our democracy and adding in the violent, racist, and foaming-at-the-mouth followers of Trump, the GOP is now a genuine terrorist movement.
It is no longer a political party that believes in vying in elections. The attempts across over 30 states to suppress voting and prevent democracy from occurring, paired with the nature of Trumpian zealots to threaten and even physically attack anyone who does not bow to their cult leader, is sadly a combination of a modern-day Confederacy and pro-Nazi authoritarianism.
At least 30% of this country’s population supports the violent overthrow of our government to install a dictator permanently in power. Let that sink in. They want a white nationalist plutocracy where people of color, Jews, Muslims, women, etc. are oppressed and harmed while white privilege and superiority are restored.
Trump does have an army behind him and he knows it, including a majority of Repubs in The House, some in The Senate, and a majority of Republicans in state governments. This is real. But it can be smothered. It needs to be.
AG Garland (he should be confirmed tomorrow) has already sworn to put prosecuting the 1/6 insurrectionists and white nationalists at the top of his list. This is reassuring news. As more and more of the 1/6 seditionists are arrested and their trials and convictions are publicized, many of the cowardly racists in the Trump cult will back away. As leaders of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are taken down, the leadership vacuum should also grow and undermine their momentum.
A very interesting take I heard today was that COVID-19 is helping to prop up QAnon and the white nationalists. As people have more time at home to get hooked into all the conspiracy BS and feel helpless and disconnected from others, they are more vulnerable to joining this would-be civil war because at least they would feel they belong to something that gives them the comfort of feeling smarter and more at ease due to the state of the world being easily understood through simple-minded conspiracy theories.
Chopping the head off the snake, scaring off followers by imprisoning those who commit crimes in the name of their sedition, preventing Republicans from shutting down our democracy through voter suppression, arresting, removing and voting out Republican politicians who have been and are conspiring with this insurrectionist movement and getting back to normal life after COVID with people socializing in person again could disintegrate this “movement”
But for now, I think it’s important that the rest of us see this terrorist, anti-democratic movement for what it really is, a self-confessed adversary of the U.S. and our democracy.
Thanks AdLib appreciate your kind words.
We have a problem within our political structure I believe most people are completely ambivalent to.
Both parties have their issues. However, those who have sway within the Republican party have moved it away from any sense of democratic governing. It all about control for them. Total control. Snyder writes:
“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing it true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
Reading about the push by Republicans moves to pass more restrictive voting laws, so they can control the vote of their non-white voters, seems to fit with what Snyder is writing about.
Instead of giving people a reason to vote for them they have decided it’s easier to restrict voting all together. The truly fear the diversity of thought, free thinking and the change such thinking inspires.
Look at the people who are drawn to the Republican party, conspiracy nuts, climate deniers, wannabe dictators, along with your every day cadre of fools who will turn over their money gladly if they can a steady diet of white supremacy rhetoric spew on TV and radio rabid dogs like Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson and Levine.
The GOP – Grand Old Party needs to change its name to Gullible Only Party, because it members have definitely shown their gullibility, with all the QAnon nonsense, along with believing all the lies Trump** has fed them.
I completely agree with you on the GOP. It is a hollowed-out shell of a political party. It has far more in common with a criminal enterprise and/or a cult. No principles, no platforms, they have one and only one goal, grabbing power and using it to dominate the majority of Americans and put money in their pockets and those of the wealthy who finance them.
It’s easy for Repubs to support, applaud and collaborate with traitors to our democracy because they share the same and only goal, installing a dictatorial leader who will harm their enemies and empower them.
The GOP should be RICOed. It is a criminal operation and if the FBI and a 9/11-styled commission finally present the facts, I am confident we’ll see evidence confirming the collusion between Republicans in Congress and the attempt to overthrow our democracy (we already have proof of this, the Repubs who voted against counting electoral votes were very clear about doing so to undermine the confirmation of the winner of the presidential election as president.
This is a very dangerous time but made more of a threat because even the media won’t deem the GOP as a corrupt, anti-American cult because the concept is so outrageous and foreign.
But this is where we are. The GOP is continuing to promote The Big Lie which is an engine for insurrection. They actually are whipping up a civil war, period. Even now. The followers of the GOP are as brainwashed and blindly committed as those in Germany were towards the Nazis. This is exactly how tyrants take over countries, through a cowardly political “party” that bows to Dear Leader and the propagandizing of that party’s followers into seeing themselves as victimized and righteously entitled to hold power forever (instead of those non-white and reasonable enemies of the state).
And religion is firmly entwined with this fascist movement, the evangelical fundamentalists are using the same absolutism, entitlement, racism, and fear-mongering to whip their followers into helpless mental slaves, convincing them that they must follow God’s will which is to be a soldier for Trump and authoritarianism.
There is going to be a lot of pressure on AG Garland to wage an all-out war on white supremacy and this insurgency. He said that’s exactly what he sees as Job One and he has the background to confirm that. The fear of imprisonment and losing all they have must be seared into the minds of those who would threaten, hurt and kill other citizens and politicians who stand up for our democracy. That is a meaningful way to undercut this dangerous and destructive cult of nihilism and authoritarianism.