The court was unanimous in determining that neither Colorado – which had banned Trump from the ballot – nor any other US state is qualified to decide on the eligibility of a presidential candidate. Furthermore, a majority opinion coming from the five conservative judges – three of them nominated by Trump himself – determined that only the US Congress can disqualify an individual from running for office on the grounds of insurrection.

This majority opinion, the three progressive judges in the minority warned, risked closing the door to any possible future US Supreme Court decision to ban an insurrectionist from becoming President. An indictment against Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is still possible but the Supreme Court would probably not act on it.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Germany, media attention is focused on a judicial proceeding taking place in Münster, a city in the West of the country. At the core of the dispute, we find the far-right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (Alternative for Germany or AfD) and the “Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz” (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV), a domestic intelligence agency that has no clear counterpart in other European countries.

The agency’s role is to police anti-constitutional extremism. The BfV, however, has often been unable or unwilling to fulfill this vital task. From 2012 to 2018, when the president of the agency was Hans-Georg Maaßen, the AfD – founded in 2013 – grew more powerful and more radical. Maaßen recently founded a right-wing party called “Werteunion” (Values Union) that is willing to reach agreements with the AfD and embraces part of its agenda.

In 2021, the BfV determined that the AfD merited the category of “suspected case of far-right extremism.” The far-right party appealed against the decision and the case has dragged on until now. The hearing in Münster is the second and last appeal. The AfD is likely to lose the appeal, but that would not imply its illegalization. A win for the BfV would bring further rights to investigate and surveil the activities of the party.

Both Trump and the AfD have been following the same legal strategy when forced to appear before the courts: delay, delay, and, if possible, delay even further. CNN reporter Stephen Collinson notes that Trump “appears to want to also forestall jury verdicts until after the general election – likely because polls have suggested some voters would be less keen to vote for him if he is a convicted felon.”

Meanwhile, the AfD wants to prevent for as long as possible a final decision on whether the BfV was right in qualifying the AfD as a “suspected case of far-right extremism.” This could negatively affect its electoral performance. There are elections to the European Parliament in June and regional elections in the three Eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in September. In the European elections, the AfD is polling second with around 20% of the vote, whereas in the three Eastern states, the radical right is polling first with over 30% of the vote.

After the September elections in three of the five eastern states, broad coalitions, or at least tacit alliances from the left to the center-right will be needed to avoid that the far-right reaches its highest level of power in Germany since the end of the Second World War. In this sense, it is very worrying that the leader of the center-right CDU, Friederich Merz, continues to equate the left-wing party “Die Linke” with the AfD, announcing it will reach agreements with neither of these forces. Unless the pre-election polls are wrong by a huge margin, the CDU will soon be forced to pick a side.

By delaying the legal process in Münster, the AfD does not only seek to preserve the pretense that it is just as legitimate as any other German party – if not more, according to their discourse. The far-right party also seeks to prevent the BfV from taking the next step and qualify the whole AfD as “proven right-wing extremist”. The regional AfD groups in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt are already classified in this category.

DW News Video: “Why is Germany’s far-right AfD party so successful? | DW News”

The AfD has close ties with openly neo-Nazi groups and some of its leaders, especially in eastern Germany, have adopted a language very often reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. Björn Höcke, the regional leader of the AfD in Thuringia and powerbroker within the national leadership of the party, has used multiple times the expression “Everything for Germany”, the motto of the SA, a paramilitary Nazi group that was key in Hitler’s power takeover in 1933.

Höcke has said that Africans have a biological reproduction strategy different from Europeans or, about Adolf Hitler, that “there is no black and white in history.” The AfD often employs terms such as “Volkstod” (death of the German nation), as well as “Stimmvieh” (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties.

The AfD has often fantasized about the possibilities of “remigration”, a common term among far-right European groups. The concept refers to the deportation of people with a migration background and has been popularized by Martin Sellner, an Austrian neo-Nazi. The Austrian ideologist is banned from entering the US because he accepted money from – and probably met – Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist terrorist. In 2019, Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 40 more in his attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. On March 19 it became known that Sellner had been banned from entering Germany.

The concept of “remigration” is not a new one, and Höcke and other members of the most radical current within the AfD have been toying with the idea for years. However, many Germans became aware of how specific the concept of “remigration” has become in recent times when it was revealed that Sellner had presented his racist theses in a secret meeting in Potsdam organized by two businessmen. The meeting was attended by high-ranking AfD cadres – among them Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader in Sachsen-Anhalt – and some low-ranking members of the center-right CDU, who were later forced to resign. According to research by the independent investigative platform Correctiv, Sellner proposed that a far-right government in Germany should plan the deportation of asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens.

The Correctiv revelations triggered a wave of massive demonstrations in Germany against the far-right. They also renewed the discussion on whether a process should be started to ban the AfD. A call for a party ban can be issued by the German government, the parliament, or the Bundesrat, an institution where the different German states are represented. The final decision would always be in the hands of the German Constitutional Court. The process could take years and there would be no guarantee of success. The openly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was deemed too politically irrelevant to be banned when the Constitutional Court decided on the matter in 2017.

There is no consensus between the different German parties on whether an attempt to ban the AfD is the path to follow. The differences of opinion are also found within the parties. Whereas a parliamentarian for the center-right CDU was one of the early proponents of banning the AfD, the leader of the party Frederich Merz is against this. The neoliberal FDP is generally against the ban. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz have not taken a clear position, as views diverge on the issue. Within the Greens, banning the AfD would probably find wider acceptance. Every case is different, but the governing coalition in the northwestern state of Bremen, where the Social Democrats lead a government with the Greens and the left-wing “Die Linke”, has asked for an AfD ban.

German society appears to be equally divided on the appropriateness of initiating a process to illegalize the AfD. According to a poll from February 2024, 51 percent of the population was against starting such a process and 37 percent was in favor. The percentages change significantly when citizens are asked whether the AfD should continue to receive public funding as the other parties do. 41 percent are in favor while 48 percent want public funds not to reach the AfD.

On February 23, I attended a counterdemonstration against Martin Sellner, the neo-Nazi who has been pushing for “remigration”, when he visited the city of Chemnitz, in the state of Saxony. The protest was organized by “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, a group that has been mobilizing against the far-right for fourteen years in a city that represents a radical right stronghold.

Before the march against Sellner, I discussed with two activists of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement their views on whether a procedure should be started to ban the AfD. They told me this had been a major issue of discussion within their group in recent times. Although more members of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement are in favor of an AfD ban than against it, there is no clear majority.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of a ban, the activists I interviewed remarked, is the significant consequences this would have for the AfD’s financial situation, which could be forced to reduce its activities. At the same time, they fear that AfD followers could become more violent if a ban was implemented. They did not discard that something similar to the assault on the Capitol in Washington could take place in Germany if the AfD was banned. The open question for the members of “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, as for many others, is: If you ban the AfD, what about the situation afterward? A poll from February 2024 shows that only 43 percent of those who plan to vote for the AfD would be willing to consider voting for another party in the coming years.

It is certainly urgent to discuss whether Trump should be able to run again for president, or whether the AfD should be banned by the Constitutional Court. But the key issue is that broad sectors of both German and US society – a far stronger one in the latter case – have radicalized themselves to the extent that they are ready to use the instruments of democracy to undermine its foundations. This does not mean that every Trump or AfD voter is anti-democratic, and part of these voters can still be convinced to move to less extremist positions. But a considerable percentage of them, and maybe even the majority, have crossed the point of no return.

Democracy is not only destroyed through authoritarian power grabs or military coups but also through free and fair elections. While Germany has known this for a long time due to its historical trajectory, this does not necessarily imply that it is better prepared than other countries. The poor performance of the BfV in protecting the Constitution is proof of this.

While democratic systems offer many opportunities that right-wing radicals can exploit, they are not defenseless and have mechanisms to combat radicalism. If all democratic forces in Germany take the right-wing threat seriously – and here the center-right CDU needs to play a responsible role – and focus on what unites them, the AfD can still be kept away from the main centers of power in the country. It might be too late for the US, where Biden has recovered some ground in the polls in recent months but lags behind Trump in the states that will probably decide the November election. Germany, meanwhile, still has a strong anti-AfD majority but should not be too complacent.

All too many of us who now argue about the Ukraine and Gaza wars and their ensuing humanitarian crises, about police violence and extremism in the military here at home, about all sorts of things, would no longer share a common language. Basics that once might have meant the same thing to you and me, like claiming someone won an election, might become unsafe to mention. In a Trump 2.0 world, more of our journalists would undoubtedly face repercussions and need to find roundabout ways to allude to all too many topics. A moving opinion column by the New York Times’s David French, who faced threats for his writing about Donald Trump, highlighted how some who voiced their views on him already need round-the-clock police protection to ensure their safety and that of their family.

I often think about the slippery slope we Americans could soon find ourselves on. After all, from the time Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president in 1999, I spent 20 years traveling to his country and back, working there first as an anthropology doctoral student and later as a human rights researcher. I’ve followed Russian politics closely, including as a therapist specializing in war-affected populations, asylum seekers, and refugees. Friends and colleagues of mine there have faced threats to their safety and their careers amid a Kremlin crackdown on public discussion after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and several fled the country with their families in search of safety and a better life.

To be sure, there are many differences between the United States, with its robust democratic tradition, and Russia, which only briefly had competitive elections and a free press. Nonetheless, my experiences there offer a warning about how a Trumpian version of top-down rule could someday stifle any possibility of calling out state-sponsored violence for what it is, and what it might feel like if that’s our situation here someday.

Tucker Carlson’s Moscow

On first look, far-right journalist Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Moscow, covered exuberantly by Russia’s state media, might seem like an example of an American tourist’s naïve glorification of another country’s luxuries. Carlson marveled at the fancy tilework of the city’s subway system, visited the national ballet, and noted that you can buy caviar cheaply at the local grocery store. He also pointed out that Moscow’s pristine streets had no homeless people and no apparent poverty.

In the gilded halls of the Kremlin palace, he interviewed President Putin for more than two hours. Despite his guileless expression, Carlson occasionally appeared flummoxed as Putin lectured him endlessly on Russian history and the centuries-old claim he insisted Moscow has on Kyiv as its protector from aggressors near and far. Of course, he never challenged Putin on his rationale for invading that country (nor did he refer to it as an invasion) or any of the Russian leader’s other outrageous claims.

I’m of the school of thought that considers Putin’s Russia exactly the sort of anti-woke paradise the MAGA crowd craves. Anyone of Carlson’s age who grew up during the Cold War and turned on his or her television in that pivotal period when the Berlin Wall fell should certainly know that all of Russia doesn’t look anything like what he was shown. He should also have known about the recent history of economic “shock therapy” that drained Russian public services of funding and human resources, not to speak of the decades of corruption and unfair economic policies that enriched a choice few in Putin’s circle at the expense of so many.

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Of course, something had to happen to turn the Moscow that Carlson saw into a sanitized moonscape. If you haven’t been following developments in Russia under Putin, let me summarize what I’ve noticed.

Protesters — even many going to opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s recent memorial service — have been arrested or at least intimidated when appearing to sympathize with anything that’s not part of the Kremlin’s official pro-Putin ideology. Many groups, from Asian migrants to the homeless, have either been rounded up by the police or at least relocated far out of the view of tourists of any sort. In fact, the imprisoned American journalist whom Carlson briefly gestured toward emancipating, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, had written on the practice of zachistki, or mop-up operations by the Russian authorities that, for instance, relocated homeless services to the outskirts of Moscow, far from public view. Of course, Gershkovich is now imprisoned indefinitely in Russia on charges of espionage for simply reporting on the war in Ukraine, proving the very point Carlson so studiously avoided, that an endless string of lies underscore Putin’s latest war.

What’s more, amid sub-subsistence wages, housing shortages, and the thin walls of so many city apartments, ordinary Russians are not always able to engage in the “hard conversations” that conservatives like Alabama Senator Katie Britt boast of having in their well-furbished kitchens. After all, neighbors are now encouraged to denounce each other for decrying Russia’s war. (You could, it seems, even end up in prison if your child writes “no to war” on a drawing she did for school.)

There are very personal ramifications to living in an autocracy with which Tucker Carlson and, of course, the Orange Jesus himself are signaling their agreement when they entertain the views of leaders like Vladimir Putin or call Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán “fantastic.” They’re signaling what their end goal is to Americans and, sadly enough, it’s not particularly far-fetched anymore to suggest that, someday, we won’t even have the freedom to talk about all of this with each other.

The Thing That Cannot Be Named

Tucker Carlson at least did his homework. He clearly knew that you couldn’t describe the war in Ukraine as an unprovoked Russian invasion, given that country’s carefully crafted censorship laws.

Since his February 2022 invasion, Putin has referred to it as a “special military operation” focused on the defense of Russia from NATO and the “denazification” of Ukraine. During that first spring, the Russian president signed a law forbidding journalists from even calling the invasion a “war,” choosing instead to frame the killing, displacement, abduction, torture, and rape of Ukrainian citizens as a surgical rescue operation provoked by the victims themselves. Broader, vaguer censorship laws were then passed, further limiting what Russians of all stripes could say, including one against “discrediting the army,” which imposed stiff fines and prison sentences, and more recently, property confiscations on anyone deemed to have said anything negative about Russia’s armed forces. While the thousands of arrests made may seem modest, given Russia’s 146 million people, it’s still, in my opinion, thousands too many.

The Russian leader’s perverse framing of his unprovoked war is undoubtedly what also allows him to admit that hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed or wounded so far, something he couldn’t otherwise say. In a country suffused with right-wing Christian nationalism, it also certainly helps his cause that most of Russia’s war dead come from remote, poor, and predominantly minority regions.

This is the sort of muddling of meaning and motives that autocratic leaders engage in to justify deaths of all kinds. American equivalents might be what the MAGA crowds do when they blame the January 6th far-right assault at the Capitol, aimed at police and lawmakers, on the “Antifa,” or extreme leftists, without disputing that people were hurt. Or consider then-President Donald Trump’s comment that far-right white supremacist Charlottesville rioters and counter-protesters included “very fine people on both sides” — no matter that one such fine person plowed down a counter-protester in his car, murdering her, or that certain of those “fine” white supremacists espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories considered by some an incitement to violence.

For their part, Russians of various political stripes enjoy an ancient tradition of using dark humor and irony to engage in the kinds of conversations they really want to have. Take as an example the way progressive journalists like those at the news stations TV Rain and Novaya Gazeta (since banned from operating) began discussing the war in Ukraine as “the thing that cannot be named.” Eventually, however, sweeping censorship laws prevented even workarounds like those.

It’s not a small thing to live in a place where you can’t say what you want to for fear of political persecution, especially when you’ve grown up in other circumstances. A good friend of mine who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall and led a prosperous, happy life in St. Petersburg, fled the country on the last train out of that city to Helsinki, Finland, her young child in tow. Her goal: to start life over from scratch and avoid having to raise her child in a place where he would be brainwashed into thinking Russia’s armed forces and police were infallible and beyond critique. I suspect that many of the hundreds of thousands of Russians who joined her in fleeing the country weren’t that different.

Imagine raising a child whose unquestioning mind you can’t recognize. (That goes for you, too, Trump supporters, because — count on it! — once in office again, he would undoubtedly move toward ending elections as we know them, not to speak of shutting down whatever institutions protect our speech!)

America and the Lie that Begot Other Lies

Events in recent years indicate that Americans — particularly those in the MAGA camp — have grown inured to the public mention of armed violence. Who could forget the moment in 2016 when candidate Trump boasted at a campaign rally before winning the presidency that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”? As racially and politically motivated violence and threats have proliferated, so many of us seemed to grow ever less bothered by both the incidents themselves and the rationales of those who seek to encourage and justify them.

My own adult life began as Vladimir Putin consolidated power in Russia, while former President George W. Bush launched his — really, our — disastrous Global War on Terror, based on lies like that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, we’ve spilled all too little ink here on the nearly one million people who died across our Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African war zones since 2001 (and the many millions more who lost their lives, even if less directly, or were turned into refugees thanks to those wars of ours). And don’t forget the more than 7,000 American troops (and more than 8,000 contractors!) who died in the process, essentially baptizing our national lies in pools of blood. And how could that not have helped normalize other lies to come like Trump’s giant one about the 2020 election?

Thankfully, in this country we can still say what we want (more or less). We can still, for instance, call out the Pentagon for underreporting the deaths its forces have caused. In other words, something like the Costs of War Project that I helped to found to put our lies in context can still exist. But how long before such things could become punishable, if not by law, then through vigilantism?

Yes, President Biden is arming Israel in its gruesome fight against Hamas while providing only the most modest aid to Gaza’s war-devastated population, but we can still hold him to account for that. If the 2024 election goes to Donald Trump, how long will that be true? If we don’t get to the point right now where all of us are calling out lies all the time, then every Trumpian lie about violence — from Republican members of Congress calling the January 6th rioters “peaceful patriots” to The Donald’s claim that he would only be a dictator on “day one” of his next presidency (a desire supported by a significant majority of Republicans) — will amount to lies as consequential as the 1933 burning of the Reichstag parliament building in Germany, which Hitler’s ascendant Nazi party attributed to communists, setting the stage for him to claim sweeping powers.

We are entering a new and perilous American world and it’s important to grasp that fact. In that context, let me mention a Russian moment when I did no such thing. I still feel guilty about a dinner I had with human-rights colleagues in 2014, including a Russian activist who had dedicated his career to documenting political violence and war crimes committed under successive Russian leaders from Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin. I was sitting at the far end of the table where I couldn’t catch much of the conversation and I joked that I was “out in Siberia.” Yes, my dinner companions graciously laughed, but with an undercurrent of discomfort and tension — and for good reason. They knew the dangerous world they were in and, in fact, that very activist has since been sent to a penal colony for his work discrediting the actions of the Russian armed forces. My joke is anything but a joke now and consider that a reminder of how quickly things can change — and not just in Russia, either.

In fact, oppression feels closer than ever in America today and verbal massaging, joking, or willful ignorance can only mask what another Trump presidency could mean for us all.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Tomdispatch.com

He’s also provided some of America’s favorite headlines and jokes, even for progressives like me. As one fictional mom quipped in a Saturday Night Live skit at the end of his term in office, “If he’s gone, what am I supposed to do? Focus on my kids?” She was also mockingly lamenting the possibility that startling headlines like “‘Grab ‘em by the pussy” would disappear from our all-American world.

It turns out she needn’t have worried! It seems the media is far more eager these days to cover the former president’s endless missteps (or are they just steps?) than highlight the investments made by President Biden’s administration, which have finally started to pay off in terms of higher wages, more jobs, and lower carbon emissions. Big as we are on short-term gratification (or gloom) and the latest polls, we seem so much less interested in examining what presidents actually do.

Among Us

With the 2024 election heading toward us the way that asteroid hurtled toward the dinosaurs, while our sensationalistic political culture shows little sign of changing anytime soon, I’d suggest that we turn the conversation from the crazy stuff “Orange Jesus” loves to say to the fact that Trump and his supporters are, for the foreseeable future, going to be among us. Isn’t it time, imagining the worst to come, to start talking about what an anti-Trump resistance would look like?

To do so, we’d first have to take a closer look at what some of his most influential supporters are planning for the next time around. You may have noticed that a set of conservative think tanks and scholars, who call themselves Project 2025, have drafted a nearly thousand-page blueprint for a hypothetical Trump second term. It’s a document labeled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (though all it really purports to conserve is an abiding American focus on funding our military-industrial complex). The document covers everything from how a Trump administration ought to handle federal staffing to how it could restructure military and federal law enforcement agencies to its own benefit. Let me flag a few parts of that document that I find particularly concerning and suggest small ways in which you and I might act to preserve democratic values in a country that seems either to take them all too much for granted or care about them less and less.

“Taking the Reins of Government”

When it comes to the plans of Trump’s advisers to reshape the executive branch in an autocratic fashion, should he be reelected, the title in the relevant section of their document — “Taking the Reins of Government” — perfectly catches the top-down approach to power they envision. For years now, the Orange Jesus has made no secret of his urge to launch retribution against those in the Washington bureaucracy who opposed him and ensure that tens of thousands of career public service positions in federal agencies and the White House will, in (his) future, be held by people vetted for their loyalty to him (and only him!). So reads the first major section of that Mandate, which outlines how a second Trump administration would assert far more direct White House control over this country through the federal bureaucracy.

In fact, the document’s authors advocate that an incoming Trump administration circumvent the Vacancies Reform Act, which establishes standards for congressional vetting of temporarily appointed federal personnel. They suggest instead indefinitely using acting personnel in vacant positions, particularly ones the first Trump administration was hostile to like State Department diplomatic posts.

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Notably, the document is remarkably explicit about its recommendation to appoint acting personnel in departments already known for their abuse of American civil rights. (Think: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials kidnapping Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland during the summer of 2020.) A chilling example is the Mandate’s discussion of how a Trump White House could appoint acting personnel at DHS from scratch to “guarantee implementation of a Day One agenda.” I can’t help thinking: Is this what Trump meant when he told a Fox News Town Hall that he would be a “dictator” only on day one? Ostensibly, he could make many of the worst decisions immediately and then leave his goons to carry out the rest of the dirty work, Putin-style.

Given such a topsy-turvy reality, if you were hoping that journalists would still be close at hand to help call out any disastrous lapses in integrity, think again. Because count on something else: serious journalists wouldn’t be allowed within a country mile of Donald Trump and his closest advisers. In fact, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the authors of the Mandate suggest the White House should have a very different relationship with its press pool, if there even were to be one at all. In describing a future Trumpian White House Office of Communications, the Mandate reads, “No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus, and the next Administration should reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.”

Right! A Trump White House undoubtedly wouldn’t have space for all too much. At another point, in a paragraph on how Trump’s future communications director would need to “navigate the mainstream media” to advance the president’s agenda, the authors write, “The new Administration should examine the nature of the relationship between itself and the White House Correspondents Association and consider whether an alternative coordinating body might be more suitable.”

An “alternative coordinating body” organized by Donald Trump and crew? What could possibly go wrong?

In fact, just imagine a Trumpian future in which those with the president’s ear on every topic will be chosen by and aligned with that very same unhinged person, while his administration attempts to transform the media into its own propaganda arm, while repressing anything that might prove hostile to him in any way. In a second Trump White House, supporting an independent media would mean more than just subscribing to the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and local newspapers that will undoubtedly come under existential threats. It’s also going to mean providing an actual safe space for journalists whose exposés of government abuse will make them prime targets for the Orange Jesus’s followers. Think, for an analogous example, of murdered Russian war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed abuse by Russian security forces against Muslim minority communities in the south of that country.

Now imagine, in an unhinged second Trump presidency, what sorts of doxing and other nightmares writers and their families might have to endure. We’ll all have to be ready to let such figures (or their threatened children and spouses) into our homes, lock the doors, and tell no one that they’re there. Meanwhile, the rest of us would have to protest — and get others to join us – when journalists and other oppositional figures start to be arrested under bogus charges or attacked by thugs. In a second Trump era, it will be of crucial importance for the rest of us to stand with those who continue to insist on telling the truth, even if you don’t agree with them politically.

It will be no less important to elevate and celebrate the writing of people who describe acts of resistance and heroism, be it their own or of others. I’m thinking about people like Washington Post columnist and author Jennifer Rubin or former Republican politico (and truthteller) Liz Cheney, who have made a point not just of critiquing the fascists aligned with Trump but of describing how to build life-affirming new policies that would serve the very constitution a second Trump term would undoubtedly try to toss into the gutter.

“The Common Defense”

Those would-be Trump presidential advisers have been remarkably detailed in describing their hopes for how a second Trump presidency could transform the U.S. military, and that section of their Mandate, I must admit, initially sounded okay to me. After all, they seemed to want to keep this country out of yet more foreign conflicts, while making the Pentagon accountable for how it spends its money. They also want more employment and financial support to be offered to military families (like mine!). In other words, many of the things I’ve been writing about at TomDispatch for years.

I was even initially impressed that they claimed to want the military to deprioritize “manufactured extremism” — until I realized that what they’re evidently referring to is the Pentagon’s plan (largely stalled at this point) to screen new and existing servicemembers for alignment with Nazi-style and white supremacist ideologies. In fact — I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn — their blueprint goes on to describe a military remade in the very image of those Project 2025 leaders as white, cisgender, and heterosexual men, and they want to start ’em young, too. The Mandate recommends standardized testing in all federally funded schools to check kids’ aptitude for military service. They want, in other words, to offer the Pentagon increased access to children for the purpose of recruitment. And the proposal only gets “better” after that. In fact, Trump’s future would-be advisers go on to support expelling people with gender dysphoria from that very military.

How are we then to trust that the Department of Defense won’t be used against the American people, if our troops are distinctly shaped not to reflect our exploding diversity? In fact, The Donald has called the 2024 election “the final battle” and has already suggested that he might take out after his foes (“vermin”), even possibly invoking the Insurrection Act to use the military to do so. And then, it seems, the rest of us would have to live with a military that embraced the very types who sought to tear down our elected government on January 6, 2021.

Oh, and even better news! The Mandate writers also propose increasing the number and size of American companies producing munitions here in the U.S., funding arms acquisition and training at more universities, and increasing the power of the arms production industry even further.

They also propose — and what could possibly go wrong here? — that the government should enhance its ability to deploy special forces and conduct irregular (nonstate) warfare “across the spectrum of competition, crisis, and conflict.” Hmmmm…. It’s hard for me not to recall a recent response by a Trump lawyer to a question by a federal judge in which he claimed that a president should be immune from prosecution for ordering a special forces unit to assassinate a political opponent. Welcome to 2025 and Trump 2.0!

All You Need Is Love

If former President Trump listens to his all-too-well-prepared advisers — and many think he would be more disciplined in doing so a second time around — there would be far less of a buffer of reasonable civil servants loyal to the Constitution between him and the rest of us. Given that, I’m suggesting that those of us in military communities tell our loved ones to defy any orders to brutalize other Americans who pose no violent threat to the rest of us — those exercising freedom of assembly and speech, running for public office, writing the truth. And even though this may sound counterintuitive to some of you, get rid of your guns! If the Trumpian security state that might arise did everything its would-be advisers advocate, there would be no point in taking up arms against it. After all, civil wars are the bloodiest forms of human conflict, with the worst impact on civilians.

But don’t give up either. Make sure in every way you can that elections continue, and show up to vote. Volunteer to get people to the polls and inform them of their rights as voters. Become an election worker or volunteer. Do your damnedest to keep a non-Trumpian world alive.

Change is afoot, and it could be bad, but who knows? It’s also possible that election 2024 will prove to be white supremacy’s dying gasp. Think of how readily Trump’s supporters scuttle away when the candidates he endorses lose elections. And if our very own Orange Jesus is more decisively denied access to power through a jail sentence or another big election loss, maybe all the planning of his toadies won’t mean a tinker’s damn. But that will only be true if we all show up and act, starting now.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

I remember first reading The New Abolitionists in the 1990s when I was a college student and activist. I had grown weary of hearing older people complain about the inactivity of my generation, decrying why we weren’t more involved in the social issues of the day. Of course, even then, such critiques came in the face of mass protests, often led by the young, against the first Iraq war (launched by President George H.W. Bush), the Republican Contract With America, and the right-wing “family values” movement. Such assertions about the apathy of youth were proffered even as young people were waging fights for marriage equality, the protection of abortion, and pushing back against the attack on immigrants, as well as holding mass marches like the Battle for Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting as well as protests at the Republican National Convention of 2000, and so much more.

Another quote from Zinn remains similarly etched in my mind. “Theirs,” he wrote, “was the silent generation until they spoke, the complacent generation until they marched and sang, the money-seeking generation until they gave it up for… the fight for justice in the dank and dangerous hamlets of the Black Belt.”

And if it was true that, in the 1990s and 2000s, young people were so much less complacent than was recognized at the time, it’s even truer (to the nth degree!) in the case of the Millennials and Gen Z today. Younger generations are out there leading the way toward justice in a fashion that they seldom get credit for.

Don’t Look Up

Let me suggest, as a start, that we simply chuck out the sort of generalizations about Millennials and Gen Z that pepper the media today: that those younger generations spend too much money on avocado toast and Starbucks when they should be buying real estate or paying down their student loans. Accused of doing everything through social media, it’s an under-recognized and unappreciated reality of this century that young people have been showing up in a remarkable fashion, leading the way in on-the-ground movements to ensure that Black lives matter, dealing vividly with the onrushing horror of climate change, as well as continued conflict and war, not to speak of defending economic justice and living wages, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Take, for instance, the greatest social upheaval of the past five years: the uprising that followed the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, with #BlackLivesMatter protests being staged in staggering numbers of communities, many of which had never hosted such an action before. Those marches and rallies, led mainly by teenagers and young adults, may have been the broadest wave of protests in American history.

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When it comes to the environmental movement, young people have been organizing campaigns for climate justice, calling for a #GreenNewDeal and #climatedefiance from Cop City to the March to End Fossil Fuels to a hunger strike in front of the White House. At the same time, they have been bird-dogging politicians on both sides of the aisle with an urgency and militancy not previously associated with climate change. Meanwhile, a surge of unionization drives, whether at Walmart, Starbucks, Amazon, or Dollar General, has largely been led by young low-wage workers of color and has increased appreciation for and recognition of workers’ rights and labor unions to a level not seen in decades. Add to that the eviction moratoriums, mutual-aid provisions, and student-debt strikes of the pandemic years, which gained ground no one had thought possible even months earlier.

And don’t forget the movement to stop gun violence that, from the March for Our Lives in Florida to the protests leading to the expulsion and subsequent reinstatement of state legislators Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee, galvanized millions across racial and political lines. Teenagers in striking numbers are challenging this society to value their futures more than guns. And most recently, calls for a #ceasefirenow and #freepalestine have heralded the birth of a new peace movement in the wake of Hamas’s attacks on Israel and the Israeli destruction of much of Gaza. Although university presidents have been getting more media attention, Palestinian, Jewish, and Muslim students have been the ones organizing and out there, insisting that indiscriminate violence perpetrated against Palestinians, especially children, will not happen “in our name.”

From Unexpected Places

An observation Zinn made so many years ago about young people in the 1960s may have lessons for movements today: “They came out of unexpected places; they were mostly black and therefore unseen until they suddenly became the most visible people in America; they came out of Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, and Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. And they were committed. To the point of jail, which is a large commitment.”

Today’s generation of activists are similarly committed and come from places as varied as Parkland, Florida, Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York, and Durham, North Carolina. Below the surface, some deep stuff is brewing that could indeed continue to compel new generations of the young into action. As we approach the first quarter mark of the twenty-first century, we’re stepping firmly into a new technological era characterized by unparalleled levels of digital power. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, as elite economists and think-tankers like to call it, promises a technological revolution that, in the words of World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, is likely to occur on a “scale, scope, and complexity” never before experienced. That revolution will, of course, include the integration of artificial intelligence and other labor-replacing technology into many kinds of in-person as well as remote work and is likely to involve the “deskilling” of our labor force from the point of production all the way to the market.

Residents of Detroit, once the Silicon Valley of auto manufacturing, understand this viscerally. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ford River Rouge Plant was the largest, most productive factory in the world, a private city with 100,000 workers and its own municipal services. Today, the plant employs only a fraction of that number — about 10,000 people — and yet, thanks to a surge of robotic innovation, it produces even more cars than it did in the heady days of the 1930s. Consider such a shift just the tip of the spear of the kind of change “coming to a city near you,” as one veteran auto worker and union organizer once told me. All of this is impacting everything from wages to health-care plans, pensions to how workers organize. Indeed, some pushback to such revolutionary shifts in production can be seen in the labor strikes the United Auto Workers launched late in 2023.

Overall, such developments are deeply impacting young people. After all, workers are now generally making less than their parents did, even though they may produce more for the economy. Growing parts of our workforce are increasingly non-unionized, low-wage, part-time and/or contracted out, often without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. And not surprisingly, such workers struggle to afford housing, childcare, and other necessities, experiencing on the whole harsher lives than the generations that preceded them.

In addition, the last 40 years have done more than just transform work and daily life for younger generations. They have conditioned so many to lose faith in government as a site for struggle and change. Instead, Americans are increasingly dependent on private, market-based solutions that extol the wealthy for their humanitarianism (even as they reap the rewards from federal policymaking and an economy rigged in their favor).

Crises upon Crises

Consider the social, political, and economic environment that’s producing the multi-layered crises faced by today’s younger generations. When compared to other advanced countries, the United States lags perilously behind in almost every important category. In this rich land, about 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly 80 million are uninsured or underinsured, close to 10 million live without housing or on the brink of homelessness, while the education system continues to score near the bottom compared to the other 37 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And in all of this, young people are impacted disproportionately.

Perhaps most damning, ours is a society that has become terrifyingly tolerant of unnecessary death and suffering. Deaths by poverty are an increasingly all-American reality. Low-wage jobs that have been found to shorten lives are the norm. In 2023, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, found that poverty was the fourth-leading cause of death in this country, right after heart disease, smoking, and cancer. While life expectancy continues to rise across the industrialized world, it’s stagnated in the U.S. since the 2010s and, during the first three years of the Covid pandemic, it dropped in a way that, according to experts, was unprecedented in modern world history. That marks us as unique not just among wealthy countries, but among poorer ones as well. And again, its impact was felt above all by the young. What we call “deaths of despair” are also accelerating, although the label is misleading, since so many overdoses and suicides are caused not by some amorphous social malaise but by medical neglect and lack of access to adequate care and mental-health treatment for the under- or uninsured.

Nor are low wages, crises of legitimacy, and falling life expectancy the only significant issues facing our younger generations. Just last week, the New York Times reported that 2023 was the hottest year on record (with climate chaos worsening yearly and little chance of the elimination of our reliance on fossil fuels in sight). Add to that the fact that anyone born in the last three decades can hardly remember a time when the United States was not in some fashion at war (whether declared or not) and pouring its taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon budget. In fact, according to the National Priorities Project, this country has spent a staggering $21 trillion on militarization since September 11, 2001, including increased border patrols, a rising police presence in our communities, and various aspects of the Global War on Terror that came home big-time. Add to all that, the rise of Trumpian-style authoritarianism and attacks on our democratic system more extreme than at any time since the Civil War.

What Time Is It?

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time — and the times in which we live. Chronos was quantitative time, the measured chronological time of a clock. Kairos, on the other hand, was qualitative time: the special, even transformative, time of a specific moment (and possibly of a movement). Kairos is all about opportunity. In the days of antiquity, Greek archers were trained to recognize the brief kairos moment, the opening when their arrow had the best chance of reaching its target. In the Bible (and as a biblical scholar I run into this a lot), Kairos describes a moment when the eternal breaks into history.

German-American theologian Paul Tillich introduced the modern use of kairos in describing the period between the First World War and the rise of fascism. In retrospect, he recognized the existential stakes of that transitional moment and mourned the societal failure to stem the tide of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain. There was a similar kairos moment in apartheid South Africa when a group of mainly Black theologians wrote a Kairos Document noting that “for very many… in South Africa, this is the KAIROS, the moment of grace and opportunity… a challenge to decisive action. It is a dangerous time because, if this opportunity is missed, and allowed to pass by, the loss… will be immeasurable.”

2024 may well be a kairos moment for us here in the United States. There’s so much at stake, so much to lose, but if Howard Zinn were with us today, I suspect he would look at the rise of bold and visionary organizing, led by generations of young leaders, and tell us that change, on a planet in deep distress, is coming soon.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

“Trump Insurrection,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3,/ IbisPaint, 2023

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet .

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

Embed from Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 06: Protesters supporting U.S. President Donald Trump gather near the east front door of the U.S. Capitol after groups breached the building’s security on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Pro-Trump protesters entered the U.S. Capitol building during demonstrations in the nation’s capital. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

Mark A. Graber, University System of Maryland Regents Professor of Law, University of Maryland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Stefanik implicitly characterized campus protests against the Israeli total war on Gaza and its reckless disregard for civilian life as a form of antisemitism, indeed as a call for genocide. Apparently the logic is that if Palestinians get their basic civil rights, then an Israeli ethnostate becomes difficult to maintain, and if Israel has to be a pluralist state rather than retaining solely sovereignty for Jews, that outbreak of equal rights equates to a genocide.

It is the same logic white nationalists use to argue that rights for African Americans equates to genocide against white people. That Stefanik is deploying Klan logic is no accident — see below.

Stefanik is supposedly a Roman Catholic. Here is what the head of her church said about brutalizing Israeli tactics in Gaza: “This is what wars do. But here, we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism.”

The Pope accused the Israeli army of terrorism against Palestinians. Would Stefanik let him come to the University of Pennsylvania and say that on campus? Or is she a cafeteria Catholic who likes the pro-life stance of the church regarding abortion but isn’t pro-life when it comes to war on Palestinians?

We can further tell that Stefanik is a hypocrite because she did not bother to criticize Donald J. Trump for saying that the Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville in 2017 were “very fine people.” (She did, in her earlier incarnation as a somewhat normal person, herself condemn the white nationalists at Charlottesville. But she never protested Trump’s characterization.)

When challenged on Trump’s association with Kanye West and other genuine antisemites, Stefanik lamely excused him on the grounds that he had recognized Israel’s illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. No wonder she can’t understand, like, college. She thinks breaking international law is a sign someone isn’t an antisemite.

It gets worse. In 2021, Stefanik began taking up the talking points of the Great Replacement Theory. It holds that wealthy Jewish businessmen are bringing in immigrants from the Global South to replace white workers, since the immigrants will work more cheaply. Stefanik perhaps did not utter the phrase, but she appealed to all the dog whistles of this odious theory.

Marianna Sotomayor noted last year at the Washington Post that Stefanik put out campaign ads saying, “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION . . . Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Guess who the “radical Democrats” might be, to which she refers? Could they possibly be people such as, oh, I don’t know, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and other Jewish American legislators who have worked for immigration reform?

Anti-immigrant hatred wrapped up with bigotry toward Jewish Americans has been responsible for mass shootings at Buffalo, NY and at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. It is perhaps the single most dangerous ideology in the United States.

Stefanik is up to her ears in it.

Democracy Now! “Peter Beinart on ‘Who is Elise Stefanik?’

I wrote earlier about the origins of the Great Replacement Theory:

“The phrase, and the most extensive elaboration of the theory, originated with the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957), who served during WW II in The Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, which consisted of French collaborators. You don’t get more fascist than that– the Charlemagne Brigade were the last troops to defend Hitler’s bunker before his suicide, and staged a failed, desperate fight against the Soviet army’s advance into Berlin.

Binet fulminated after the war against “the invasion of Europe by Negroes and Mongols,” by which he meant Americans and Soviets. He saw Americans as an impure mestizo “race” (he was a biological racist). He also launched diatribes against unbridled capitalism and the ways in which Jews were using it to abet the replacement of civilized white Europeans.

So this supposedly far right American nationalist idea actually originated in hatred for Americans and a denigration of their supposed “whiteness” by the European Right, which did not see Russians as “white” either . . .

As defenders of illiberalism and implicitly of hatred of Jews, these useful idiots of the far right are symbolically still deployed around Hitler’s bunker, defending it from the approaching Allies.”

The fact is that Stefanik was not defending Jewish American students on US campuses but attempting to silence non-white and progressive students and ensure that their speech is criminalized.

During the intense Israeli bombardment of densely populated Gaza, which has killed over 17,000 people, 70% of them women and children, many American students have felt traumatized. The gory images coming out of Gaza and the grim determination on the part of Israeli and Biden administration officials to continue the carnage have shaken many in the younger generation. Some 46% of young people aged 18-29 disapprove or strongly disapprove of the Biden administration’s handling of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, whereas only 19% strongly approve.

In addition, Palestinian American, Arab American and Muslim American students, along will many other students of color and progressives, including members of Jewish Voices for Peace, have demanded not only an immediate ceasefire but an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and freedom for the stateless, oppressed Palestinians. They have chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and called for a new uprising (in Arabic, intifadah.

Students (and professors) invested in chauvinist Israeli nationalism have charged that protesting against the Israeli assault on Gaza, or in favor of basic human rights for Palestinians, are forms of anti-Jewish bigotry. That charge is patently ridiculous. The issue is not discrimination against a minority but critique of the 18th most powerful military in the world and its shameful, blatant disregard for International Humanitarian Law.

Stefanik’s Democratic rival, Steven Holden, a veteran, replied to her stunt at Facebook, pointing out that she is implicitly assaulting the first amendment:

University Presidents should stop playing into the hands of wily sociopaths such as Stefanik, who is plotting to impose Trumpism and his promised dictatorship on all Americans, to take away a woman’s right to choose nationally, to ban Muslims, and to put the nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. They should simply say that in this country we have a first amendment and we can criticize any government we like– Argentina’s, China’s, Hungary’s, or Israel’s. That isn’t racism, that is responsible world citizenship, and the right of free citizens of a democracy.

Staunchly against bodily autonomy for women, Johnson supports a nationwide ban on abortion which he considers, “a holocaust.” This inexperienced, soft-spoken Ned Flanders suggested that abortion activists want to kill babies that are “half way out of the birth-canal,” and voted against Americans having access to purchase legal contraception. The most powerful Republican in Washington insisted that, if only women would bear more “able-bodied workers,” he wouldn’t be forced to cut trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Hostile towards gay and transgender people, Johnson called them “dangerous” and “deviant” threats to the American way of life and defended laws that criminalized homosexual relations between consenting adults that he called “inherently unnatural.” He warned that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”

Last year, Johnson introduced legislation that would prohibit the use of federal funds for providing education to children under 10 that included LGBTQ topics — a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. He also is working to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

Johnson is a virulent Christian Nationalist, an ideology modeled on Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s program of “illiberal democracy,” and defense of Christendom against Muslims, progressives, and the “LGBTQ lobby.” Johnson “pushed all kinds of hateful anti-LGBTQ bigotry while at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian Nationalist legal outfit that wants to drag this country back to the 5th century,” warns Andrew L. Seidel, civil rights attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American. For nearly twenty years, Johnson served as senior legal counsel and spokesman for the ADF.

Designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADF is a legal advocacy organization that not only supported “re-criminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults,” but has also defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people and contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia. Johnson and the ADF claim that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.

Politicon: “James Carville explains everything about Mike Johnson”

The ADF, according to the New York Times, is the “largest legal force of the religious right.” They would go on to successive Supreme Court victories, most notably rolling back abortion rights in the Dobbs decision, undermining LGBTQ rights in the (purported) same-sex wedding website case 303 Creative, allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control, and twelve other cases related to curtailing the civil rights of women and LGBTQ people.

Johnson’s rise to the speakership is best understood in terms of the ongoing white Christian nationalist takeover of the American government through MAGA rather than, as the mainstream press suggested, the quirky, exhausted and embarrassed result of a bickering caucus. Since the rise of the Tea Party, the primary driver for both the GOP’s dysfunction and its incipient fascism is the political might of organized right-wing Christianity, successfully redeployed especially in primaries, to wrest control from establishment “Republicans in Name Only” (“RINOs”).

As the former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer wrote, “the political muscle provided by white Christian nationalism’s extensive church-based infrastructure in congressional districts, and its national reach through Christian broadcasting and national organizations, has turned MAGA into a ruthlessly successful RINO-hunting machine.”

Still, Johnson’s loathsome ideology and religious zealotry were not the main reasons for his elevation to the speakership — most Republicans share his repulsive worldview. Rather, the MAGA cult embraced his tireless advocacy on behalf of despotic Donald’s seditious attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Most House Republicans voted to back the Fabricator’s lies about the election; but few had worked as diligently as Johnson to foist fraudulent conspiracy theories, such as “rigged Dominion voting machines,” on Americans. A constitutional lawyer who uses the law to subvert democracy, Johnson enlisted dozens of fellow-members to support a sham Texas court case seeking to cancel the election results in battleground states.

Johnson’s role, neglected at the time, was such that the Times later called him “the most important architect” of the campaign to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results and thus overturn Trump’s defeat. Circulating his hollow rationale to the party, Johnson reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. Proudly exhibiting a bizarre religious devotion to the Un-Christian Trump, Johnson helped plot the Jan. 6 attempted coup while calling the insurrection a “peaceful protest” and defending the Seditionist at both of his impeachment hearings.

At a time when Trump’s co-conspirators, probably including his Chief of Staff, admitted they lied about the election being stolen, House Republicans handed the reins of power to someone who showed no hesitation to help overturn American democracy. Johnson was given a powerful government position by people in the government who don’t believe in government — and installed an unrepentant election-denier leader two heartbeats away from the presidency.

In his first major initiative as House speaker, Johnson pushed through a bill to provide $14 billion in military assistance to Israel. Before the vote, he declared, “Israel doesn’t need a cease-fire.” However, Palestinians do. Israel’s aerial and ground offensive, ostensibly targeting Hamas infrastructure, has killed over 11,000 people while those who managed to flee Israel’s attack in northern Gaza now encounter a scarcity of food and medicine in the south. “Residents wait hours for a gallon of brackish water that makes them sick,” reported the Times of Israel. Scabies, diarrhea and respiratory infections rip through overcrowded shelters.” 

In addition, Johnson engineered the House censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian serving in Congress. The censure resolution is “rife with propaganda, fake history, and racism,” said Juan Cole on Informed Comment. 

In his first public appearance, the newly-elected Christian Zionist told a crowd of Jewish Republicans in Las Vegas: “We are going to stand like a rock with our friend and ally, Israel.” He boasted that his first act as speaker was passing the pro-Israel resolution in spite of “no” votes from several democrats, including Rashida Tlaib, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar. Their opposition was due to the bill’s failure to recognize Palestinian victims and call for a cease-fire. Johnson maliciously and deceitfully blamed their defiance on an “alarming trend of antisemitism” enabled by “academia and the mainstream media, and fringe government figures.”

The evangelical Christian’s rise to power is the biggest political victory for the evangelical movement to date and his connections to Israel reflect the movement’s deep ties to the Israeli far right. “God is not done with Israel,” said Johnson cryptically. He gushed that his 2020 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount was the “fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.”

This remark references the Christian Zionist end-times belief, derived from a literal reading of the Bible, that Israel is God’s chosen nation and that its 1948 creation will lead to the Second Coming of Christ. In the real world, they rabidly support the state of Israel and its policies, especially regarding the expansion of settlements, the annexation of territories in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

In the biblical narrative, Christ will defeat Evil, or the Antichrist, in an apocalyptic battle that will take place in Israel at Har Megiddo, or Armageddon. Along with Christian believers and converts who have ascended to heaven in the Rapture, Christ will rule from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for a thousand years. Fueled by these fantasies of a cataclysmic war in the Middle East, Christian Zionists maintain that literal war is not something to be avoided, but inevitable, desired by God, and celebrated. These zealots condemn those that oppose Israeli occupation as being evil, aligned with the “Antichrist.”

The Bible becomes a script for those millennial Christians in power, like Mike Johnson — a self-fulfilling prophesy of violence and destruction that portends an apocalyptic foreign policy. In some warped minds, the current battle in Israel may be hastening the coveted dooms-day of reckoning. In a bizarre twist to the end-times prophecy, those Christian Zionists who are the most passionately pro-Israel also believe that those Jews who do not convert to Christianity will not be raptured, and if they don’t convert during the horrific cataclysm at Har Megiddo, they will be condemned to suffer eternally in the “lake of fire.”

Eager to visit the Christian holy land, Johnson traveled to Israel with his pal Gym Jordan. Jordan, who was considered an aggressive and confrontational jerk, was rejected by his party for the speakership. Yet Jordan apparently served as a spiritual mentor to Johnson, who has guest-hosted Jordan’s national radio show Washington Watch, and praised Jordan as a “great friend and leader” and “a guiding light” on his podcast Truth be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson.

Along with their wives, Jordan and Johnson’s week-long pilgrimage was sponsored by the New York-based 12Tribes Film Foundation, a small outfit that that describes itself as “online warriors for truth about Israel and the Jewish people.” The organization’s CEO Avi Abelow — an arch-Zionist — lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.

Johnson’s first stop on his Abelow-organized visit was to receive a briefing from the Kohelet Policy Forum, a far-right Israeli think tank that would later help cultivate the Netanyahu administration’s despised plan to weaken the country’s judiciary. The itinerary included meetings with Israeli military officials, business owners, and political leaders including Netanyahu, current Israeli U.N. envoy Gilad Erdan, and other members of the far right Likud Party.

At the Golan Heights, the pair posed and smiled in front of a sign for “Trump Heights,” the name of an Israeli settlement honoring Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Located in occupied territory claimed by Israel, it is widely considered to violate international law.

Johnson also visited the Temple Mount compound — the Palestinian Aqsa Mosque complex — alongside Abelov, a Temple Mount activist, and Yehudah Glick — an Orthodox rabbi and former Likud lawmaker, who has led the fight to change the legal status quo and permit Jewish prayer at this Palestinian national symbol, the third holiest shrine in the Muslim world, and one of the most sensitive flashpoints in the world. In 2023 during Ramadan, Israeli forces repeatedly invaded the sacred al-Aqsa Mosque, in an act of “state terrorism,” where they beat and expelled Palestinian worshipers on behalf of Jewish extremists.

This visit to Israel, led by right-wing extremists, influenced the future speaker’s views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During a video made of the trip, Johnson declares — without traveling to Gaza or meeting with Palestinian leaders or activists — that the Palestinian and Israeli people were “working well together” and that there was a “great cohesion of the people” in the West Bank. He blamed “activists and the leftist groups” for “pushing” the narrative that there was conflict, implying that Palestinians enjoyed life under Israeli occupation.

Johnson called Netanyahu, in his first talk with a foreign leader, during which he echoed the premier’s comments that Israel’s war is one of good vs. evil and light vs. darkness. “I assured the prime minister of our own unwavering support of Israel and the people in our Congress and under my leadership, we will be there until the end, we will be there until the end of this conflict.” He opposes basic human rights for Palestinians as well as many Americans.

In an appearance with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Johnson described himself as “a Bible-believing Christian” and said that to understand his politics, one only need to “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” This is cultish nonsense that threatens democracy.

Democracy means that the candidate ordained by God, in Johnson’s view, lost an election, so he forsook his oath to the Constitution to keep a corrupt, seditious demagogue in power. Democracy also leads to abortions and gay marriage. Under democracy, Johnson also believes that white Christians are being “replaced”— by immigrants, by Muslims, by trans kids, by drag queens, and by a whole litany of scapegoats. So, perhaps, the only way to save the U.S. and white Christians is to end democracy.

In a potentially horrifying scenario, suppose Trump loses the 2024 election but again claims he won and the GOP demands his “victory” to be certified, House speaker Johnson is positioned to do so. A devout apostle to the Pagan Coup Plotter, MAGA Mike is prepared to subvert democracy in deranged obedience to Trump and his biblical fanaticism.

( Tomdispatch.com) – If he becomes the official nominee of the Republican Party in next year’s presidential race, Donald Trump will receive tens of millions of votes in the general election. He may get less than the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. He may get more. Regardless, tens of millions of GOP, conservative, and extremist voters will cast their ballots for him.

In 2016, despite his history of elitist, racist, and sexist behavior, failed businesses, lack of governing experience, and no demonstrated past of caring for anyone but himself, he won nearly 63 million votes. While still almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton got, it was not just enough for a victory in the Electoral College but a clear warning of things to come.

In 2020, after four years of non-stop chaos, the death of more than 200,000 Covid victims at least in part because of his mishandling of the pandemic, a legitimate and warranted impeachment, abuse of power, ceaseless corruption, and more than 30,000 documented public lies, he gained 74 million votes, even if, in the end, he lost the election.

Now, in addition to all that history, you can add on the incitement of a violent insurrection, a second impeachment for attempting to overthrow the government, four criminal indictments (91 separate charges), being found liable for sexual abuse, and a stated plan to exact retribution against his enemies in a second term. And yet he will undoubtedly again receive many tens of millions of votes.

In fact, you can count on one thing: the 2024 election will not resolve the authoritarian attraction that the Trump vote represents. So perhaps it’s time to prepare now, not later, for the political crisis that will undoubtedly emerge from that event, whatever the vote count may prove to be.

The Authoritarian Threat Continues

A year from the next election, multiple scenarios are imaginable including, of course, that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden will be contenders. While Biden’s health seems fine at present, he will be only weeks away from his 82nd birthday on Election Day 2024. A lot can happen, health-wise, in a year. When it comes to Trump, however, Biden is now likely to be significantly healthier (mentally and physically) than him. Among other things, no blatant lies or well-tailored suits can hide his unhealthy obesity.

And while he relishes castigating Biden’s cognitive state, it was Trump who only a few weeks ago, while giving a speech attacking the president’s capabilities, stated that he beat “Obama” in an election, that Americans needed IDs to buy bread, and that Biden would lead the country into “World War II,” which just happens to have ended 78 years ago. While some of Trump’s GOP opponents like Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley have indeed launched ageist attacks against him, it’s true that he’s roughly in the same age group as Biden.

Meanwhile, don’t forget that Donald Trump’s legal health is on life support. It’s a good bet that, in 2024, he will spend more time in courtrooms than on the campaign trail. He may very well face that moment of truth when he has to decide to cut a deal that keeps him out of prison and out of the White House.

In any case, the current trajectory remains Biden vs. Trump 2.0 while, whatever the outcome of the election, this nation seems to be headed for a crisis of historic proportions. No matter who wins, next November 7th will do nothing to end the divisions that exist in this country. In fact, it’s only likely to exacerbate and amplify them. 

Trump Remains a Danger

Trump has already made it clear that he won’t accept any losing outcome. Neither will millions of his followers. For modern Republican Party leaders and their base, election rejection (if they lose) has become an ironclad principle. On the stump, Trump has already begun to emphasize that the spiraling legal cases against him are “election interference,” that the Democrats are putting the pieces in place to steal the election from him, and that the Black judge and prosecutors holding him accountable are “racists.”

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As he wrote on one of his social media posts (in caps) those individuals are to him “RIGGERS.” That stable genius’s use of a term that rhymes with a racist slur against Black people was undoubtedly no accident. After all, he spends a considerable amount of his private time branding people. White supremacists wasted hardly a moment in beginning to use the term online, in part, to get around censors on the lookout for explicitly racist terminology.

He is, in other words, already laying the foundation to claim election fraud and creating the basis for another MAGA revolt. While there’s plenty of reason to believe he won’t be able to draw tens of thousands of his supporters to attack the Capitol again, not the least being the Justice Department’s prosecution of hundreds of those who tried it the last time, he’ll certainly have GOP members in Congress ready to resist certifying a Democratic victory.

Trump’s desperation to win is driven not only by the prospect of multiple convictions in his various trials, drawn-out appeals (that are unlikely to be successful), and possible prison time of some sort, but also by the brutal public dismantling of what’s left of his financial empire. The civil suit New York Attorney General Letitia James brought against Trump and the Trump organization has already resulted in a devastating judgment by Judge Arthur Engoron. He ruled Trump and his adult sons liable and immediately stripped them of their control over their businesses. Trump may now not only lose all his New York business properties but have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution. For someone whose whole identity is linked to his purported wealth, there could hardly have been a more crushing blow.

In his mind, a second term as president clearly has little to do with benefiting the country, the Republican Party, or even the rest of his family. It’s his only path to shutting down the two federal cases against him in Florida and Washington, D.C. However, even such a win wouldn’t help him with the election interference case in Georgia or the hush-money criminal case in New York. Convictions in either of those would mean further accountability sooner or later. A second term would undoubtedly offer him another chance to monetize the presidency, just as he did the first time around, in a fashion never before seen.

His record is still being investigated but, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Trump raked in tens of millions of dollars that way. It reports that Trump’s businesses took in more than $160 million from international sources alone, and a grand total of more than $1.6 billion from all sources, during his presidency. As CREW put it: “Trump’s presidency was marred by unprecedented conflicts of interest arising from his decision not to divest from the Trump Organization, with his most egregious conflicts involving businesses in foreign countries with interests in U.S. foreign policy.”

Trump’s Violence Advocacy Grows

Trump’s legitimate fear of losing is pushing him toward ever more strident and violent language. He’s also signaling to his followers that the use of force to put him in power (or go after those who deny it to him) is all too acceptable. His visit to the Palmetto State Armory gun shop in Summerville, South Carolina, on September 25th was an unambiguous message to them: get ready for war.

There, he admired a Glock pistol and was visibly eager to purchase it. However, he ran into a legal snafu. His spokesperson, Steven Cheung, initially posted a video on social media celebrating Trump’s purchase of the Glock, a special “Trump edition” that had a likeness of him and the words “Trump 45th” etched on it. According to the New York Times, Trump gleefully said, “I want to buy one.”

However, after a staff member apparently realized that no one under federal indictment could legally do so, the post was deleted and a subsequent statement was put up that read, “President Trump did not purchase or take possession of the firearm. He simply indicated that he wanted one.” The store would also have been liable under federal law 18 U.S.C. 922, given that it would have been hard for its proprietors to deny that they knew the former president was under multiple indictments.

That visit was more than just a message to his followers to arm themselves. There are 158 gun stores in South Carolina and yet Trump selected the very one linked to a mass killing of Black people in Florida. At least one of the guns used in those murders had been purchased at that very gun shop. On August 26, 2023, white supremacist Ryan Christopher Palmeter went to a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, and murdered three African Americans — Angela Michelle Carr, 52; Jerrald Gallion, 29; and Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr., 19 — and then killed himself as the police closed in.

The shooter had two guns, a Glock and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, one of them from the South Carolina Palmetto State Armory gun store. Palmeter also left behind several racist manifestos.

That carnage occurred just a month before Trump’s visit and his implicit decision to associate himself with that explosion of bigoted violence — like an earlier trip to Waco, Texas, the site of a deadly gunfight between federal law enforcement agents and antigovernment extremists — helped reinforce the idea on the far right that violent force is acceptable for political ends. In his speech at Waco, his first “official” campaign rally for election 2024, Trump stated, “I am your warrior, I am your justice… For those who have been wronged and betrayed… I am your retribution.”

The chaos and disorder likely to follow any Trump loss in 2024 will only be further enhanced if the GOP keeps control of the House of Representatives or wins control of the Senate. A number of congressional Republicans have shown that they will not hesitate to do all they can to put Trump back in the White House, including igniting a constitutional crisis by refusing to certify Electoral College votes.

All that said, Trump losing and sending his supporters into the streets amid tantrums by congressional Republicans and Republican state governors and legislatures would hardly be the worst possible scenario.

After all, if Trump were to win, the extremists in and out of government would immediately be empowered to carry out the most right-wing agenda since the height of the segregationist era. A reelected Trump will find the most loyal (to him) and corruptible cabinet members possible. Their only necessary qualification will be a willingness to follow his orders without hesitation, whether or not they’re legal, ethical, or by any stretch of the imagination good for the country.

Count on one thing: it wouldn’t be an America First but a Trump First and Last administration.

He would undoubtedly engage in a series of personal vendettas with the sort of viciousness and resolve never before seen in Washington. He would take a victory, no matter how marginal or questionable, in the Electoral College as a mandate to attack all his perceived enemies with whatever power his new presidency could muster. He’s also well aware of a Department of Justice policy (of questionable legality) not to prosecute a sitting president, which he’ll interpret as a license of perpetual lawlessness. Trump’s persecution administration would harken back to the worst days of McCarthyism and beyond.

And lest you think that’s the end of the matter, it only gets worse. 

Trump Will Have Significantly More Help in a Second Term

Beyond Trump’s individual sociopathic behavior, a far-right agenda is being created that will provide a certain ideological clarity to his bumbling authoritarianism. The policy work, not just from the Trump campaign but from Project 25, should scare everyone. A $22 million initiative by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, Project 25 has already produced a 920-page book, Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise, detailing plans to reshape the federal government. If implemented, its strategy would write “the end” to the classic separation of powers, checks and balances, and even a non-partisan civil service. Every single federal department and agency would instead be restructured to fall under the complete control of the president.

It also offers hundreds of new policies on issues ranging from the environment and labor rights to education and health care. Its underlying assumption: that, post-2024, a conservative president will be in power for some time to come. (If so, Trump will, of course, have the backing of Republicans in Congress, who again may control one or both chambers, and a 6-3 Supreme Court majority.)

Count on this: resistance will be swift, massive, and enduring. Trump and Republican minority rule would not go unchallenged and the repression sure to follow would only generate yet more resistance and, undoubtedly, a generation of political turbulence.

On the other hand, a significant electoral defeat for the Republicans and Trump (along with his conviction on any number of criminal charges) would certainly prove a major obstacle to future authoritarianism. However, tens of millions of his voters will not go quietly into the night, while far-right elected officials in Congress and state legislatures will continue to push extreme conservative policies. White nationalists and radical evangelicals will mobilize as best as they can. Financial and political resources will be available.

The effort to defeat MAGA at all levels and in all ways politically will go on, but progressives need to prepare for the challenge of 2024 and the perilous years to follow.

Copyright 2023 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com

Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more or less by fiat? That’s the fascist position. 

Or would they prefer to destroy the government, to “starve the beast,” something anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to call for decades ago? “I don’t want to abolish government,” he declared. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That’s the anti-government nihilist position.

You might not think that those two goals could coexist comfortably within a single party. And of course, you’d be right if you were talking about an ordinary American political party. But the Republicans are no longer an ordinary party. In many respects, in fact, they have become the however-fractious sole property of one Donald J. Trump. That former and quite possibly (God forbid) future president has no trouble simultaneously advocating contradictory, not to mention devastating, ideas. That’s because, for him, ideas are an entirely fungible currency that he deploys primarily to maintain the attention and adulation of his — and it is increasingly his alone — GOP “base.” And precisely because Trump has so little invested in actual policy, the right wing believes he’s a weapon they can point and shoot in whatever direction they choose.

You might also wonder why, at a moment when horror is being heaped on horror in Israel/Palestine, when wars continue unabated in Ukraine and Sudan, I find myself focusing on some distinctly in-the-weeds aspects of the American political system. Perhaps it’s partly to distract myself from all the other nightmares around us. But even if I believed (which I don’t) that the right response to the crisis in Israel/Palestine involved sending more weapons and money to Benjamin Netanyahu, Congress isn’t in a position to appropriate anything at the moment.

Just as we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function. Perhaps by the time you read this, Republicans in the House of Representatives will have stopped squabbling over which right-wing bigot should be speaker. Maybe they will have opted for Jim Jordan, who has accused the Biden administration of planning to replace white voters with immigrants, or perhaps someone else entirely. Remember, too, that whatever joker emerges as speaker from such a chaotic process will be second in line to the presidency, should something happen to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Fearsome Power

Recently, I’ve somehow managed to end up on a few right-wing email lists. The strangest people (Ron DeSantis, for example) are writing to ask me for money. My most recent supplicant was Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to President Trump and co-author, with Steve Bannon, of Trump’s 2017 inaugural address in which the new president inveighed darkly against the “American carnage” he saw defiling the nation’s landscape. These days, Miller is himself a president of something called the America First Legal Foundation, which bills itself as “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions and the Radical Left.”

Miller, it turns out, has written to let me know that “we are living in extremely perilous times and a truly dangerous moment for our Republic.” As it happens, I agree with him, though obviously not for the same reasons. “The federal bureaucracy has turned against the American people,” Miller’s missive continues. “It has been completely corrupted into an ideological monolith of hard-left loathing for America. The fearsome power [his emphasis] of the state is raining down on political dissidents, while violent and vile criminals are released into our communities.” The solution, of course, is to send money to America First Legal, so it can get on with the business of “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions.”

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Miller, however, will likely be less concerned about the fearsome power of the state once it’s again in the hands of Donald Trump. Indeed, he’s part of a group of former and present Trump advisers engaged in planning for a potential presidential transition in 2025. These include Russell Vought, who ran Trump’s  Office of Management and Budget, and former Trump White House chief of personnel John McEntee. As the New York Times reported in July,

“Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.”

The key thrust of Project 2025 is full implementation of the “unitary executive” principle — the view that the Constitution locates the power of the executive branch in a single individual, the president. In its maximalist version, according to the Times, this theory also contradicts the long-held doctrine of the separation of powers, under which three co-equal branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — provide checks and balances on each other. Under the unitary executive principle, presidential power simply outweighs that of either Congress or the Supreme Court. Project 2025’s backers know that Donald Trump will agree and act accordingly.

By “long-held doctrine” I mean a blueprint for democratic government that goes back to two seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophers: Charles Montesquieu, who first wrote about the separation of powers, and John Locke, whose ideas about unalienable rights were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Like Montesquieu, Locke advocated for a separation of governmental powers in which the legislative, not the executive, would be supreme. In that view, the democratically elected legislature makes a nation’s laws and — just as the name suggests — the executive exists to “execute” them.

Despite their occasional homages to Montesquieu and Locke, the Heritage Foundation and its followers have flipped that thinking upside down by insisting that the Constitution considers the executive branch superior to the other two. If that were the case, wouldn’t the executive branch be described in that document’s first article? In fact, Articles I, II, and III describe the legislative, executive, and judicial functions in that order, suggesting that if any of these is superior, it is (as Locke argued) the legislative.

Heritage, however, points to Article II, which begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows…” What “follows” is a lengthy description of the very electoral process that Trump and company tried so hard to suborn on January 6, 2021.

While Trump was president, he delighted in explaining to anyone who’d listen that he had “an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” At the time, that suggestion of ultimate power was met with widespread derision.

However, were Trump to be re-elected, the folks at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute have plans to, as the starship Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard would say, make it so. As the Times reported in July, their goal is “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” Consider what follows a first step in exactly that direction.

A (Schedule) F in Government

Okay, now let’s truly dive into the weeds: In his final year as president, Trump issued an executive order amending the regulations governing the federal civil service. That service was instituted by law in 1871 in response to what was then seen as rampant favoritism throughout the federal government. Patronage jobs — positions granted, often to the friends and family of powerful politicians or in return for money or favors — were officially eliminated. Competitive processes designed to select qualified candidates for specific positions replaced the old system.

Today, the Office of Personnel Management oversees the hiring and firing of roughly 2.2 million civilian federal employees, the people who keep the wheels of government turning. They administer Social Security, Medicare, and the Internal Revenue Service, among many other things. They make sure that your meat isn’t rotten and the alcohol content of your vodka bottle is what it says on the label.

The vast majority of those employees are chosen through competitive examinations, but about 4,000 key positions are directly appointed by the president or other senior officials, including the leadership of many agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other government executives. It’s not unreasonable for presidents to want to put their own policy stamp on various branches of government through such appointments.

Those 4,000 positions exempted from competitive hiring fall into five categories, delineated in five “schedules” (lists) described in a subsection of Title 5 of the United States Code. To be exact, Rule VI of Subsection A of Title 5 — I told you we were going to get into the weeds! — lists in Schedules A through E the employees exempt from civil service exams.

Or at least those were all the exempt categories until October 2020. That’s when Donald Trump issued an executive order creating Schedule F, which exempted from competitive hiring all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”

Such a broad, ill-defined category could, in fact, have come to include any junior employee in any federal department who might in the course of his or her employment have cause to send a memo to a superior advocating any action. It’s estimated that implementing Schedule F would have sent the number of exempt civil service employees soaring from 4,000 to roughly 50,000.

On taking office, however, President Joe Biden immediately rescinded that executive order so, at the moment at least, Schedule F no longer exists.

In fact, the feckless President Trump we knew wasn’t even vaguely prepared to replace 50,000 civil servants with his own people during his last few months in office or, likely as not, over the following four years had he been re-elected. That’s where the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 comes in. They are now spending millions of dollars to recruit and vet political appointees who would toe the Trump line (a line they hope to draw in a future Trump presidency).

Jokers to the Right of Me…

The rock band Stealers Wheel caught our current situation perfectly back in 1972 when they sang about “Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right.” The jokers to the right of me (and to the right of the majority of the people in this country) are the members of the House Freedom Caucus, their allies, and other MAGA followers. They are the ones (de)constructing the house of cards that Congress is becoming at this very moment. To call them anarchists would be an insult to conscientious anarchists everywhere. They are, in fact, anti-government nihilists who believe in little beyond a kind of gun-slinging performative violence. They don’t want to drown the government quietly in a bathtub but to strangle it on live TV. And keep in mind that they have imagined nothing with which to replace it.

Where to begin? Those Freedom Caucusers in the House are now walking weapons in search of a target. Yes, they threatened to shut down the government unless their demands were met, but then they couldn’t even decide what those demands were. Did they want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other social service programs? Impeach President Biden? Stop the prosecutions of Donald Trump? Increase border security? Stop funding Ukraine’s war effort?

When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to cooperate with the Democrats to prevent just such a shutdown, they threw him out. Then they couldn’t agree on a new speaker, even though the House of Representatives can’t conduct business without one. Yet not a day passes without a bomb-thrower like Matt Gaetz strutting around saying things like:

“My goal is to get the most conservative Speaker of the House with broad trust across the conference. The Swamp of Washington D.C. is going crazy right now because they are not in complete and total control — this gives us a great opportunity to put the interests of our fellow Americans first.”

All Together Now

Much of this would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. However, recent polls suggest that a 2024 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains a toss-up. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently told the Guardian, “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” The re-election of Trump. she believes, will signal

“an end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business, and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.

“I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down.”

I can’t say it any better than she has. They want to burn it all down so that they can rule over the smoldering ashes. That would put us on a true Schedule F — for Failed State — a condition this country now seems hellbent on achieving.

Copyright 2023 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com