Insurrection.
Impeachment.
Inauguration.
If
a year ago you had asked anyone what the chances were of those three words
appearing in a sentence that would accurately describe the two weeks leading to
January 20, 2021, you would have been told you needed professional help.
The conventional Republican wisdom at that time was that Trump was an over-the-top but ultimately harmless showman, always ready to walk to a line but willing to cross only those that either weren't all that important to voters in the first place (e.g., proper "presidential" speech or etiquette) or that in crossing he could later fudge as to their meaning (e.g., his "fine people on both sides" comments in Charlottesville in 2017 or his attacks on the Mueller investigation, the former of which he defended as a reference to the non-Nazi statue lovers in that crowd, the latter of which he escaped by turning self-enforced prosecutorial boundaries into legal exonerations).
Even the nightmare that was Trump's response to the
pandemic was spun toward some form of acceptable -- the denial, ridiculous
pressers and idiotic messaging (ingesting bleach, for example) offset by a
vaccine developed at warp speed.
On
this view, Democrats would, as was their wont, overreact, a consequence of both
their unwillingness to ever accept Trump as president and an identity politics
that made it impossible for them to appreciate both the level of anger outside
their metropolitan and suburban base and the fact that Trump's nastiness had
actually connected with a lot of those who were angry. Also on this view,
Trump had delivered for his voters with a growing (pre-pandemic) economy, tax
cuts, a cadre of conservative courts, and a level of frustration among his
opponents -- "owning the liberals", as it were -- that more than made
up for his foul-mouthed narcissism and compulsive lying.
Not to be outdone, the conventional Democratic wisdom back then was that Trump was a pathological liar and corrupt narcissist not remotely interested in or capable of doing the job but absolutely bent on retaining it at any price and regardless of consequence to the country at large.
In their mind, his
attempt to bribe Ukraine's president to announce a phony investigation of Joe
Biden was emblematic of what his narrow and legalistic escape from Mueller's investigation
had wrought -- a dishonest and unhinged megalomania. And his subsequent
inability to competently manage the nation's response to the coronavirus
pandemic, indeed, his distortion and politicization of it, confirmed their
worst fears.
Conventional wisdom is conventional because in many respects it is correct. And that may have been true of the competing conventional takes on Trump as well. The conventions themselves, at least in their less extreme form, were not necessarily at odds with each other. It was at least possible that over time Trump's dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence -- all Democratic tropes -- might have (more or less) peacefully co-existed with an economy running hot on auto-pilot while conservative judges in the background reined in perceived overreach and expanded the scope of their favored constitutional rights located in the Second Amendment and in the religion clause of the First.
Trump
defenders even had a practical rule on how one got there.
You
had to, they said, take Trump "seriously but not literally."
Those who did could navigate Trump's verbal sewer and disordered psychology on
their way to a more or less normal politics of competing interests where one
side -- the GOP -- occasionally (but not always) won and the other occasionally
(but not always) lost. Those, however, who violated the rule -- who took
him literally but not seriously -- would wind up increasingly frustrated,
victims of their own unwillingness to concede that they were often as over the
top as the President they -- so it was said -- never accepted as legitimate in
the first place.
And
then came January 6.
And
that whole model just blew up.
It
didn't blow up simply or only because the Trump-induced march on and riot at
the US Capitol that day was an attempted coup. It was that, of
course. But it was also a lot more than that. And the more, hard as
it may be to fathom, is probably even worse than the attempted coup.
Discussing
Hegel, Marx once said that "world-historic facts and personages appear, so
to speak, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as
farce." The attempted coup on January 6, however, varied that
theme. It was tragedy and farce all at once.
Thousands
stormed through police barricades, smashing windows, trashing offices,
proclaiming electoral lies and asserting a patriotic superiority borne of both
their own arrogance and an ignorance cultivated and harvested by the nation’s
45th President. Many were bent on stopping the electoral vote count then
in progress. Others wanted to kidnap or kill elected officials, including
the Speaker and the Vice-President. In their attempt at an
illegitimate putsch, they told the police "There's a million of us out
there, and we are listening to Trump -- your boss." They breached the chambers
of both legislative branches and rifled through the papers of the legitimate
Representatives and Senators who only moments earlier had to be quickly ferried
to secure locations because their lives were at risk. Five people
died. One was shot trying to break into the
House. Another, a police officer, died from injuries sustained in
the assault. Hundreds of Congressional staff sat terrorized in offices
listening in abject fear to the outrage just beyond their locked doors.
Those
tragedies, however, were intertwined with absolute farce.
In
the truest sense of that word.
Comic
buffoonery, crude characterization and ludicrous improbability.
About
a year ago, a very smart friend who is an investment banker by day,
accomplished historian by night, and local official in between, posed a
question at dinner. Apropos of the current American political scene, he
asked "when did we start doing stupid?" I immediately
responded: "1980". At first he appeared startled.
But then he reprised Ronald Reagan's famous line about "trees caus[ing]
pollution" and we proceeded to congratulate ourselves in tracing a straight
line from some of the Gipper's more famous gaffes through voodoo economics,
non-existent WMD in Iraq, and Sarah Palin's word salad, leading to that champion
of rank dishonesty himself, Donald Trump.
Today,
stupid has taken a far more insidious form than the occasional gaffe from an
otherwise genial chief executive. Over 70% of Republicans actually believe the
2020 election was stolen. There is nothing behind this claim, not a
single fact that supports it, other than Donald Trump's lie -- uttered daily
since election day -- that it was. And that is all it has taken. That
lie, like all his lies, was ingested by Trump supporters and their numbers then
created the background for invented efforts to manufacture some patina of
support by hundreds who should have known better -- the Giulianis, Cruzes,
Hawleys and 130 or so Republican House members who decided to contest Arizona's
and Pennsylvania's uncontestable electoral college votes on January 6.
Meanwhile, a mob -- clad in their flak jackets, helmets, horns and MAGA hats --
tried to take down the government all in the service of that lie.
Pace President
Biden, the road out of this mess will require much more than unity.
And pace President
Lincoln, it will also require much more than the "better angels of our
nature" summoned from the “mystic chords of memory".
My
suggestion is that we try intelligence.
Which
in the past has proven useful.
And
from which there are small signs of progress even today.
Two
days after the riot, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram took down Trump's social
media accounts. And not since Samson's hair was cut has power dissipated so
rapidly. One survey reported that the amount of "misinformation”
about the election declined by over 70% in the days that followed, and the two
weeks after January 6 were characterized by something not seen from Trump's
White House in the past 206 -- relative silence.
This
is a space in which sanity can begin to reclaim at least a part of the public
dialogue.
The
problem with Trump as Twitter President was that he could always suck all the
oxygen out of the room with his latest outrage. Those outrages had to be
reported and reacted to and analyzed by the media, and whenever anyone
suggested some form of benign neglect in the interest of progress (or even a
semblance of rationality), there was always the rejoinder that he was -- after
all -- President and that journalists (of whatever stripe) had a duty to
disseminate what he was saying. Without Twitter, Trump did not lose the
right to be heard.
But
he did lose the opportunity to mainline lies unfiltered into the veins of the
body politic.
Intelligence,
in other words, works.
For
the sake of resurrecting intelligence as a sought-after characteristic of
public discourse, it is also important that the impeachment trial of Trump go
forward.
In
the weeks to come, Republicans will argue that any such effort will be foolish
at best or illegal at worst. The latter claim is almost certainly false
as ex-officials have been impeached in the past and the potential consequences
of presidential impeachment -- which include a lifetime ban from holding any
office of "honor, trust or profit" in the United States -- themselves
contemplate the need for that possibility with the chief executive.
As
to the former, the argument is that impeachment will merely delay any effort at
unity by solidifying the divisive commitments of America's competing
tribes. On this view, those who support Trump will treat him as a martyr
and double down on his electoral fictions, the trial of which will at the very
least re-broadcast them, and those who don't will meet the same fate they met
last January in the form of another Senate acquittal.
I
don't think so.
An
impeachment trial is the only venue in which both Trump and his enablers can be
held responsible. And, for a number of reasons, the chance they may escape
should not become an excuse for short-circuiting that hearing. For the
same reasons, those now assuming an acquittal may very well be counting eggs
before they are hatched. At least a half dozen Republican senators,
including their leader Mitch McConnell, appear open to conviction today and
there is no guarantee ten more won't find their way to that result once the
evidence is heard.
Trump
incited a violent insurrection.
He
sent forth a mob to kill the constitutionally-required work of the first branch
of the government in order to insure his continued but illegitimate control of
the second branch of the government. He and his seconds are now defending
his January 6 rally speech by claiming that it never demanded or approved of
violence and in fact at one point specifically sanctioned only
"peaceful" protest.
That
defense has to be heard and refuted.
Because
it is both false and dangerous.
It
is false because you cannot spend months inviting thousands to Washington DC
for the express purpose of reversing non-existent electoral theft; fully
understand that the group you summon will be (illegally) armed; literally
observe them outfitted for battle as you speak; tell them to march on the
Capitol while instructing them that they will "never take back [their]
country with weakness"; and then pretend it was not your fault -- or
your words -- that led to deadly violence merely because you sandwiched the
word "peaceful" into what was otherwise an hour long jeremiad of the
lies you have been spouting for three months. And you certainly cannot do
that if you are Donald Trump, having preached unmitigated aggression from the
presidential pulpit for four years and having told rally goers in the past
to bust heads.
And
then there is the overriding issue of danger.
The
Roman Republic -- from which much of our own governmental architecture was
inspired if not directly drawn -- began to collapse when violence became an
accepted method of political combat. That occurred in the late second and
early first century BC as candidates for the two annual consul positions
discovered they could command armies loyal to themselves rather than the
republic and then fight or leverage their way to political power on the back of
brute force.
January
6 was a test run to see if such an approach might gain traction here in the
US.
For
Trump and the more violent extremists who stormed the Capitol that day, the
hope was that a demonstration of armed strength would in fact coerce others --
most particularly, Vice President Pence -- into declaring the recent election
illegitimate and thus force Republican state legislatures in a half dozen swing
states to switch their state's electoral votes from Biden to Trump. Had
it succeeded, America would have ceased being a republic for the same reason
Rome did. Might would have made right. Elections would have become
irrelevant.
For
years after violence became a feature of its politics, Rome preserved its
republican forms. Consuls, praetors, tribunes and magistrates were
elected and Senators appointed. But none of that mattered. Because
long before Augustus, the republic had died. January 6 could have been a
similar crossroads for us and at the very least should therefore be a
reminder.
This
experiment in republican government is fragile.
It
is by no means inevitable.
Ben
Franklin wasn't kidding when he told that inquiring lady in Philadelphia in
1787 that the founders had given them a republic "if they could keep
it." Keeping it relies on what they thought of as civic virtue
and you and I call good faith and basic honesty. It also requires a willingness
to compromise and an eternal preference for ballots over bullets . . .
And
bullies.
America needs a re-boot. It needs to exorcise Trump's demon notion that truth either does not exist or does not matter. There are no "alternative facts". It also needs to re-establish its republican bona fides. That may not occur even if the impeachment trial goes forward. But it definitely will not occur if it does not. If that happens, poltical violence will have escaped consequence. Another Trump at another time will take another run at her.
And next time . . .
The
clowns may decide to stay home.
Joseph
Robinette Biden, Jr., America's 46th President, thus stands athwart a moment in
history. It is a multi-dimensional moment. A virus still plagues
us. Our politics divides us. And an insurrection almost ended
us. The capital (and Capitol) from which he delivered his Inaugural
Address today was rimmed by 25,000 troops from the National Guard, there to preclude
any reprise of January 6, and the mall he faced was flooded with flags, not
people, in deference to Covid.
Since election day last November, Joe Biden had struck all the right notes. He has been calm, deliberate and forthright -- the un-Trump as it were.
Today he was all that and more.
To
the "riotous mob [who] thought they could use violence to silence the will
of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred
ground," he repeated the simple truth -- "It did not happen." In
a "crucible for the ages, . . . America [had] risen to the challenge. The
people [had] been heard, and . . . heeded."
To
the country, he then made a simple pledge. On his watch, mob rule
"will never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not
ever." And then another pledge: "I will always level with you.
I will defend the Constitution. I'll defend democracy. I'll defend
America."
He offered a laundry list of “the foes we face, anger, resentment and hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness.” As expected, his prescribed antidote was “unity”. But not unity as a “foolish fantasy”. “[T]he forces that divide us are deep and they are real,” he said, “But . . . they are not new.” “History, faith and reason show us the way of unity . . . We can treat each other with dignity . . . We can . . . stop the shouting [and] end [our] uncivil war . . . There is truth and there are lies."
What will all of that look like?
Joe Biden is not elusive. In fact, he is as easy to find as the Main Streets that produced him, the parents that guided him, the nuns that taught him, the ambitions that seized him, and the tragedies that confronted him. He knows “there’s no accounting for what fate will deal you.” There are “some days when you need a hand”, others when you’re “called to lend” one. We're in this together because we have to be.
Even when we do not want to be.
Joe Biden is also not particularly eloquent. So today he left the eloquence to an elderly priest and a 22-year-old poet. The priest reminded us that “Dreams are built together”, the poet that “there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it/ If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Biden is brave enough.
Are we?
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