Trump is radioactive. But he remains leader of what is now an insurgent Republican Party.
By Marc Cooper — The Coop Scoop January 8, 2021
Yes, the violent seizure of the U.S. Capitol two days ago was an attempted coup. An attempted Trump Coup, and that puts it in a special category. Something you might call tragi-farce.
Is there anything that Trump does well? He‘s not even a good liar, no matter how much he practices. How the hell can you trust a man to carry out a successful coup when he can’t figure out to stop cheating at golf?
There were just a few elements missing from the Trump putsch attempt that doomed it to failure: you know, some small details like tanks, troops, fighter planes, and a gunboat or two sailing up the Potomac.
Even his own shock forces were, for the most part, quite unimpressive. Real Brown Shirts don’t dillydally around snapping iPhone pics of the gilded hallways and foreboding paintings and they don’t take selfies with cherubic smiling cops (who ought to have been slapping cuffs on them).
Trump’s ground troops that broke into congress were a motley mix of neo-Nazis, “patriotic militias,” loons, kooks, addicted Fox News watchers, cosplay actors, delusionals, Qanon head cases, conspiracy theorists, undoubtedly some Republican staffers, brandishers of long guns, and a whole lot of very angry, very confused, very brainwashed people who have been convinced that their Fat Jesus was cheated out of an election that he lost by just 8 million votes! In short, those we saw smashing the windows of the Capitol, scaling its walls, hanging off its rafters, rifling through the offices and personal papers of sitting congress members, smashing the television equipment of broadcast reporters, stealing Pelosi’s lectern, and trying — unsuccessfully — to burst into a room where dozens of congress members were huddled and trying to take them hostage — are, simply, put, America’s misfits and losers.
Standing behind and above this stratum of miserables are the elites, the elite manipulators, puppet masters and opportunists. In this case, the two most notable being Princeton and Harvard law school grads, Sen. Josh Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz. Make no mistake, they may dress better, smell better, speak better, and have a whole lot more money, but Hawley, Trump and the more than half of Republican congressmembers who persisted in their farcical but intensely anti-democratic stunt to overturn Biden’s election on the congressional floor are just if not more reprehensible and a lot more dangerous than the ragtag Trumpistas running amok inside the Capitol.
Trump himself sits atop this pyramid of cynical and openly seditious elites, ineptly clawing at any opportunity, mostly imaginary, to reverse the election.
Indeed, since the very night of the vote more than two months ago, Trump kicked off what was very much a slow-motion coup — and one that we could see from the onset was going to go nowhere. The Nazis kept repeating the trope of the “stab in the back” in their rise to power…referring to the revolution that interrupted and ended German participation in World War One.
In his fall from power, Trump came up with his own Big Lie, that he somehow won the November election only to have it stolen by a deep, and dark conspiracy involving Dominion voting machines, Hugo Chavez (R.I.P), corrupt local Republican officials, the deep state, the FBI, and covert elements of S.M.E.R.S.H. This profoundly subversive narrative is the only element in Trump’s plan that actually worked. For eight weeks, with the help of such gargoyles as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, and then joined by a dozen Republican US senators, more than 125 Republican house members and flanked by countless provincial low level Republican Babbitts, this outrageous lie gelled and became a semi-permanent feature of our political topography.
All of these folks, all of these liars, all of these cynical opportunists, cowards and lackeys stand today indicted and convicted on the world stage as co-conspirators in the most despicable act ever committed by an American President: inciting a frenzied crowd to go down and bust open the Congress after Mike Pence failed to follow Trump’s illegal order to invalidate the certified and valid results of an election in which more than 150 million Americans voted.
Don’t get me wrong. Very few if any of these elite level criminals will face any direct consequences. They should get up every morning and light a candle giving thanks that we are a nation in which the rule of law more or less still exists. As in most other less democratic countries, these subversives would have already been arrested, disappeared, sent into exile, locked up in a dungeon or simply taken out and shot at dawn.
Trump however will not be so lucky. Talk of invoking the 25th Amendment, much like Western Civilization, is a great idea but it ain’t happening. The Democrats, however, seem intent to pass probably two articles of impeachment early next week — — one on Trump’s blatantly illegal phone call to the Pennsylvania Secretary State, and another for using the incendiary lie of a stolen election to incite a huge crowd of supporters to march on the Congress and “fight.”
Most likely the Senate will not take up or will quickly vote down the new articles of impeachment and Trump will fly off to Scotland or Florida a day or two before the inauguration.
While it will not remove him from his last few days in office, the Democratic-led impeachment has become absolutely necessary. It’s more than symbolic. It’s imperative that Trump be officially branded for being the authoritarian he is, he should carry the burden or being the only president impeached twice and once for incitement to insurrection. Seems like a fitting addition to his already bulging resume as a sociopath.
Let’s give Trump credit for one success. He has definitively smashed the Republican Party. We even see some of his chief rodents abandoning the ship. Two of his more corrupt cabinet members, Betsy Devos and Elaine Chao have resigned allegedly in protest over the fracas at the congress.
Really? Nothing else over the previous four years caught their attention regarding the loathsome personality and policies of their boss? Chao had no problem remaining 100 percent mum as her hubby Mitch McConnell worked feverishly alongside Donald Trump to help dismantle America. Some pundits guessed thatDeVos and Chao bailed so they would not have to vote on the 25th amendment if it actually came to the cabinet.
Now even Mitch, even Lindsay Graham, William Barr (!), Mike Pence and some other more Regular Republicans are taking distance from Trump — just a little late in the game. These folks are no heroes. They are collaborators trying to salvage their own scalps.
The only sitting Republican I heard speak with consistency and principle over the last 2 months is Mitt Romney. Mittens is clearly trying to position himself as the leader of some yet-to-be-born Republican Renaissance Party that would supplant the Trumpies and isolate them in some third party somewhere.
My view is that Romney and Collins and Murkowski and the other “moderate” Republicans have this equation 100% backwards. Trump has disgraced himself with just about everybody in the world — except that pesky Republican base. He still rules. In fact, his distance from the White House might lead more to a robust mythology rather than a fade out. Exiled or defeated leaders can wield enormous power from the outside as they are not subject to the daily business of government that belittle them. not
Che Guevara was a much more powerful character in 1977 than he was the year he was killed a decade earlier. Juan Domingo Peron was a much more influential after 20 years in exile than he was the week he was overthrown. Authoritarian or ideological movements need leaders to build them up but can far outlast their founders.
That frenzied pro-Trump base was not created by Donald Trump. It was whipped up first and slowly simmered with Dick Nixon’s overtly racist Southern Strategy back 50 years ago. Ronald Reagan spent 8 years fortifying and solidifying that base and inculcating it with a nasty ideology that criminalized the poor and glorified fat cats roving around in yellow power ties and spiffy suspenders.
While Poppy Bush nearly put that base to sleep with his unremarkable regime, his son, #43, got them all whipped up again. He could teach the masses real patriotism by immersing us in two endless and totally SNAFU wars, scare the snot out of the population with his color-coded terror warnings, implement a surveillance state, and –yet — keep that base happy by pretending to be just like one of them. It’s really Gingrich, Reagan and Bush 43 that softened up the Republican base for Trump, slowly transforming the principled conservative movement into a vengeful, hate-filled, xenophobic unprincipled gang of bewildered losers — never figuring out that it was their own leaders who were making their lives so economically precarious.
Enter Donald Trump whose eyes widened at the rich opportunity left him by his Republican predecessors and by the growing alienation of the white working class that felt abandoned and betrayed by the Democrats (because they were).
Here resides the current existential crisis of the Republicans. Their leader, and that leader is Donald Trump, has a total, solid lock on that base that took 35 years to build before he came on stage. And no matter that Trump and Trumpism are now toxic to a general election electorate (nothing new here with Republicans losing popular vote in seven of the eight last presidential elections). He’s still The Boss.
The bet of the Republican “moderates” and the wish of many liberals is that Trump, once out of office, will fade away. I would not rule that out but for the moment I’m not buying it.
It’s the “moderates” who have no future. No immediate future. Just exactly who is their voting base? Okay, that’s enough time. Stop looking. There isn’t one. These are the guys who are gonna wind up marginalized and it’s the Trumpies –maybe without Trump — who are going to be running the Republican Party for the time being. (Note: that base has become so radicalized that this morning there are tweets from some of the alt-right types, slamming Trump for his quasi-concession speech Thursday). Something tells me those kind of folks are not going to be future Romney voters.
Oh yeah, the police? What’s up with that? I am not a believer in conspiracy theories. But I also don’t believe much in coincidences. None of us know exactly what went down but we all know that Thursday was a massive law enforcement failure. Massive.
There was no lack of intel. The media itself was full of stories for a solid week about how DC was steeling for the January 6 events. Police had been put on standby. Maryland Virginia law enforcement pledged police support and the former offered the National Guard (which was magically rejected four times during the riot) and came in only after Mike Pence authorized them. The captain of the Capitol Police has resigned as have the Sergeants of Arms of both houses.
These is still a ton of unraveling of this story to do and it’s not going to be pretty. There had to be some sort of collusion somewhere that allowed that mob to breach the puny security that had been deployed. If not collusion, then excessive sympathy on the part of the cops. There were also some disturbing press stories of successful penetration of some small town police forces by right wing militias. And up here in the Pacific Northwest as well as in the Southwest, there are a number of county Sheriffs who act as petty tyrants, refusing to enforce state and federal gun laws, anti-COVID mask laws and who go play miniature golf with top militia leaders. The links between law enforcement and the militia movement is a great under-reported story just waiting to be blown open by some enterprising journalists.
Just a quick logistical note: It’s a 2.2 mile march from the White House down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. That’s about a 45–60 minute march. Maybe more. How is that when a mass of thousands began to move down that avenue the Capitol Police and Metro DC Police could not stand up a robust security cordon to protect the Capitol. Somebody has to come up with an answer.
Bottom line: The Republican Party is radioactive this week and will be so indefinitely. It is now a party totally dominated by Trumpy loons who have no idea what it takes to win elections and therefore is doubly dangerous.
Things are moving way too fast and news is breaking every 5 minutes, making it a fool’s errand to do much more prognosticating. The only certainties that emerge from this last set of dramatic episodes are: It can happen here. If Trump had an IQ above room temperature he might have pulled off a break with democratic rule. Be advised that his smarter minions have taken note and will soon be giving it a try.
Second, we now have a new identifiable neo-fascist movement in the United States made up of the hard core of Trump supporters. He has given them a high profile, much more cred than anyone else would give, and he has brought them through the membrane into the political mainstream. That does not mean we are on the verge of civil war or some sort of grand militia uprising. No. It means we must now factor in this movement in any and all of our political calculations and must stop making illusions aout some great and non-existent Bi-partisan Moment that is supposedly about to dawn.
Three: The Democrats seem quite unprepared for much of this. Even after Thursday’s attack on the Capitol, Biden is still talking about how great he will get along with all of his old GOP buddies in congress. Oh, sure. More importantly, rank and file Democrats best wake up to the fact that though they now control both Houses of congress and the White House, nothing is forever and in this case, some things might only be for 2 years. In no way do I advocate mimicking the tactics of the right wing goons. But that they are better organized than we are, um, yes!
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