View from America
By M.R. Josse
GAITHERSBURG, MD: If 7 December 1941 is seared on the American psyche as – in the oft-recalled words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – a ‘date which will live in infamy’, I believe 6 January 2021 will henceforth be remembered as another such tragic, nay shameful and horrific, moment in American history.
FDR‘s memorable, anguished cri de coeur, to recall, followed in the wake of Japan’s deceitful, devastating blitzkrieg on America’s storied naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I believe 6 January 2021 will be recalled for the desperate, attempted coup d’etat against the U.S. Capitol by a mob of assorted armed gangs of domestic terrorists incited to insurrection by the incendiary and sedulously flogged myth of a ‘stolen’ election.
TRUMP’S INSURRECTION
President Trump’s supporters storming the US Capital
Which is to say that an election handsomely won by Joe Biden of the Democratic Party, and certified as such by the Electoral College, was allegedly ‘stolen’ from President Donald J. Trump of the Republican Party. (The official result: 306 v. 232 in the Electoral College. Biden’s margin of popular votes exceeded those of Trump’s by more than 7 million.)
Significantly, the blighted desperadoes timed their brutal assault and attempted seige of the U.S. Congress at the very time that a joint session was one hour into deliberations vis-à-vis the formality of endorsement of the Electoral College’s certified results. Their ferocious armed assault not only resulted in widespread vandalism of state property and the violation of the sanctity of some of the most hallowed political offices in the land but, even more tragically, resulted in five deaths, including that of a U.S. Capitol police officer.
Clearly, those responsible have ‘blood on their hands’, as is now a common refrain in political commentary across America. Incidentally, the Trump White House deigned to lower the national banner as a token of respect for the police officer who fell defending the U.S. Capitol four full days after his death at the hands of the rioters, who appear to have been mainly White extremists.
The fable of a ‘stolen’ election was relentlessly and perniciously pursued by President Donald J. Trump – who, as of this writing, has just nine more days in office – and his ‘enablers’ in the Republican Party, although by all accounts the just-concluded presidential election was, in the opinion of those most knowledgeable in such matters, one of the most fair and transparent to date.
It will be germane at this point, surely, to mention that 59 court litigations by Trumpsters claiming electoral fraud, led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudi Guiliani, were dismissed by an assortment of courts; not a single one of those legal interventions could establish that the election was either rigged or that fraud was as widespread as to overturn the election result.
What cannot be overlooked, too, is that Trump himself had, days in advance, tweeted to his lumpen band of Trumpsters to converge on the U.S. Congress on 6 January during its key joint session, not only promising that things would be ‘wild’ but also urging/threatening Vice President Mike Pence, President of the Joint Session of Congress, to flip the election in his favor!
On the 6 January itself, Trump addressed the crazed mob in person, minutes they began their nefarious attack, and directed them to launch their unholy crusade, while his sons and toadies got on speakers’ platforms to egg them on. Rudi Guiliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, the once-widely respected mayor of New York City, even intemperately whipped up mob frenzy calling for ‘trial by combat.’
While the corrosive effects of Trump’s constant assaults on ‘fake news’ and the media must certainly have contributed to the obtaining toxic, stifling atmosphere where lies triumph over truth, it can be argued that the roots of the rioters attack lie in the 2016 presidential campaign with Trump peddling the line that if he lost, the election must be rigged!
Truth be told, the egregious exhibition of the motley 6 January domestic terrorists attempting to batter down the bastion of the American republic’s very symbol is not the first of its kind. Such instances were especially prevalent in the South during the Reconstruction Era – that is to say, following the devastation wrought by the Civil War of 1861-1865.
To come back to the present, however, for far too long have conservatives here been condoning Trump’s autocratic tendencies, as underscored by the fact that the bulk of Republican lawmakers attempted to throw a monkey wrench into the works during the 6 January Joint Session of Congress.
In fact, even the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, while they were inside the premises, did not deter dozens of Republican Congressmen and Senators from trying to overturn the election they all knew Trump had most pronouncedly lost! It is most revealing that the Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate – till 20 January 2021 – waited three weeks before finally acknowledging Biden’s victory.
On the positive side of the ledger must be noted that despite the mayhem, chaos, violence and all manner of conspiracies to overturn the 2020 presidential election, overall, and in the final analysis, U.S. polity demonstrated the requisite resilience so as to be able to confirm Biden’s electoral victory in the small hours of 7 January.
This was despite the objections of many Republican enablers of Trump’s whopping lies. Several of them, though, stopped in their tracks, and reversed gears, after almost being physically assaulted: they were in time secured by the U.S. Capitol’s security personnel who whisked them to safety.
SECOND IMPEACHMENT
Notably, despite Trump’s open threat to Vice President Mike Pence to do what he could not constitutionally do, Vice President Mike Pence released a statement, just before the joint session began, which declared, in essence: “Mr. President, I can’t do what you want.”
Trump’s squeeze on Pence was completely unwarranted: the role of the vice president in such a setting is purely ceremonial. Two examples from the recent past should make that plain: Vice President Nixon performed a similar role in 1961 after he lost to Kennedy; Vice President Al Gore did the same in 2001 when he was defeated by Bush.
Since that act of defiance, however, Pence had been waffling on whether he would lead the initiative seeking Trump’s removal on grounds that he is unfit, invoking the 25th Amendment, or not. That caused the Democrats to proceed with impeachment proceedings. If it goes through in the House, Trump would be the only American president in history to be impeached twice!
Since Trump is clearly not in the mood to resign – as Nixon did in somewhat similar circumstances in 1974 – and because Pence is not keen to lead the move to remove him from office, House Democrats just hours ago formally introduced their resolution to impeach Trump charging him with “incitement of insurrection.”
The House is poised to vote later this week. Democrats had attempted to urge Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment but before that House Republicans blocked the request. As per CNN, the single impeachment article which was introduced this morning in a brief pro-forma session, points to Trump’s “repeated false claims that he won the election and his speech to the crowd on 6 January before pro-Trump rioters breached the Capitol. It also cited Trump’s call with the Georgia Republican secretary of state where the President urged him to ‘find’ enough votes for Trump to win the state.”
In addition to a stream of senior Trump administration officials quitting lately, the most recent polls indicate that the majority of Americans support removing Trump from office. Among prominent Republicans who have called for Trump’s removal and being “rebuked in some way” is former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former chief of staff, John Kelly, had favored Trump’s removal via the 25th Amendment, adding that he has become a “laughing stock”, lashing out at all and sundry.
I absolutely concur with a sharp commentator on TV who called for a “bonfire of the insanities” – a play on the title of Tom Wolfe’s satirical 1987 novel, ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, about ambition, racism, social class, politics and greed in New York City – that have lately been put on public display in the political/media arena.
While Republicans’ angst at having to surrender control of the American political trifecta – the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate – to the Democrats is understandable, their craven behavior – with a very few exceptions – powerfully reminds one of how Democrats themselves found it very difficult, for long, to stomach the fact that the 2016 election was handily won by Trump.
They admittedly did not go to the absurd lengths as Trump and his acolytes have in trying to prove black is white, leave alone inciting a full-throated armed revolt to overturn the election result.
In a society as severely polarized as today’s America is, one only hopes that in Biden’s incoming Administration such divisions will gradually erode, if not altogether dissolve. But, as Elizabeth Neumann, a former Department of Homeland Security official cautioned on CNN the other day, the “mob attack on the Capitol will encourage far-right extremist groups who see this as a victory” before disclosing that “such extremist groups have grown in the past two years.”
Against that backcloth it is sobering that calls on social media have been made for more protests before the inauguration of the new president on 20 January 2021. There has also been chilling talk, more specifically, of “another attack on 17th January”.
POST MORTEM
Plainly, there will be a plethora of official investigations into myriad aspects of the 6 January onslaught on the edifice of American democracy. Such must include unraveling why – despite open-source intelligence that a mob attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol on the very day of the joint session of Congress on 6 January 2021 was in the offing – law enforcement did not see this coming.
Equally imperative, in my view, is why the U.S. Capitol was guarded by a huge phalanx of security personnel during a Black Lives Matter demonstration last summer, but not this time around! Similarly, the report that the dispatch of a security contingent from nearby Maryland was blocked from entering the District of Columbia by at least an hour on 6 January must be fully investigated and the findings brought to light.
Clearly, there is bound to be enormous interest in the future of the Grand Old Party, whose reputation now so severely besmirched. In my view, a huge factor in determining the same will depend on Trump’s fate. If he is impeached – and thereafter punished by the Senate when it comes under the control of the Democrats, après 20 January 2021 – obviously his hold on the party will wither away; he will not then be permitted to contest the 2024 presidential elections as he wishes.
If Trump can use the huge pile of cash he has collected, on the plea of funding his bout of electoral litigation, to underwrite the political activities/ambitions of flunkeys or even his son(s) in the future, there may still be some Republican politicos on his side.
I would think that, in the wake of the “Trump insurrection”, there will be a break-up of the GOP with a new leadership that will jettison all vestiges of the tainted Trump era. We will have to wait and see.
Of course, America’s moral or ethical voice in the international arena will diminish for some time, at least until it is clear that she has rebounded back, with the inanities and wild fluctuations of the Trump era a thing of the past.
For the immediate future, the Biden Administration will have its hands full, focusing on coming to grips with the ravages of the raging coronavirus, getting its cabinet functioning as a team and effectively tackling its urgent economic, foreign/security policy, and political agenda.
Obviously, there will be other occasions for this observer to monitor and comment on those and other themes in the near future.
The writer can be reached at: manajosse@gmail.com
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