Bob Sheak
Sept 14, 2024
Trump continues to argue falsely, as he did in the recent debate with Kamala Harris on Sept 10, 2024, that he won the 2020 presidential election over Biden and did so by millions of uncounted votes, the largest margin ever, he deceitfully says. He also claims that he had no responsibility for the violent and destructive attacks on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2023, a claim that is likewise contradicted by the evidence. His views on the 2020 presidential election are often referred to as “the big lie.” And they are a significant part of Trump’s anti-democratic campaign platform this year.
————-
The Sept 10, 2024, Debate
Trump’s ongoing assertion that he won the 2020 presidential election
Eric Tucker reports for the Associated Press on how in the debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris Trump persisted “in saying he won the 2020 election and he’s taking no responsibility for what unfolded at the Capital on Jan. 6, 2020,” as his supporters stormed the building to block the peaceful transfer of power (https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/trump-repeats-false-claims-2020-election-loss-deflects-113575338).
Tucker writes: “The comments Tuesday night underscored the Republican’s refusal, even four years later, to accept the reality of his defeat and his unwillingness to admit the extent to which his falsehoods about his election loss emboldened the mob that rushed the Capitol, resulting in violent clashes with law enforcement. Trump’s grievances about that election are,” Tucker writes, “central to his 2024 campaign against Democrat Kamala Harris, as he professes allegiance to the rioters.”
Trump maintains that he had “every right” to interfere in 2020 election
Steve Benen addresses this issue in an article for MSNBC, Sept 3, 2024
(https://msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-claims-every-right-to-interfere-2020-election-rcna169323). Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
Benen writes: “About a year after Donald Trump was initially indicted over his efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, special counsel Jack Smith and his team decided it was time for a new superseding indictment related to the same underlying crimes. The move was apparently necessary as a result of a scandalous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that, to a radical degree, elevated the American presidency above the law.”
“Days later,” Benen writes, “Trump blustered ‘that he had every right’ to interfere with the 2020 election, even as two criminal cases involving those allegations hang over him. On Monday, Kamala Harris’ campaign charged that the comments were evidence that Trump believed he was ‘above the law.’
Believes he is above the law
Benen offers the following summary. “Everything Donald Trump has promised on the campaign trail — from ‘terminating’ the Constitution, to imprisoning his political opponents and promising to rule as a dictator on ‘day one’ — makes it clear that he believes he is above the law. Now, Trump is claiming he had ‘every right’ to interfere in the 2020 election.” His public statements substantiate all this.
Trump asserts that he had ‘every right’ to interfere in a presidential election, just days after he was indicted for allegedly trying to interfere in a presidential election, the former president’s rhetoric looked a bit like an ill-timed admission.” Trump has much to admit.
“For example, Benen reports, “Trump admitted that he fired James Comey as the director of the FBI in the hopes of derailing an investigation against him. He confessed that he deliberately misled his own country about the severity of the coronavirus threat. He made provocative comments about his role in the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal. More recently, the GOP candidate made his lawyers’ life more difficult with comments about taking classified documents to his glorified country club.”
Trump falsely says he won the 2020 presidential race.
Eric Tucker has evidence that indicates otherwise. He writes: “In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and there was no widespread fraud, as election officials across the country, including Trump’s then-attorney general, William Barr, have confirmed. Republican governors in Arizona and Georgia, crucial to Biden’s victory, vouched for the integrity of the elections in their states. Nearly all the legal challenges from Trump and his allies were dismissed by judges, including two tossed by the Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-nominated justices.
“An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by Trump found fewer than 475. Biden took Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 electoral votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.”
Trump has no regrets about Jan. 6 insurrection
Tucker’s sources indicate otherwise. “In the ABC debate, Trump was asked twice if he regretted anything he did on Jan. 6, when he told his supporters to march to the Capitol and exhorted them to ‘fight like hell.’ On the Philadelphia stage, Trump first responded by complaining that the questioner had failed to note that he had encouraged the crowd to behave ‘peacefully and patriotically.’
Trump’s incendiary language
“But,” Tucker points out, “he ignored other incendiary language he used throughout the speech…during which he urged the crowd to march to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory. Trump told the crowd: ‘If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.’ That’s after his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, declared: ‘Let’s have trial by combat.’”
Trump delayed calling for rioters to stop
The implication is that Trump had the power to stop the attacks on the Capitol.
“Trump didn’t appeal for the rioters to leave the Capitol until more than three hours after the assault began.” Trump attempts to deflect attention away from his actions. In the debate, Trump “repeated an oft-stated false claim that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., ‘rejected” his offer to send “10,000 National Guard or soldiers’ to the Capitol. Pelosi does not direct the National Guard. As the Capitol came under attack, she and then-Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. called for military assistance, including from the National Guard.” But had no authority to do this and there was no initial response.
Trump praised the rioters
Tucker – “He then [after three hours of mayhem] released a video telling the rioters it was time to ‘go home,’ but added: ‘We love you. You’re very special people.’”
—————
Trump’s present campaign running on “pure contempt”
Chris Lehmann argues this point in an article on The Nation, Aug 28 2024
(https://thenation.com/article/politics/trump-arlington-cemetary-scandal). Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).
“Tuesday’s political news cycle [August 27, 2024] delivered a crash course in the fundamental outlook of the Trumpified Republican Party, via a pair of stories conveying the deep, reflexive contempt that Donald Trump has helped spread throughout the party’s upper reaches. This contempt extends not merely to the GOP’s political rivals but also to basic humanity and decency.”
Here are the two examples.
#1 – Trump violates rules governing Arlington National Cemetery
Lehmann reports, “The Trump story came from a report by NPR’s Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman about an ugly and cynical photo-op the Trump campaign staged at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. Trump and his handlers had barged into Section 60 of the cemetery grounds, where recent war fatalities are laid to rest, in order to photograph the candidate at the gravesites of 13 soldiers killed during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The event culminated in a typically tasteless and inapposite shot of Trump giving a smiling thumbs-up at the site—not exactly a study in somber, statesmanlike mourning.
“But, as Lawrence and Bowman reported, the photo-op was not merely an exercise in bad taste. Trump and his entourage had callously violated the cemetery’s strictures against using the graves of soldiers as a political backdrop, along with its policy against having anyone other than Arlington staff members take official photos there. And Trump staffers had profanely insulted the cemetery official trying to prevent the photo-op from happening, with some sort of altercation ensuing. ‘Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” the cemetery said in a statement to NPR. ‘Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants.’ The statement also confirmed that ‘there was an incident, and a report was filed.’
#2 – Trump’s bizarre vice-presidential choice
JD on childless women
On Tuesday, the Harris campaign posted a recording of a 2021 Vance speech to the Christian Virtue leadership forum. In it, Vance launches into still another detour into his bizarre natalist obsession with childless women. Where he’d elsewhere dismissed people without kids as free riders on the sociobiological social contract—lacking enough ‘skin in the game’ to be entrusted with serious grown-up responsibility—here he lays into the subgroup of childless women teachers.
Lehmann quotes Vance. “‘Our conservative idea is that a parent and a family should determine what ideas children learn and are brought up with,” Vance begins, citing a long-standing talking point in right-wing efforts to undermine public education and single-parent, dual-earner, and otherwise nontraditional families. He then supplies an example: ‘So many leaders of the left, and I hate to get so personal about this’ Vance says (spoiler alert: Vance, in fact, does not hate to get personal), ‘but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children. And that really disorients me and that really disturbs me. Randi Weingarten is the head of one of the most powerful teachers’ unions in the country. She doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.’”
The disturbing point. “Bottom of FormIt’s also worth stressing,” Lehmann writes, “that the logic of Vance’s remarks show that he’s not opposed to ‘brainwashing’ America’s children on principle; instead, he favors letting right-wing parents do the relevant indoctrination.”
Vance accepts the extremist Republican 2025 document
“Vance candidly aired his reasoning in a podcast interview recorded just days ahead of his appearance at the Christian Virtue leadership forum. There he called for the right’s ideological seizure of the civil service, declaring, ‘We need a de-Ba’athification program in the U.S.… We should seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire…every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our own people.’ In other words, Vance’s real grudge against Weingarten isn’t that she’s warping the minds of children; it’s that she’s not warping their minds in the way he prescribes—and the way that he wants all public servants to emulate on pain of ideological dismissal. It’s the same crass and instrumentalist vision that the Trump campaign has of dead soldiers—as designated movement props, rather than human beings with moral agency of their own. And just as Trump reportedly views dead soldiers as ‘suckers and losers,’ so does Vance regard education, and governance more broadly, as a rigid process of developing kids into ideological ventriloquist dummies for the natalist right. disqualifications for both members of the GOP presidential ticket. But in today’s hopelessly deranged political discourse, it was just another Tuesday.”
————
The majority of Americans believe that if re-elected Trump will move on his authoritarian/fascist threats
Chris Walker reports Aug 30, 2024 on a poll that finds two-thirds of Americans think Trump won’t accept 2024 election outcome (https://truthout.org/articles/poll-two-thirds-of-americans-think-trump-wont-accept-2024-election-outcome).
Walker based his reporting on The ABC News/Ipsos poll, which asked respondents to predict “whether the two major candidates for president would themselves be accepting of the outcome — 68 percent said the Democratic candidate for president and current Vice President Kamala Harris would accept the results, while only 29 percent said they believe Trump would. Two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) said they believe Trump won’t be prepared to accept the outcome.”
“The poll further asked if voters are confident that the upcoming election will be counted accurately, finding that just 65 percent believe the outcome will be correct, while 34 percent stated that they lack confidence in what the final results will be. Those numbers represent the highest rate of skepticism that the election will be counted accurately since the poll started asking the question in 2004.”
Walker continues. “Indeed, 21 percent of Trump supporters (accounting for 8 percent of voters overall) say they are not prepared to accept the 2024 election results.”
“The poll suggests that, should Trump legitimately lose the 2024 presidential race to Harris, a large portion of voters, close to 1 in 12 casting a ballot, will not accept the outcome.”
Much like he did in 2020, Walker sees how Trump is laying the groundwork to dispute the 2024 presidential election. At the same time, “Trump has not provided any sound or rational basis for why the election should be viewed skeptically, repeating many of the same debunked talking points he peddled to his supporters nearly four years ago when he lost to President Joe Biden.”
Walker adds: “During the Republican National Convention this summer, Trump continued to claim that the previous election was ‘rigged’ against him — a statement that has no basis in truth whatsoever.” Then after weeks of peddling this lie, “Trump held a rally in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. There, he encouraged his enraged supporters to go to the Capitol directly, to protest in person as Congress was certifying Trump’s Electoral College loss to Biden. Before sending them off,’ and that they couldn’t ‘take back our country with weakness.’”
Thousands of Trump followers went on to storm the Capitol grounds, violently entering the building and disrupting the proceedings inside. “Dozens of Capitol Police and other law enforcement were injured by Trump’s mob of loyalists. At least seven individuals died in connection to that day’s events.”
————–
Building a right-wing army of militia to destroy US democracy
Bob Dreyfuss delves into this issue in an article for The Nation on Sept 5, 2024
(https://thenation.com/article/society/donald-trump-squadristi-nazies). Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an independent investigative journalist who specializes in politics and national security.
Dreyfuss writes: “Trump, of course, has a long history of supporting and encouraging potentially violent supporters. In 2016, during his first campaign, he suggested that ‘the Second Amendment people’—i.e., his gun-owning backers—might be able to stop the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court choices. In 2019, he said, ‘I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.’ And in 2020 Trump famously told the Proud Boys militia to ‘stand down and stand by.’ Ultimately, the Proud Boys would help lead the January 6 insurrection.”
There is a pattern. Dreyfuss reports, “Certainly, Trump has summoned US militias and other extremists to his cause. In 2020, for instance, at the height of nationwide protests against lockdowns, mask requirements, and school closures at the start of the coronavirus crisis, Trump issued a series of viral tweets urging his followers to ‘liberate’ Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, where armed adherents were mobilizing in street demonstrations. For instance, on April 17, 2020, Trump tweeted—characteristically, in all caps—’LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ Soon afterwards, gun-toting Trump supporters invaded the state capitol in Lansing. Most egregiously, he called on supporters to gather in Washington on January 5-6, 2021—’Be there, will be wild’—for a rally that ended in the occupation of the Capitol and led to Trump’s impeachment.”
Trump has an armed and cult-like following that seems prepared to take up arms on his behalf. This is in a context in which the nation is bitterly divided “in which a substantial portion of the populace believes that violence may be necessary.
“According to a survey by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security & Threats, as many as 14 percent of Americans say that violence is justified to ‘achieve political goals that I support,’ and 4.4 percent—that’s more than 11 million US adults—agree that ‘the use of force is justified to return Donald Trump to the presidency.’”
Dreyfuss considers whether there are parallels between “…the Nazi Brownshirts, called the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Storm Division… first, established by Hitler as a kind of bodyguard formation to protect Hitler’s speeches in beer halls. It drew its recruits from a pool of German rightists called the Freikorps (Free Corps), a 400,000-strong, ultra-violent paramilitary militia that engaged in mass killing of socialists and communists in the immediate aftermath of World War I.”
Are the militias and Trump’s followers who believe in the power of insurrection a growing American SA? The evidence says they are. Dreyfuss gives the following examples.
“During and after Trump’s presidency, gun-toting protesters occupied several state capitols, organized militias at the US-Mexican border to combat what Trump called an ‘invasion,’ mobilized militia-like formations to engage in street fights with antifa and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd, and created self-defined protection units to defend business owners who opposed pandemic-imposed lockdowns and closures.”
The U.S. has encumbered by a wild west gun culture. Dreyfuss gives these additional examples.
“The armed occupation of the Michigan state capitol in 2020 was carried out by the Michigan Liberty Militia, the Michigan Proud Boys, and others, carrying semiautomatic assault rifles (Two men arrested in that action were later charged in a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.) Only 13 states have elected to regulate or restrict open carrying of weapons, making it difficult or impossible to prevent armed demonstrators from intimidating opponents. Similar armed rallies, focused on militant opposition to Covid-19 restrictions, were also held inside statehouses in Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Wisconsin, and armed demonstrations erupted in the streets of Salt Lake City, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Dallas, according to a compilation by Everytown for Gun Safety. And in January 2020, the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), a militant pro-gun group, led a massive, armed march and rally in Richmond, Virginia, to protest gun safety legislation, in concert with militias and the boogaloo movement. “We welcome our militia brothers and sisters,” said the VCDL. According to the Everytown report, “Militia groups descended on Richmond [and] organized a conference the day before, titled ‘The State of the Militia’ at which various militia leaders spoke, including those who had helped plan the [Unite the Right] event in Charlottesville.”
The US militia movement survives, as it consolidates its membership at the local and regional levels, while ‘still engaged in equipping their followers in tactical gear and training in the woods,’ Travis McAdam, senior researcher for the SPLC, told The Nation. The SPLC currently tracks 51 organized militias, part of what it describes as ‘more than 1,500 hard-right extremist groups operating across the country.’” Additionally, there are recent attempts “to create a national militia under the name National American Patriot and Liberty Militia (NAPALM) and its parallel name, the National Constitutional Militia. It’s being organized by Jake Lang, currently in jail on charges of assaulting law enforcement officers with a baseball bat on January 6, along with a host of extremists and white nationalists.”
It is also worrisome “that conservative elected officials, sheriffs, and Republican Party offices are tacitly, and sometimes even explicitly, cooperating with, encouraging and supporting militia groups. The membrane that has long separated the state and local governments from nongovernmental and private ultra-right actors, including violence-prone ones, is becoming increasingly porous.”
Dreyfuss continues. “‘It would be foolish to underestimate the power of Trump’s comments to call rogue militias to action,’ wrote Mary McCord, in essay for Lawfare five years ago. ‘The militia movement has shown that it will take action based on the president’s statements.’” Dreyfuss quotes McCord. ‘If he doesn’t win, he’s been planting the seeds of a false narrative that people with AR-15s are listening to,’ she says. ‘A lot of what happens is up to Trump and what words he uses, and to what extent does he call people to engage in violence.’”
McCord also points out
‘that despite the Second Amendment, which refers to a “well-regulated militia,’ militias and militia-like organizations are illegal in all 50 states. In the landmark 2008 Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court supported the most conservative interpretation of the Second Amendment and gun ownership, Justice Antonin Scalia also wrote that that amendment ‘does not prevent the prohibition of private paramilitary groups.’ Yet, says McCord, laws against militias are never enforced, partly because local officials misinterpret the law, partly because militias thinly disguise their activities, and partly because many local law enforcement agencies are broadly sympathetic.” The NRA is also a powerful right-wing force against gun restrictions of any kind.
Back to Dreyfuss: “Not surprisingly, in 2024 the NRA has given Trump its endorsement. Of course, after a decade of controversy, financial troubles, and high-profile lawsuits against it, the NRA has lost a significant about of its clout. Still, the organization, once topping 6 million members, can still boast of 4.2 million, and will spend millions of dollars in the 2024 election. On February 9, Trump appeared at the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, telling the crowd, ‘They are coming to get your guns,’ and announcing the creation of Gun Owners for Trump. And on May 18, Trump traveled to the NRA’s annual convention in Dallas, Texas, where he predicted ‘death and destruction like never before’ if he isn’t elected in November.”
Concluding thoughts
There is still little doubt that Trump dominates the Republican Party, enjoys the support of a large number of the rich and powerful organizations, and has a loyal, cult-like base of tens of millions of grassroots supporters, along with a multifaceted militia movement and other supporters who are well armed. The country may be able to avoid authoritarianism/fascism if the Democrats can rally voters for Kamala Harris and Jim Walz and not be defeated by the Electoral College or the Republican efforts to reduce opportunities for Democratic voters.
Suggested further reading
David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy (2023)
John Rennie Short, Insurrection: What the January 6 Assault on the Capitol Reveals about America and Democracy (2024)
Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church (2023)
Steve Benen, Ministry of Truth
Democracy, Realty, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past (2024)
Vital issues - challenging pol and econ power 