Tag Archives: 2020 Election

What a Fool or Creep Believes

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Back when there was a plague upon the nation (not the plague caused by the virus), the question whether the president was lying or merely mistaken was often discussed. Reputable journalists at reality-based news organizations didn’t want to say he was lying (30,000 times in four years) since maybe he believed all the nonsense he said. So, perhaps he wasn’t lying. It felt safer, less judgmental, to say he was merely saying things that weren’t true (30,000 times).

A very good reason to think he was lying his big boy pants off was that every “falsehood” he shared with us was self-serving. People who are merely confused occasionally say something that doesn’t make themselves look good. Not our former president. He never wavered from his fundamental message: “I’m a winner, not a loser”. He never deviated from the con man’s creed: “Never give a sucker (i.e. the rest of us) an even break”.

As the January 6th committee reviews the evidence, similar questions about this person’s state of mind are being asked. Did he really believe he won the election? Did he really intend to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes?

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo argues that trying to figure out what the creep believed is a waste of time:

For T____, there is just what he wants. He “believes” whatever will get him what he wants.

Does he somehow convince himself of this? Like some kind of willed delusion? Stop it. You’re sticking too much to your linear way of thinking about belief. He hasn’t “convinced” himself. Why would he need to and what would that mean? He just says whatever will get him what he wants. Full stop….

Trump doesn’t “believe” anything.

… It cannot be the case that someone can evade legal culpability for a crime by consistently claiming not to know things that are obviously true, that everyone around him says are true, that he has no basis for disbelieving…. Otherwise, it’s a “get out of jail free” card for literally any crime. Just say consistently that you believe Mr. X threatened your life and you’re entitled to murder him without any legal consequences.

As we know from actual trials, you can’t just “believe” anything…. Your belief has to be reasonable….

We don’t need to go down the rabbit hole of the inner workings of [his] mind. That’s his problem. Not ours. As long as we do, we’re chasing a figment where there is only one possible witness: him. That’s silly.

The mob boss who says he’s never been a member of the mob isn’t confused. He’s lying because he doesn’t want to go to prison. That’s obvious. Just as this case is obvious.

One correction I’d make: not “everyone around him” was saying he lost. Rudy Giuliani and other sleazeballs were telling him the opposite. I hope that doesn’t make any difference when he’s prosecuted.

If you want more on this topic, two well-known lawyers who’ve worked for the government wrote an article for Salon about T____’s “criminal intent”:

As apologists prepare to defend his conduct, it is important to realize how shallow their defense will be. It is laughable to suggest that T____ genuinely believed he had won the 2020 election. We already know that experts and advisers told him the election results were legitimate. He heard this from his campaign advisers, Department of Justice lawyers, high-level officials in his own Department of Homeland Security and Republican elected officials [and at least 60 judges!]. T____ knew he had lost a free and fair election, but he wanted to remain in power anyway….

The committee’s work will be helpful, providing key evidence about … what T____ and others were saying and doing in public and what they were admitting in private.

[There is also] a foundation for showing T____’s corrupt intent: his long-established pattern of crying “fraud” to undermine results he didn’t like.

After T____ lost the 2016 Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz, he cried fraud and demanded a do-over. He did the same thing in the general election after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, despite winning the Electoral College… Throughout 2020, he made a series of statements along these lines … showing that even before the first vote was cast, he had no intention of accepting election results he didn’t like….

Even if T____ could somehow convince prosecutors and a jury that he really believed he had won — despite all the evidence to the contrary —  that would not have permitted him to use dishonest means to stay in power. His legal adviser, John Eastman, made clear that the scheme he and T____ tried to execute to keep T____ in power required breaking the law. You can’t keep power illegally even if you believe you really won an election. But prosecutors won’t need to reach this point, since the evidence is so strong that T____ and those around him knew he lost.

Their Plan to Steal the 2024 Election (While Simply Following the “Law”)

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J. Michael Luttig, a conservative appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was a US Court of Appeals judge for 15 years. He advised Mike Pence on January 6. Here he explains the Republican plan to “legally” steal the next presidential election. From CNN:

Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about.

Fewer still understand why former President T____ and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the “stolen” election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen.

January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual voting fraud. It was always and only about an election that T____ lost fair and square, under legislatively promulgated election rules in a handful of swing states that he and other Republicans contend were unlawfully changed by state election officials and state courts to expand the right and opportunity to vote, largely in response to the Covid pandemic.

The Republicans’ mystifying claim to this day that T____ did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious objective.

That objective is not somehow to rescind the 2020 election, as they would have us believe. That’s constitutionally impossible. T____’s and the Republicans’ far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if T____ or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest.

The last presidential election was a dry run for the next.

From long before Election Day 2020, T____ and Republicans planned to overturn the presidential election by exploiting the Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, the Electoral College, the Electoral Count Act of 1877, and the 12th Amendment, if T____ lost the popular and Electoral College vote.

The cornerstone of the plan was to have the Supreme Court embrace the little known “independent state legislature” doctrine, which, in turn, would pave the way for exploitation of the Electoral College process and the Electoral Count Act, and finally for Vice President Mike Pence to reject enough swing state electoral votes to overturn the election using Pence’s ceremonial power under the 12th Amendment and award the presidency to T____.

The independent state legislature doctrine says that, under the Elections and the Electors Clauses of the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary [i.e. absolute] and exclusive power over the conduct of federal presidential elections and the selection of state presidential electors. Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under this theory.

The Supreme Court has never decided whether to embrace the independent state legislature doctrine. But then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in separate concurring opinions said they would embrace that doctrine in Bush v. Gore, 20 years earlier, and Republicans had every reason to believe there were at least five votes on the Supreme Court for the doctrine in November 2020, with Amy Coney Barrett having just been confirmed in the eleventh hour before the election.

T____ and the Republicans began executing this first stage of their plan months before November 3, by challenging as violative of the independent state legislature doctrine election rules relating to early- and late-voting, extensions of voting days and times, mail-in ballots, and other election law changes that Republicans contended had been unlawfully altered by state officials and state courts in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan.

These cases eventually wound their way to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2020, and by December, the Supreme Court had decided all of these cases, but only by orders, either disallowing federal court intervention to change an election rule that had been promulgated by a state legislature, allowing legislatively promulgated rules to be changed by state officials and state courts, or deadlocking 4-4, because Justice Barrett was not sworn in until after those cases were briefed and ready for decision by the Court. In none of these cases did the Supreme Court decide the all-important independent state legislature doctrine.

Thwarted by the Supreme Court’s indecision on that doctrine, T____ and the Republicans turned their efforts to the second stage of their plan, exploitation of the Electoral College and the Electoral Count Act.

The Electoral College is the process by which Americans choose their presidents, a process that can lead to the election as president of a candidate who does not receive a majority of votes cast by the American voters. Republicans have grown increasingly wary of the Electoral College with the new census and political demographics of the nation’s shifting population.

The Electoral Count Act empowers Congress to decide the presidency in a host of circumstances where Congress determines that state electoral votes were not “regularly given” by electors who were “lawfully certified,” terms that are undefined and ambiguous. In this second stage of the plan, the Republicans needed to generate state-certified alternative slates of electors from swing states where Biden won the popular vote who would cast their electoral votes for T____ instead. Congress would then count the votes of these alternative electoral slates on January 6, rather than the votes of the certified electoral slates for Biden, and T____ would be declared the reelected president.

The Republicans’ plan failed at this stage when they were unable to secure a single legitimate, alternative slate of electors from any state because the various state officials refused to officially certify the T____ slates.

Thwarted by the Supreme Court in the first stage, foiled by their inability to come up with alternative state electoral slates in the second stage, and with time running out, T____ and the Republicans began executing the final option in their plan, which was to scare up illegitimate alternative electoral slates in various swing states to be transmitted to Congress. Whereupon, on January 6, Vice President Pence would count only the votes of the illegitimate electors from the swing states, and not the votes of the legitimate, certified electors that were cast for Biden, and declare T____’s reelection as President of the United States.

The entire house of cards collapsed at noon on January 6, when Pence refused to go along with the ill-conceived plan, correctly concluding that under the 12th Amendment he had no power to reject the votes that had been cast by the duly certified electors or to delay the count to give Republicans even more time to whip up alternative electoral slates.

Pence declared Joe Biden the 46th President of the United States at 3:40 a.m. on Thursday, January 7, roughly 14 hours after rioters stormed the US Capitol, disrupting the Joint Session and preventing Congress from counting the Electoral College votes for president until late that night and into the following day, after the statutorily designated day for counting those votes.

T____ and his allies and supporters in Congress and the states began readying their failed 2020 plan to overturn the 2024 presidential election later that very same day and they have been unabashedly readying that plan ever since, in plain view to the American public. Today, they are already a long way toward recapturing the White House in 2024, whether T____ or another Republican candidate wins the election or not.

T____ and Republicans are preparing to return to the Supreme Court, where this time they will likely win the independent state legislature doctrine, now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Court and ready to vote. Barrett has not addressed the issue, but this turns on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and Barrett is firmly aligned on that method of constitutional interpretation with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, all three of whom have written that they believe the doctrine is correct.

Only last month, in a case from North Carolina the Court declined to hear, Moore v. Harper, four Justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) said that the independent state legislature question is of exceptional importance to our national elections, the issue will continue to recur and the Court should decide the issue sooner rather than later before the next presidential election. This case involved congressional redistricting, but the independent state legislature doctrine is as applicable to redistricting as it is to presidential elections.

The Republicans are also in the throes of electing T____-endorsed candidates to state legislative offices in key swing states, installing into office their favored state election officials who deny that Biden won the 2020 election, such as secretaries of state, electing sympathetic state court judges onto the state benches and grooming their preferred potential electors for ultimate selection by the party, all so they will be positioned to generate and transmit alternative electoral slates to Congress, if need be.

Finally, they are furiously politicking to elect T____ supporters to the Senate and House, so they can overturn the election in Congress, as a last resort.

Forewarned is to be forearmed.

T____ and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine (thus allowing state court enforcement of state constitutional limitations on legislatively enacted election rules and elector appointments) and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.

Although the Vice President will be a Democrat in 2024, both parties also need to enact federal legislation that expressly limits the vice president’s power to be coextensive with the power accorded the vice president in the 12th Amendment and confirm that it is largely ceremonial, as Pence construed it to be on January 6.

Vice President Kamala Harris would preside over the Joint Session in 2024. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have any idea who will be presiding after that, however. Thus, both parties have the incentive to clarify the vice president’s ceremonial role now.

As it stands today, T____, or his anointed successor, and the Republicans are poised, in their word, to “steal” from Democrats the presidential election in 2024 that they falsely claim the Democrats stole from them in 2020. But there is a difference between the falsely claimed “stolen” election of 2020 and what would be the stolen election of 2024. Unlike the Democrats’ theft claimed by Republicans, the Republicans’ theft would be in open defiance of the popular vote and thus the will of the American people . . .

Unquote.

Millions of Americans chose a monstrosity to lead us. Millions would have him lead us again. They must never be forgiven.

When Do We All Get To Say They’re Fascists?

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From The New York Times:

The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of D____  T____ in spreading the election lies that fueled it. . . . 

From the resolution unanimously adopted by the Resolutions Committee at the Republican Party’s winter convention:

WHEREAS, Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger have engaged in actions in their positions as members of the January 6th Select Committee not befitting Republican members of Congress . .

WHEREAS , Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse . . .

RESOLVED, That the Republican National Committee hereby formally censures Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and shall immediately cease any and all support of them as members of  the Republican Party for their behavior which has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic . . . 

From The Times again:

It was the latest and most forceful effort by the Republican Party to minimize what happened and the broader attempt by [the former president] and his allies to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. In approving it and opting to punish two of its own, Republicans seemed to embrace a position that many of them have only hinted at: that the assault and the actions that preceded it were acceptable. 

It came days after [he] suggested that, if re-elected in 2024, he would consider pardons for those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack and for the first time described his goal as aiming to “overturn” the election results. . . . 

The censure  was carefully negotiated in private among party members . . . 

In response:

Then there’s this from Vanity Fair:

Over the last several years, there have been many opportunities to throw around terms like “fascist“ and “fascism,” typically in the context of the Republican Party and the wannabe dictator to whom many of its members have pledged their undying loyalty. In response, said Republicans have frequently gotten bent out of shape about such terms . . .  And yet . . . 

Per Insider:

Amid the [Republican Party’s] nationwide push against teaching about race and sexuality in schools, two members of the Spotsylvania County School Board in Virginia advocated for burning certain books, according to the Fredericksburg-based Free Lance-Star newspaper. This came as the school board directed staff to begin removing “sexually explicit” books from library shelves, after voting 6-0 in favor of the removal, the Lance-Star reported. The board has plans to review how certain books or materials are defined as “objectionable,” the paper said, which opens the door for other content to be removed. 

Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg both championed burning the books that have been removed . . . 

Incendiary, Dangerous – Part 2

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Quoting Paul Waldman of The Washington Post:

If and when D____ T____ runs for president in 2024, his will be a campaign devoted to revenge. Take all the ugliness, the anger, the race-baiting, the hate-mongering and the fetishization of violence that characterized his prior campaigns, and multiply them tenfold. That’s what’s in store for all of us.

T____’s revanchist [i.e. retaliatory] campaign will have many targets, but his greatest enemies are democracy and the rule of law itself. He made that clear this past weekend, when he took a new step in his long campaign to turn the horrific Jan. 6 insurrection into a story in which he and his supporters are the real victims.

T____ has been unwavering in justifying the insurrection and defending those who carried it out, beginning while the violence was still in progress. “We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said in a short video issued that day while the rioters were still rampaging, telling them, “We love you, you’re very special.”

But at a rally in Texas on Saturday, he went further than he has before.

“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” he said. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

The practical implications of this pledge for the insurrectionists themselves may be small; nearly all are likely to have completed their sentences by the time Trump would take office in 2025. But the symbolic importance is enormous.

No president in history used his pardon power in as corrupt a fashion as T____. Early on, he dangled the possibility of pardons as a message to those who helped him commit his misdeeds: Stay loyal to me, and I will make sure you are not punished for your crimes. And he followed through, pardoning a rogues’ gallery of former aides: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Stephen K. Bannon and Michael Flynn, among others.

But now, T____ is not just speaking to those who work for him; he’s talking to the whole population of his supporters, millions strong. If you commit crimes in my service, he says — even violent crimes, even insurrection against the government of the United States — I will protect you. Do your worst.

He also lashed out at prosecutors examining his financial shenanigans and his efforts to pressure officials into overturning the results of the 2020 election:

If these radical, vicious, racist [i.e. black] prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt.

This isn’t an explicit call to mob violence, but combined with his celebration of the mob violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and his promise to pardon those who carried it out, the implication is clear: The appropriate response to the operation of the American legal system, if it doesn’t produce the outcomes you want, is to threaten it in the same way the electoral system was threatened a year ago.

Trump’s statements were so alarming that even some Republicans objected to them. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said, “I think it is inappropriate. I don’t want to reinforce that defiling the Capitol was okay,” while New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu denounced the idea of pardons. And a handful of more reasonable Republican governors are willing to say that T____ shouldn’t be their party’s leader, because it will lead to more defeat.

But if there’s an internal conflict in the GOP over T____, he’s going to win it and his critics are going to lose.

You can point to some polls showing declines in T____’s popularity among the large universe of Republicans. But his GOP critics won’t coalesce into coherent resistance. Most Republican officeholders represent conservative states and districts where his supporters dominate, so they can’t be too critical of him. Those who are have no national constituency; there is no organized movement behind, say, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan.

So no Republican would beat him in a presidential primary. And if he is their nominee, what will happen? Once again, nearly every Republican will say, “I don’t agree with everything he says, but since the alternative is Democrats being in power, I’m behind him.”

Which will mean indulging T____’s increasingly violent rhetoric and promises to abuse power and undermine the rule of law.

From now through 2024, T____ will steadily ratchet up his threats of lawlessness from both inside and outside the government he seeks to lead. And his fans will thrill to every moment of it. Just as in 2016 he told them to abandon civility and relish giving offense, in 2024 he will give them new permission to edge toward violence.

The difference between then and now is that the 2016 version of T____ felt that adherence to laws and norms — paying your taxes, obeying labor laws, telling the truth on loan applications — was for suckers, losers, people who didn’t have his ability to get what they want from the system.

But today, the system isn’t merely something he wants to circumvent and manipulate, it’s his enemy. It validates his election loss, it prosecutes him and his business, it resists him at every turn. And he wants revenge, both by winning in 2024 — with the help of a cadre of candidates who are all but promising to steal future elections on his behalf — and with a new presidential term that will make the previous one look upstanding and honorable.

T____’s malignant presidency ended with an attack on both the Capitol and the American system of government. If he gets another chance, do you doubt he’ll bring even worse?

His threats are not just talk. They’re a terrifying preview of what’s to come, and we’d better pay attention.

“One of the Most Incendiary, Dangerous Speeches in America’s 246-Year History”

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Quoting Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer:

For a nation that’s awakened every morning for nearly two years to a Groundhog Day of pandemic and paranoia, the scenes from D____ T____’s latest comeback rally on Saturday at a fairground in the East Texas flatlands of Conroe could certainly numb the American mind with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

The mile-long line of T____ fanatics, braving the January prairie chill to see the twice-impeached ex-president and passing rows of vendors, including the occasional Confederate flag. Then the viral clips of the true believers — the woman in her T____ 2024 hat expounding that the “Joe Biden” currently in the White House is fake and that the real one was assassinated at Gitmo in March 2019, another woman peddling a book containing all of T____’s tweets before he was banned from Twitter, and the guy peddling doses of the quack COVID-19 cure Ivermectin while lashing out at anyone wearing a mask for trying to “save Grandma.”

. . . Over at the zealously pro-T____ One America News Network, or OANN, analysts awaited the 45th president as their antidote to what they called “the divisiveness” of President Biden’s first year, insisting in the words of Liz Harrington that “T____ will unite us.” But more mainstream outlets like CNN were busy obsessing on the possible retirement of football’s Tom Brady, having decided — wisely — after Jan. 6 not to cover T____’s words live but to only revisit his rallies if he actually makes any news.

In fact, the man who’d occupied the White House little more than one year ago delivered one of the most incendiary and most dangerous speeches in America’s 246-year history. It included an appeal for all-out mayhem in the streets to thwart the U.S. justice system and prevent T____ from going to jail, as the vise tightens from overlapping criminal probes in multiple jurisdictions. And it also featured a stunning campaign promise — that T____ would look to abuse the power of the presidency to pardon those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

It’s impossible for me to understate or downplay the importance of this moment, and I hope that my colleagues in the media — who too often over the last year have craved or even pretended about a return to the politics of “normal,” when we are nowhere near normal — will wake up and see this. Of course, Biden’s presidency deserves our full scrutiny, with praise for what’s gone right (an economic boom) and criticism for what’s gone wrong (broken promises on climate and student debt). But while Biden is seeking to restore democratic norms, a shadow ex-president — unpunished so far for his role in an attempted coup on Jan. 6 — is rebuilding a cult-like movement in the heartland of America, with all the personal grievance and appeals to Brownshirts-style violence that marked the lowest moments of the 20th century. On the 89th anniversary of the date (Jan. 30, 1933) that Adolf Hitler — rehabilitated after his attempted coup — assumed power in Germany, are we repeating the past’s mistakes of complacency and underestimation?

Amid the predictable reiterations of the Big Lie that Biden’s legitimate 2020 election was stolen and his other narcissistic blather, T____’s lengthy speech in Conroe contained three elements that marked a dangerous escalation of his post-presidential, post-Jan. 6 rhetoric. Let’s digest and analyze each of them:

— For the first time, T____ — if somehow elected again in 2024 and upon returning to the White House in January 2025 — dangled pardons before people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he told the rally, adding: “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” The statement raises as many questions as it answers — for example, was he including many or all of the more than 700 mostly low-level insurrectionists, or sending a message to his higher-up friends like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows and others who could be subject to criminal probes?

But two things are clear. The first is that T____ — facing probes over Jan. 6 in Georgia and possibly from the U.S. Justice Department — is committing a form of obstruction of justice in full public view, since the future possibility of a pardon offers an incentive to stay on the ex-president’s good side and not testify against him. The other is that abusing the constitutional power of a presidential pardon — intended by the framers for grace and true clemency — to clear the jails of his political allies is banana republic-type stuff, the ultimate rock bottom made inevitable when T____ was allowed to abuse his pardon powers while in office 2017-21.

— In a sign that T____ is increasingly worried about the overlapping probes — the remarkable evidence uncovered by the House Jan. 6 Committee that will likely be referred to the Justice Department, the Fulton County grand jury investigation into Georgia election tampering, and the unrelated probe into dodgy T____ family finances in New York, he explicitly called for mob action if charges are lodged in any of these jurisdictions. Said T____: “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had . . . in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

Of course, the last time that T____ used his megaphone to summon a large crowd (”Will be wild!” he famously tweeted) was last Jan. 6, and we all remember how that “protest” turned out. Experts call T____’s practices here “stochastic terrorism” — broad statements in the media that are meant to stoke spontaneous acts of violence, in this case to intimidate the prosecutors or even the grand jurors who are weighing charges against T____. While his Jan. 6 exhortations were the prelude to an attempted coup, T____’s incendiary remarks in Conroe sound like a call for a new civil war — naming both the locales and the casus belli.

— But let’s take a step back and drill down on arguably the most important and alarming word in T____’s statement: “Racist.” At first blush, it seems to come out of left field, in the sense of what could be racist about looking into a white man’s role in an attempted coup or his cooked financial books? Except that it happens that three of the key prosecutors investigating T____ — the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and new Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg — as well as the chair of the House committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, are all Black.

Thus, it’s both alarming and yet utterly predictable that T____ would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president’s cult. In tying skin color into his call for mobs in Atlanta or New York, T____ is seeking to start a race war — no different, really, from Dylann Roof. Roof used a .45-caliber Glock handgun, while T____ uses a podium and the services of fawning right-wing cable TV networks. Sadly, the latter method could prove more effective.

What happened in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday night was not politics. A politician seeking to regain the White House might craft a narrative around Biden’s struggles with inflation or with COVID-19 and make a case — no matter how absurd, given T____’s failings on the pandemic and elsewhere — that he could do better for the voters. But increasingly T____ is less a politician and more the leader of a politics-adjacent cult. He does not want to make America great again so much as he wants to keep D____ T____ out of prison, and the most narcissistic POTUS of all time is willing to rip the United States in two to make this happen.

T____’s chief weapons are fear and intimidation. To save American democracy, the people tasked with getting to the bottom of a former president’s high crimes and misdemeanors — on Capitol Hill and in those key courthouses — must be ready for the violence that T____ is inciting, and must summon the courage to finish their job. My fear is that T____’s speech in Conroe will live in infamy — but the only reason it happened at all is because we have not held T____ to account for attempting to wreck American democracy on Jan. 6 . . .  not yet. Now, T____ has told us in no uncertain terms how he plans to break the nation this time. We can act forcefully to stop his new insurrection and punish his past crimes — or we can sit back and let the comet of autocracy strike.