“I know your pain. I know your hurt… But you have to go home now… We love you. You’re very special.”
Donald Trump, to the invaders hours after the January 6th attack on the Capitol began
“President Trump won this election, so everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes ... join together and let’s stop this.”
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, days after the 2020 election
"When you talk about insurrection, what they're doing, that's the real deal. That's the real deal. Not patriotically and peacefully — peacefully and patriotically."
Donald Trump
“But let me be clear, there was no insurrection and to call it an insurrection in my opinion, is a bold faced lie. Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol, and walk through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures, you know.”
Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.
"The truth is that this was a riot that should never have happened…It just infuriated me… I remember thinking, you know, 'Not this, not here, not at the United States Capitol.'"
Mike Pence
The only accurate and honest quote above is Mike Pence’s recent statement on CNN. Every other quote is dispelled by the facts as clearly illustrated by the above photographs showing violence, Congresspeople diving behind desks and the chaos in the Capitol Rotunda on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump, the remaining GOP candidates and virtually every Republican member of Congress have attempted to recast the January 6th violence at the Capitol, in which there were serious injuries and resulting deaths, as peaceful and patriotic.
Trump, having been so certain of his nomination as the GOP presidential candidate for 2024, has not appeared at a single GOP primary debate. An actual trial in Colorado, sustained by the Colorado Supreme Court and now pending before the US Supreme Court, reviewed the facts surrounding the Capitol events, heard many witnesses, and concluded that Trump was indeed an “insurrectionist.”
Trump’s recent campaign rhetoric includes words like “dictatorship,” “retribution,” and make frequent references to suspending the Constitution while using the military and various federal agencies to jail his political opponents as he uses his constitutional power to pardon most of the convicted January 6th insurrectionists. Yet, most of the GOP leadership who declared Trump responsible for the Capitol insurrection now endorse his candidacy.
Joe Biden, a chief of state with one of the most solid global economic success stories, showing growth exceeding that of virtually every other developed nation on earth, is either neck-and-neck with Trump or trailing him in every poll I have seen. Despite the rallying economy, where wages finally exceed inflation, and that Trump is not that much younger, Biden suffers from an image as a doddering octogenarian, “repetition credibility” – where false criticism (here, the consistent GOP “terrible economy” mantra) is accepted as truth if repeated enough – and a divisive war in Gaza, pitting younger Democrats (including Jews), in horror at the number of Palestinian fatalities, against older Democrats who support Israel. These issues, and a feeling of unease across the land, pulls too many Americans to ignore what is really at stake: democracy itself.
The threat to democracy is underscored in this January 7th piece by Associated Press writer, Lisa Mascaro: “In the 2023 follow-up to their 2018 bestseller, “How Democracies Die,” Harvard professors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky wrote about three rules that political parties must follow: accept the results of fair elections, reject the use of violence to gain power, and break ties to extremists… In the aftermath of the 2020 election, they wrote in ‘Tyranny of the Minority,’ only one U.S. political party ‘violated all three.’
“Saturday [1/6] marked the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and Donald Trump, the president at the time, is far and away the leading Republican candidate in 2024 polling… He still refuses to acknowledge his loss to Joe Biden. Far from rejecting the Jan. 6 rioters, he has suggested that, if reelected, he would pardon some who have been convicted of violent crimes. Rather than distance himself from extremists, he welcomes them at his rallies and calls them patriots…
“The [GOP] support for Trump highlights the divisions in the aftermath of the deadly storming of the Capitol and frames the question about whose definition of governance will prevail — or if democracy will prevail at all… ‘If our political leaders do not stand up in defense of democracy, our democracy won’t be defended,’ Levitsky told the Associated Press. ‘There’s no country in the world, no country on Earth in history, where the politicians abdicated democracy but the institutions held. People have to defend democracy.’
“The third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack comes during the most convulsive period in U.S. politics in at least a generation, with Congress barely able to keep up with the basics of governing and the start of the presidential nominating contests just over a week away… Trump’s persistent false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — which have been rejected in at least 60 court cases, by every state election certification and by the former president’s onetime attorney general — continue to animate the race as he eyes a rematch with President Biden.
“Meanwhile, Trump faces 91 felony criminal charges in federal and state courts, including the federal indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith that accused him of conspiring to defraud the U.S. over the election… Biden, speaking Friday [1/5] near Pennsylvania’s Valley Forge, recounted the events of Jan. 6, saying, ‘We nearly lost America — lost it all.’” The search for justice and accountability is now labeled a “witch hunt,” and Trump’s followers (most of the GOP) reject the indisputable violence of January 6th as if it never happened.
As rightwing populism rises all over the earth, most genuine democracies fear the possibility of Trump’s reelection not just as a threat to the United States… but “if it could happen there, it just might happen here.” After all, look at how many “democracies” have voted autocrats into power, from Hitler over three quarters of a century ago to Chavez/Maduro in Venezuela, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, Putin in Russia, etc. today. Indeed, on too many occasions, democracies all over the world have repealed democracy!
I’m Peter Dekom, and all the checks and balances embodied in our Constitution were never designed to create guardrails against a vote to repeal democracy itself.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment