The Battle to Save Democracy
Will political violence or the rule of law prevail in America?
In a week punctuated by the brutal assassination of former Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe, and the sudden collapse of Boris Johnson’s troubled premiership in Britain, America’s own battle against political violence and rightwing extremism has come into sharp relief. Midterm elections are fast approaching, and a shift in the balance of power threatens to derail the congressional investigation into Donald Trump’s failed coup d’etat just as it begins to bear fruit.
The clock is ticking down. Tick, tock.
Indeed, the United States is in the midst of an existential struggle to preserve its freedom and humanity against the violent authoritarianism blossoming in Donald Trump’s sectarian Republican Party, which has embraced a dark political vision that is utterly antithetical to a pluralist democracy.
Unlike the Tories in Britain, who finally tired of Boris Johnson’s endless lies and scandals and forced him out, the GOP remains firmly in Trump’s grip, with politicians who are either too cowed or too radicalized to cleanse themselves of the cancer sickening their party, and threatening to unravel the nation itself.
Indeed, the GOP’s authoritarian disease seems only to be getting worse, as Trump lays the groundwork for what would be a third catastrophic bid for the presidency, as a slate of hard right Republicans run for high office on their Big Lie bona fides.
Still, a slate of new polls show that Donald Trump’s support among primary voters within the Republican Party may finally be slipping, in the face of extraordinarily damaging televised congressional hearings into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election; about half of Republicans polled said they preferred a different candidate in 2024.
While Trump’s support appears to be weakening, it isn’t cratering, and he remains the overwhelming favorite in any future primary in the GOP.
Indeed, Donald Trump’s political power is nowhere near collapse.
Politics
Democrats, meanwhile, face considerable political headwinds in the run-up to the midterms, creating a tenuous situation for democracy itself. When only one of two political parties remains committed to democracy, this is the inevitable dilemma.
The Biden administration’s tentative steps to protect America’s battered democracy seem unlikely to stop the onslaught, with a Department of Justice that is for all intents paralyzed, and unwilling to act, amid a fear of being seen as doing Democrats’ political bidding.
With a remarkably unpopular and visibly aging President Biden occupying the White House, pervasive economic doom and gloom infecting the country amid skyrocketing inflation and gas prices, and basic electoral laws of gravity working against Democrats, there is every reason to fear a Republican takeover of the House and possibly the Senate in the midterm elections.
House Republicans remain very much under the spell of Donald Trump, and would presumably be led by a supine Kevin McCarthy, consumed by his own political ambition, indifferent to the fate of the nation.
Republicans would move to smother the congressional investigation into his botched coup, and work to seal Trump’s narrative that the last election was stolen from him in the minds of Republican voters, laying the foundation for another dire constitutional crisis in 2024.
It’s a terrifying prospect.
The 1/6 Committee
In the battle to protect American democracy from the jackals circling it, the January 6 House Select Committee is the sharp end of the spear. This is especially true as the DOJ has been missing in action, at least regarding the leaders of the coup.
Indeed, the 1/6 Committee has finally begun to deliver on its mandate to inform the American people about Donald Trump’s failed putsch, with blockbuster testimony from an eyewitness who observed the former president inside the West Wing before and during the insurrection, and who offered unique insight into his thinking and intentions.
Cassidy Hutchinson was a crucial witness, and one of the very first key Trump staffers to reveal what she knew of the sordid details of Trump’s bid to stay in power despite losing an election.
Hutchinson testified publicly despite threats of violence, witness intimidation tactics emanating from within Trump world, and immense pressure to keep quiet coming from all quarters of the conservative universe. Her brave testimony shook loose the veil of secrecy and silence that has insulated Trump from the most damaging revelations about his behavior, and his failed coup.
Indeed, difficult revelations just keep on coming.
Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, was compelled to testify in the wake of Cassidy Hutchinson’s bombshell testimony, further illustrating the Shakespearean saga of a president’s failed bid to hold on to power in defiance of the American people.
The 1/6 Committee detailed the “unhinged meeting” that took place in the West Wing, between White House lawyers and Sidney Powell, Lt. General Mike Flynn, and Patrick Byrne. It was a heated, profane argument between the president’s official lawyers and “Team Crazy” about efforts to overturn the 2020 election based on nothing more than innuendo, manufactured conspiracy, and lies.
The meeting nearly devolved into violence between Eric Herschmann and Mike Flynn, the disgraced and later pardoned lieutenant general who’s since become a darling of the far right, and is now touring the country in something called the ReAwaken America tour. He was calling on Trump to use the military to seize voting machines, and impose martial law on the United States.
The sheer insanity of his proposals was striking. Flynn appeared to want a military junta led by Donald Trump. White House lawyers duly fought back.
Nevertheless, shortly after this meeting concluded, Donald Trump posted his infamous tweet declaring that it was statistically impossible that he lost the 2020 election, and that there would be a “Big Protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” This protest would coincide with Trump’s parallel efforts to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out the election, and shunting the election into congress, where a Republican majority could then deliver him a victory via constitutional loophole.
It was as brazen as it was illegal, a criminal conspiracy.
Ultimately, Trump called on violent extremists and ordinary political supporters alike to join him at the U.S. Capitol, where he would send them to intimidate Mike Pence into quarterbacking his constitutional coup. His plan failed, but Trump’s supporters went on to ransack the Capitol, terrorize lawmakers, beat and murder police officers, and interrupt the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history.
The 1/6 hearings have produced voluminous evidence regarding Donald Trump’s criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election with violence, and crucially, clarified his intentions surrounding the insurrection he unleashed.
First, he knew he lost the election.
Second, he knew there would be violence on January 6th.
Donald Trump sought to decapitate the Department of Justice, and replace the attorney general with a stooge; he sought to pressure his vice president using the threat of violence; he fabricated fake electoral slates in multiple states.
The plan culminated when he sent his enraged supporters to the Capitol, bloodthirsty, and fueled by his lies, and his exhortation to “fight back.”
This was the coup de grace of his coup d’etat.
The plan was unsuccessful, but not for lack of trying.
Unbelievably, Republican politicians have remained loyal to Trump, rewriting history with yet more lies, and continuing to pander to this malignant presence in American life. The options to deal with this cancer, and protect American democracy, dwindle by the day.
The Department of Justice
The truth is that the 1/6 Committee can only accomplish so much.
They’ve informed the American people about Donald Trump’s brazen plot, and they’ve worked to make Republicans suffer at the ballot box for their sins. They’ve recaptured the narrative from the army of propagandists, liars, and conspiracy theorists from the far right’s internet ecosystem, Alex Jones and 4chan, all the way to Fox News.
They’ve established the truth about what happened for history.
Perhaps most critically, the congressional investigation has provided the evidence necessary for real accountability in the form of high level criminal prosecutions. Apparently, the hearings have already initiated something of a shift at the uppermost echelons of the DOJ, which has ably prosecuted hundreds of the rioters, while all but ignoring the political leaders who instigated the attack.
Still, it’s impossible to ignore what we all now know.
The New York Times reported a significant shift in the conversation taking place at Main Justice, between Merrick Garland and his deputy Lisa Monaco, concerning Donald Trump’s personal criminal culpability. The recent appointment of an aggressive federal prosecutor, Thomas Windom, has further raised hopes of a looming indictment in the most sensitive, high-stakes case in American history.
A recent and much talked about opinion piece, appearing in The New York Times, written by Andrew Weissman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Mueller probe, argues that Merrick Garland’s DOJ is investigating the insurrection all wrong. Weissman argues that the “bottom up” approach currently being used is insufficient, and that the investigation should be modeled on a “hub and spoke” approach.
Instead of working the various lines of evidence from the rioters charged with attacking the Capitol, and seeing where those lines lead, Weissman argues that prosecutors should view the insurrection as only one of several different parts of the same larger criminal conspiracy.
It’s a tantalizing notion.
The DOJ has been caught flatfooted, utterly unprepared for this extraordinary threat facing American democracy. The attorney general has resisted all incoming entreaties to investigate or indict Donald Trump as unwanted political pressure, making an attempt to restore norms at the DOJ that were shredded by the Trump administration.
But in that noble quest to restore some semblance of integrity at Main Justice, where the AG works independently of the White House and the president’s political concerns, Garland’s putting himself into a box, and stifling the investigation into the insurrection.
Whatever Garland’s legitimate concerns about politics, and maintaining the appearance of being removed from politics, the investigation into the insurrection is inherently political. There’s no way around that fact. This was a coup orchestrated from the very top of the American government.
This presents unique challenges, in what is undeniably the most consequential federal investigation in American history.
If the Republican Party had rid themselves of Donald Trump after the insurrection, at his second impeachment, say, or in the years since, the DOJ’s investigation wouldn’t be so utterly essential. But Republicans haven’t abandoned Trump at all. Rather, the GOP remains his loyal plaything.
Thus, the political solution to this political problem has failed to materialize.
The remaining solution, while less elegant, and more problematic, is America’s only real hope at excising this cancer before it grows out of control. That solution, of course, is a criminal indictment of a former president, and a likely future candidate.
The 1/6 Committee has provided the evidence, and the DOJ needs to pick up the ball and run with it, like the life of our democracy depends on it, because it does. Without accountability, American democracy won’t survive.
It’s crunch time for American democracy. What the House Select Committee has done is critical; they’ve gathered all the evidence, and wrapped it up nice and shiny and put a big fat bow on it, a beautiful present for the DOJ to unwrap.
Now it’s the DOJ’s turn. Let’s hope they also see it that way.