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Justice Department delayed probing Trump on coup for over a year
WASHINGTON—It has been proved once again that you can’t trust the FBI to guard the Constitution of the United States. A major investigation by the Washington Post reveals the bureau sat for more than a year on evidence tying former Oval Office occupant Donald Trump to the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S.
www.peoplesworld.org
WASHINGTON—It has been proved once again that you can’t trust the FBI to guard the Constitution of the United States. A major investigation by the Washington Post reveals the bureau sat for more than a year on evidence tying former Oval Office occupant Donald Trump to the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol invasion, insurrection and attempted coup d’etat.
And that’s even though the public evidence, from many sources—including Trump himself—showed the White House denizen, while inhabiting that office, violated the U.S. Constitution.
Evidence of Trump’s involvement and his aim to overthrow the U.S.’s basic charter by stealing the 2020 election, the very crime he charged against his opposition, was staring the Bureau right in the face, courtesy of indictments and convictions of the invaders for seditious treason, the Post reported, along with testimony that Trump motivated them.
The House’s Select Committee’s investigation laid out that evidence for the entire nation to see. The FBI’s leaders disregarded it.
About the only evidence the agency didn’t have, the paper reported, was who paid for the invasion. And several good government groups gathered findings on that, which were investigated and reported early in January 2023 by People’s World.
“More than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation,” the Post reported.
The reasons: “Wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution and clashes over” the sufficiency of evidence against Trump. And slow-moving Democratic President Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, wanted to first “restore public trust” in his department after its politicization under Trump and other past presidents.
Meanwhile “prosecutors below them chafed,” blaming top officials for being too hesitant to investigate, much less indict, Trump and his team, the Post reported.
Never mind that Trump openly urged his heavily armed partisans to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, knowing full well they had weapons—and their intent. Never mind that his consigliere, Rudy Giuliani, was even more explicit about invading in a speech preceding Trump’s. Never mind Trump’s pre-invasion tweeted order to the gathering insurrectionists: “Be there! It will be wild!”
Never mind that after they invaded, Trump condoned the insurrection, sitting in the White House watching the chaos, for two and a half hours, and resisting pleas that he call a halt and order them to disperse. He finally did, praising them and reluctantly telling them to go home.
Instead the DOJ and FBI officials briefing Garland just after the AG took office handed him an 11-page memorandum outlining an investigation plan working from the bottom—the invaders—up. It didn’t mention indicting either Trump, his top staffers, or both.
In just one example of what DOJ has yet to announce an indictment on, Trump and his team openly boasted about sending ballots from what turned out to be “fake electors” voting for Trump from key swing states, including Michigan and Wisconsin, to Congress in time for the early-January ballot count.
But DOJ didn’t give a “go” sign to probe that scheme until April 2022. In another, Giuliani openly lied to Georgia state legislators, in a public session about “election fraud” in the Peach State, when there was none. His law license is suspended, but there’s no indictment yet.
The delay is important. By the time Garland moved last November and appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to lead both the insurrection investigation and the probe into Trump’s illegal theft of top-secret and highly classified papers—including a plan on how to go to war with Iran—from the White House, precious time had been lost for what would be a long, drawn-out legal process in any case.
And Garland’s hand was forced as he had to distance himself from direct oversight of any Trump investigations. Trump had just announced he was seeking the White House, again.
Indicted Trump on 37 counts
Smith indicted Trump on 37 counts of violating the Espionage Act. His other team is still working on the invasion case. And DOJ’s delays in turn have pushed back Fulton County (Atlanta) DA Fani Willis’s potential racketeering indictment of Trump for trying to steal Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020.
The FBI’s and Justice Department’s stalling and delays, as reported by the Post, are in direct contrast with the Bureau’s well-known penchant for fast activism, especially under its tyrannical right-wing former director, J. Edgar Hoover. Such activism included:
“Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize’ the activities of these” civil rights, anti-war and Black Panther “movements and especially their leaders,” a Wikipedia summary says.
- In 1919, without a scintilla of evidence, the FBI, then called the Bureau of Investigation, helped Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, launch infamous raids on thousands of suspected subversives—all of whom were leftists and labor leaders, and Socialists of various stripes. Many were deported, almost all without hearings or trials. Hoover was already in control.
- The FBI repeated its performance, again with little to no evidence, in the Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy era, this time singling out alleged Communists, all with the successful aim of mortally wounding the labor movement. Even a Supreme Court ruling didn’t stop Hoover’s snoops.
- In an attempt to discredit him and disrupt the civil rights movement, the Bureau’s agents tapped Dr. Martin Luther King’s telephone and circulated scurrilous stories about his alleged philandering and left-wing ties.
- Under Republican President Richard Nixon, Hoover launched the COINTELPRO program, basically to counter Nixon’s White House “plumbers”—a group headed by an ex-FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy.
Despite what Hoover said and what legions of right-wingers believed then and still believe today, none of the “threats” whom FBI agents leaped to probe–including the labor leaders, peace activists, the Socialists, the Communists or Clinton–were threats to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. The right-wing’s tactics, including the FBI’s raids, are constitutionally questionable, at best.
- And, of course, then-FBI Director James Comey flip-flopped in a key disclosure of the 2016 election campaign. He publically reopened the bureau’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official e-mails on a private unsecure server. Comey made the announcement with fewer than three weeks to go before the election, damaging Clinton and violating Justice Department policy.
Trump was and is such a threat, as his own statement on his Truth Social platform early last December shows. After all, when he took the oath of office, he swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He sang a different tune six months ago, and acted differently long before that, the Post story summarized:
“We should terminate all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution” to overturn the 2020 election and return him to the Oval Office, Trump declared.
Trump indictment: Pentagon upset over stolen plans for war against Iran
MIAMI—The federal government’s 37-count indictment of former Republican Oval Office occupant Donald Trump—31 of the counts for violating the Espionage Act—is crammed with details of security breaches and other felonies by the one-term White House denizen.
www.peoplesworld.org
MIAMI—The federal government’s 37-count indictment of former Republican Oval Office occupant Donald Trump—31 of the counts for violating the Espionage Act—is crammed with details of security breaches and other felonies by the one-term White House denizen.
One of the items most upsetting to many in Washington is that Trump made out with documents related to the Pentagon’s secret Iran war plan. No indictments have been issued, so far, against anyone at the Pentagon for plotting a war against Iran.
The indictment reveals Trump’s carelessness, his lies to the FBI, his willful hints to others about military secrets, and the conspiracy with his personal valet, Walt Nauta, to deceive federal agents. Nauta faces the same 37 counts, and an extra one for his own role.
Trump is the first former president ever to be indicted for criminal felonies. If convicted, he would face prison for, depending on the count, anywhere from five to 20 years. Trump will be formally booked at 3 pm on Tuesday, June 13, in U.S. District Court in Miami.
The indictment makes clear that the government views Trump as a security risk, even if Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, in charge of the probe, didn’t use those words when releasing the 49-page document.
The charges provide the damning details of how cavalierly Trump spirited confidential and top-secret military documents out of the White House and how he stored the information in the months since, especially once the documents arrived at Mar-A-Lago.
“The classified documents stored in his home included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries, United States nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of both the United States and its allies to military attack and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” a key count summarizes.
A spy in the White House?
The indictment says Trump violated laws, primarily section 793 of the World War I-era Espionage Act, banning discussion and/or disclosure of sensitive defense and military documents to un-authorized people and people without top security clearances.
There are historical ironies in Smith’s extensive use of the Espionage Act. One is its initial purpose. It was passed at the start of World War I to give the government a lever to arrest and try anti-war dissidents.
Socialist Eugene V. Debs, Communist Charles E. Ruthenberg, anarchist Emma Goldman, and many others were imprisoned for supposedly violating the anti-spy law when they made speeches condemning imperialism and military conscription. President Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, cited the Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act to justify his notorious raids and deportations of left-wingers and trade union leaders.
In recent years, it has been deployed in an attempt to silence and punish individuals who received information about U.S. war operations, torture of detainees, illegal surveillance, and more from unnamed sources and published them in the public interest, such as former NSA employee Edward Snowden and Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange.
Now, with the charges against Trump, the law is being used against one of the ruling class’s own.
The plan for war against Iran
Most upsetting to the military brass is the fact that Trump held onto documents related to the Pentagon’s detailed planning for a war with what was first called an “unnamed nation,” since identified as Iran. Trump discussed the Iran war plan with four people, all of whom lacked security clearances.
It was also one of the documents Trump most bragged about stealing.
Trump pulled it from his pocket when talking with four people who lacked security clearances: The ghostwriter and the publisher of a planned book by Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and two Trump staffers. With Trump’s permission, the conversation, at Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, was recorded.
“I have a big pile of papers,” Trump admitted. “This thing just came up…This thing is highly confidential,” he said of the war plan. The ghostwriter replied, “Wow.”
“This is secret, secret information,” Trump continued. “You just attack and…” he broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished, then added: “Isn’t that incredible?”
In the talk with the ghostwriter and publisher, Trump tried to pin the war plan on Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that count says. Milley has not commented on the indictment.
“As president, I could have declassified it,” Trump says of the war plan afterwards, to one of the staffers. The staffer, laughing, replies “Yeah.”
“Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” says Trump. The staffer, still laughing, says, “Now we have a problem.” “Isn’t that interesting?” Trump replies.
Smith’s indictment goes on to say that when the National Archives demanded all the documents and the FBI obtained the subpoena it needed to search Mar-A-Lago, Trump “endeavored to obstruct justice” by claiming he had turned over everything, when he hadn’t.
Trump went even farther, it adds. It says conspirators “suggested Trump Attorney 1,” identified in news reports as Evan Corcoran, “hide or destroy the documents” which the FBI’s subpoena demanded.
Another cover-up charge says Trump lied to the FBI about possession of the documents and encouraged his lawyers to lie, too. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them (the FBI) we don’t have anything here?” Trump asks in one conversation cited in the indictment.
He also ordered his longtime personal aide, Nauta, to move the boxes of documents around Mar-A-Lago before the FBI searched it to keep the papers away from the agents.
Trump also disclosed possession of the documents to other unauthorized people without security clearance, including a top campaign finance committee operative. Showing that operative “a classified map related to a military operation,” Trump warned him “not to get too close.”
Conspiracy
Besides 31 counts of Espionage Act violations, other counts include conspiracy to obstruct justice, refusal to turn over government documents, a cover-up of the document theft, and manipulation of witnesses. Not only did Trump lie to the FBI about the documents, he didn’t tell his Secret Service guards he had them, either.
“The purpose of the conspiracy was to hide and keep them [the documents] from a federal grand jury,” the indictment says.
Trump’s actions with the documents are part of a pattern. While in the White House, he repeatedly scanned classified documents, tore them up into little pieces, and tried to flush them down toilets. The indictment identifies some of the documents he didn’t tear up, such as daily presidential briefing papers from intelligence agencies on U.S. and foreign military strength, including active U.S. military interventions in other nations, and nuclear weapons data. The indictment did not name the nations where active operations occurred.
Some aides, realizing Trump’s destruction of documents broke the law, would retrieve the pieces and try to tape them back together again.
In the chaos of moving out of the White House in January 2021, later White House aides stuffed classified documents into burn bags, unless they were to be trucked away to Mar-A-Lago in cardboard boxes, the indictment says.
Smith’s indictment dryly calls Mar-A-Lago “an active social club” and “not a location for storage…of classified documents.” One storage shed for the boxes had many unlocked doors, including one leading to the estate’s swimming pool. Trump also stored boxes of documents in a Mar-A-Lago bathroom and in a shower.
Plus, there’s the coup
This indictment, of course, is not the end of Trump’s legal troubles. Smith’s other team is still investigating and presenting evidence to a D.C. grand jury about Trump’s order and incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, invasion and attempted coup d’état at the U.S. Capitol.
In other words, Smith indicted Trump for breaking federal espionage laws, and is still probing, and telling the grand jurors, how Trump schemed to trash the U.S. Constitution, too. In that case, Smith’s team also has volumes of evidence available, and the whole country saw and heard much of it, courtesy the House Select Committee that investigated the insurrection in 2021-22.
Fulton County (Atlanta) District Attorney Fani Willis is conducting a separate wide-ranging probe into Trump’s attempt to steal Georgia’s electoral votes after Biden won them in November 2020.
Trump demanded Ga. Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger “find”—manufacture—11,780 popular votes to give Trump a one-popular-vote victory and thus the electoral votes in the key swing state. In the taped 45-minute call, Raffensperger rejected Trump’s demands.
Trump-appointed judge in charge
While Smith’s indictment is loaded with detail, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, named to hear the case, could be a barrier to prosecution. Last year, Cannon, a Trump appointee assessed and approved by the right-wing Federalist Society, threw a temporary monkey wrench into evaluating documents the FBI seized from Mar-A-Lago.
Cannon appointed a special master to decide which documents were relevant and which weren’t. That would have delayed Smith’s investigation for months. Before the master could get started, the Justice Department contested Cannon’s ruling. A three-judge panel of the conservative-dominated federal appeals court in Atlanta overruled her. Two of those judges were Trump appointees, and they said Cannon lacked the authority to appoint a special master. That court will be looking over her shoulder.
Still, Cannon, selected at random from the judicial roster in the district court, will be able to decide on everything from which evidence will be admitted to when the trial actually starts. It could open right in the middle of next year’s general election campaign. Smith said he’ll push for the trial to start as soon as possible.
Republicans line up for Trump
The indictment put top Republicans between a rock—Trump and his millions of sycophantic supporters—and a hard place: the rule of law. Led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and influential Rep. Jim Justice, R-Ohio, most have so far chosen to stick with Trump.
But three GOP presidential hopefuls didn’t: Former V.P. Mike Pence and ex-Govs.
Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey. They’re declaring Trump’s constitutionally unfit to hold high office.
In a June 10 fundraising speech in Atlanta, Trump again proclaimed his innocence, loudly and at length. He called the indictment “a witch-hunt” by Biden, adding it’s “a travesty of justice.” He didn’t answer specific counts in the indictment.
“As far as the joke of an indictment, it’s a horrible thing. It’s a horrible thing for this country,” Trump trumpeted. “I mean, the only good thing about it is it’s driven my poll numbers way up. Can you believe it?” he asked 2,000 disciples.
Trump’s conduct with classified information—even before the National Archives and the FBI seized the stolen documents—prompted Biden to break with tradition block intelligence briefings for his predecessor. Usually, past presidents are always provided with constant updates about major intelligence or security matters.
Why Did the DOJ Resist Investigating Donald Trump’s Role in January 6?
A new Washington Post report suggests the Department of Justice did not want to seem “partisan” by investigating the former president’s attempt to overturn a legitimate election.
newrepublic.com
The Department of Justice waited a year to investigate Donald Trump for his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection, The Washington Post reported Monday.
A new investigation by the Post found that the DOJ resisted looking into Trump or members of his inner circle, even as evidence of an organized scheme to overturn the 2020 election piled up. Instead, newly sworn-in Attorney General Merrick Garland and his team opted for a “bottom-up” strategy, focusing first on the rioters and working their way up. Garland and his team refrained from directly investigating the former president out of fear of looking politically partisan.
Just hours after he was sworn into office, Garland met with acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherman, who along with the FBI was responsible for prosecuting all crimes related to the January 6 attack. Sherman presented their work, which had resulted at the time in charges for nearly 300 rioters, with nearly 900 in total identified.
Sherman had made waves when he said Trump could be considered guilty of the attack, but according to the Post’s investigation, his presentation made no mention of investigating Trump or his advisers. Investigators stayed away from Trump, even as more and more evidence appeared of numerous schemes intended to overturn a legitimate election.
More than a year later, in November 2022, Garland finally appointed special counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and his alleged role in the January 6 attack. The Post attributes this delay to “a wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him.”
Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials, and the deputy FBI director all opposed investigating Trump or his allies directly, arguing it was too early, the Post reported. But Garland then continued with this approach, giving Trump more time to spread lies about the 2020 election.
Trump pleaded not guilty last week to 37 counts of keeping classified information, some of it relating to national security, without authorization, making false statements, and conspiring to obstruct justice. He is still under investigation for his role in January 6 and under a separate investigation for his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.
MAGA Authoritarian Rule or Third Reconstruction?
“An authoritarian bloc with a fascist core is driving for control of all branches of the federal government; the rest is detail.”…
convergencemag.com
This is the third installment of a new column by Convergence Editorial Board member Max Elbaum. “It Is Happening Here” will track the MAGA drive toward one-party rule based on a white Christian Nationalist agenda, and discuss strategies to block it while building independent progressive power along the way.
Thirty years after its publication, The Age of Extremes by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm still stands as the best history of the “short twentieth century (1914-1991).” Every chapter of this pro-socialist “story of a victory from the point of view of the vanquished” holds important lessons for those of us fighting for working-class power. In the U.S. today the chapter on the rise of fascism holds particular relevance.
Hobsbawm makes the crucial point that, for all their boasting about “capturing the street,” neither the Italian nor the German fascist movements “conquered power” via any kind of violent uprising. Rather, they came to power “in constitutional’ fashion.” He adds:
“The novelty of fascism was that, once in power, it refused to play the old political games, and took over completely where it could.”
The savviest operators among those who are now threatening to impose white Christian Nationalist rule on the US learned that history decades ago. They used it to craft a take-and-permanently-hold power strategy adapted to the specifics of the US constitutional system—and their persistent, think-long-term effort has paid off. The authoritarian bloc, now operating under the banner of MAGA, has captured the Republican Party and the Supreme Court, and holds trifectas in 22 states, And they are steadily moving ahead with plans to corner complete federal power in 2024.
This is the underlying political dynamic that we must keep in mind amid the media frenzy over Trump’s indictment and how that might affect the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
MAGA can be stopped if we accurately understand the existence and composition of the country’s anti-MAGA majority and can help catalyze it into action. But that will require opponents of authoritarianism to block the specific routes by which MAGA intends to take power, effectively deploy our energies and resources, and gain enough strength to take the offensive.
Trump or no Trump, MAGA is pressing ahead
The strength of the indictment in the “classified documents” case has produced an uptick in contention over who should be the MAGA standard-bearer in 2024. Worries about over-reach—present since the SCOTUS overturned Roe—have been more frequently expressed. But no significant section of the Republican Party is stepping away from the drive toward authoritarian rule. Not the presidential hopefuls who are “putting some distance” between themselves and Trump (Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott). Not the Senate leaders who have stayed quiet about Trump being indicted (Mitch McConnell). And not two MAGA Supreme Court Justices, who, out of worry at the Court’s loss of legitimacy, calculated that one ruling upholding Black voting rights will allow them to play a more credible role in MAGA’s drive to power.
And certainly not the MAGA base, which post-indictment is even more convinced that white male Christian conservatives are the most persecuted group in the U.S., with millions believing that using violence to change that is fully justified.
Electoral College, gerrymandering, voter suppression
In Italy, fascism came to power constitutionally in 1922 when the King appointed Mussolini Prime Minister. In Germany in 1932, Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. The undemocratic features of the U.S. constitutional/electoral system are different from those of 1920s-‘30s Germany and Italy, so aspiring authoritarians have crafted approaches that take advantage of U.S. specifics.
Key to authoritarian strategies here are the racially biased Electoral College in combination with a federal system that gives significant power to individual states; the winner-take-all-two-party structure; and the failure of the Constitution to protect elections in some significant ways. Absent Constitutional limits on money in elections and safeguards for the principle of “one person, one vote,” gerrymandering, voter suppression and the outsize influence of corporate interests have run amok.
White supremacists took advantage of these features to maintain the Jim Crow system in the South for close to a century. (See especially Sarah Churchwell, American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.) Jim Crow was not dismantled until the 1960s upsurge spearheaded by the Black-led Civil Rights Movement forced passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The mass pressure that drove that victory also compelled both legislative and judicial bodies to curb some of the worst gerrymandering and election money abuses.
But the racist right never accepted these as irreversible steps, just as they never accepted the gains of the New Deal era (trade union rights, social programs), or the extension of social programs (Medicare) and women’s rights (Roe) coming out of the 1960s. They knew that these were not explicitly codified in the U.S. Constitution, and to the extent they were implicit, there was a reading of the Constitution (“originalism”) that could render them unenforceable.
Because of this, changing the rules that govern electoral terrain became a top priority for the instigators of the right-wing backlash that began in the late 1960s and became dominant after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, was the main vehicle for carrying out this strategy. Legal work (establishing a pipeline for right-wing lawyers to become judges; fleshing out originalist theory; filing suits in carefully chosen cases) was synergized with issue campaigns. “Third Party” efforts were rejected in favor of taking over the Republican Party. For a recap of the results of their painstaking, well-funded, and ruthless work (gutting the Voting Rights Act, ruling that challenges to partisan gerrymandering could not be made in federal courts, gutting campaign finance reform, overturning Roe, etc.) see Michael Podhorzer’s article “To the Supreme Court, the 20th Century Was Wrongly Decided.”
Red States preview a MAGA-ruled country
The consequences have been devastating. They can be seen most vividly in numerous “Republican trifecta” states, in both the conditions imposed by new legislation on inhabitants of those states and the arrangements MAGA has put in place to ensure that they remain in power.
In states they control, Republicans have pushed through extreme curbs on abortion; sweeping restrictions on gender affirming medical care for youths; bans or limits on discussion of sexuality, history and/or race/racism in schools, and loosening already tattered gun control and safety measures. Legislation loosening restrictions on child labor is coming out of the shadows in states where right-to-work laws and other anti-worker, anti-poor people policies hold sway.
GOP governors and legislators are simultaneously putting in place measures that undermine majority rule and make successful electoral challenges to their one-party rule very difficult if not impossible. Voter suppression is now business as usual in Republican-controlled states. Gerrymandering districts is giving Republicans a grip on state legislature majorities (or super-majorities) even in states where the electorate is split close to 50-50 (for example, Wisconsin and North Carolina). In Ohio and other states, they’re taking aim at direct democracy by trying to limit the initiative process. And with control over state legislatures, Republicans have moved to silence or reduce the power of elected bodies in cities that include large people of color populations and tend to vote Democratic for example in Mississippi and in Texas.
Essentially the GOP has put in place “authoritarian enclaves” where they can implement their agenda as they pursue the goal of capturing full federal power. And they use the benefits of these enclaves to their advantage in that pursuit – increasing their share of “safe” House seats, suppressing the vote to affect close races for Senate seats or in the contention for that state’s electoral college votes for President. All this will only get worse if the Supreme Court gives them a favorable ruling at some point on the Independent State Legislature Doctrine.
The 2024 election and beyond
All this shapes the terrain on which the Left has to fight through November 2024 and beyond. Three major imperatives stand out.
One, we need to be as clear-eyed as MAGA’s core on the fundamental political dynamic at work in the US today. The specifics of the DeSantis-Trump contention, the terms of House Speaker McCarthy’s revised deal with the Freedom Caucus, and the twists and turns of each legal case against Trump need to be tracked to produce the most effective messaging and “rapid response” actions. But we can’t let these things distract us from the main story: An authoritarian bloc with a fascist core is driving for control of all branches of the federal government; the rest is detail.
Second, if MAGA succeeds, not only will most people in the US and across the globe face more dire conditions, but organizing to change the direction of the country will become qualitatively more difficult. Pushing for the deep structural changes it will take to address inequality, climate change, restrictions on democracy and militarism is difficult under an administration over which the growing but still-fragmented progressive world has some influence. It will be orders of magnitude harder if we are facing a Justice Department that acts as if McCarthyism was too cautious; an administration that lauds “stand your ground” killers and white supremacist militia members as heroes; and a judiciary and NLRB owned and controlled by Charles Koch.
Electoral victory is essential but not sufficient
Third, electoral terrain will be the main battlefront against MAGA at least through 2024. MAGA’s “constitutional” route to permanent minority rule runs through winning or stealing elections. So all candidates of the party MAGA now controls need to be defeated at every level and those results need to be protected. Across the anti-MAGA spectrum different groups and individuals will pursue different types of work and have different priorities between now and 2024. But some need to give organizing priority to battleground states and congressional districts, and we need to come together to vote anti-MAGA on election day.
At the same time, without a militant and organized base in the millions that makes its weight felt in all aspects of public life, partisans of social justice will not get beyond fighting one defensive election after another. And catastrophe awaits if we lose just once. Building that kind of base requires deep organizing work, building/rebuilding grassroots participatory organizations, and making a compelling narrative about this country’s history and future the “new common sense” of tens of millions.
In the 19th century defeating the Confederacy required the combination of years of abolitionist organizing, the election of Lincoln in 1860s, the power of the U.S. (“union”) Army, and the “general strike” of the enslaved to defeat the Confederacy and bring about Reconstruction. In the 20th century, it took a decade of civil rights organizing and militant action combined with electoral repudiation of Barry “desegregation-is-a-states’-rights-issue” Goldwater in 1964 to produce a Second Reconstruction ending Jim Crow.
Will the next chapter of US history be a reprise of the Confederacy and Jim Crow? Or will we be able to achieve a Third Reconstruction?
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My guess is that, in the end, Donald Trump won't stay in jail for long.
He will likely be out by election time next year.
But of course, even if Donald Trump stays in jail, Ron DeSantis and especially Glenn Youngkin have arisen and are a lot worse than Donald Trump will ever be (and politically savvy too).
The Democratic Party may also lose the Presidency in 2024 and this will prompt them to continue their right-ward drift that began in the 1990s (which will also prompt the Republican Party to become even more right-wing as well).
We shall see...
I hope I'm wrong.
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From ongoing investigations to potential foreign policy shifts, there's no shortage of discussion material.
