Indicted Again - Danger Ahead

“Whom the gods intend to destroy, they first make mad”

About a week ago satirist Andy Borowitz posted this to Facebook: “Trump Just 2 Indictments from Clinching GOP Nomination”. The sad thing is that with every indictment Trump’s poll ratings against his GOP challengers for the nomination have gone up. In a normal time and in any halfway sane political party such behavior would ensure that a candidate, even a former President would be turned out on his ass. He would be scorned, and office holders of that party would run for cover every time that his name was mentioned. Anyone remember Richard Nixon or Andrew Johnson?

But since he was indicted by New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg on April 4th when he was at 44% in the Real Clear Politics poling average, it went up. When he was indicted under the Espionage Act and obstructing justice on June 9th by Special Prosecutor John Smith it again rose to 49%. Then with the Federal Judge in the E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit clarified his remarks to say that Trump had “raped” her on July 19th, it went up to 54%. Last week a Superseding Indictment was issued in relation to the Classified documents indictment of June 9th, but polls haven’t yet registered its effect on Trump’s support, but if recent history is indicative his numbers will go up, and even more after today’s new indictment.

Such support is unheard of, the taint of Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes helped scuttle the campaigns of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, Gerald Ford felt the pain of Richard Nixon’s crimes, resignation, and pardon, yet Trump gains support, and with few exceptions he isn’t even criticized by those with the most to gain, his primary opponents.

However, the current GOP is not a normal or sane political party. It has become the willing enabler to a Cult leader who holds the commands the loyalty of his followers because in a sense he is their earthly Messiah. He promised what no other Republican would promise them what they wanted; power, control, and taking revenge on their imagined enemies. In other words, those who they blamed for all of their problems, Democrats, liberals, and anyone that disagreed with them, as they had been instructed by a host of radio propagandists like Rush Limbaugh, and large numbers of politicized Right Wing Christian Nationalist preachers, many with massive audiences. The late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and D. James Kennedy, as well as James Dobson.

All of these men taught of how it was God’s will for Christians to rule the country, and everyone of them used the most convoluted and aberrant distortions of history and theology to drive home to their listeners that conservatives, especially Christians were the victims of a giant worldwide liberal conspiracy that wanted to take the guns, money, freedom, and God away from them. Race hatred and hatred of LGBTQ+ people gained wider popularity among them when Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.

But what attracted them to Trump was the idea that he was a savior figure, and he became nearly Godlike to them. When he promised them “I alone can fix it,” they believed him. When he told the media that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, okay?” Most people considered it campaign hyperbole, but he meant it, and he was right about his followers.

With every outrage, they grew more supportive, even those who first only voted for him because he was the Republican candidate. No offense was enough to drive them from him. People who claimed to be Christians who 15 years ago would have excoriated and never voted for a candidate like him were and remain his strongest voting block.

Far from harming him with the MAGA/GOP base, they have rallied to him even stronger. By his denials of guilt, his attacks on law enforcement, the Justice Department, and state and local prosecutors he has presented himself as the victim of a vast conspiracy that is not only after him, but after them. Following the election of 1860, William Lloyd Garrison wrote of the Southerners threatening to secede and destroy the Union.

Never had the truth of the ancient proverb “Whom the gods intend to destroy, they first make mad” been more signally illustrated than in the condition of southern slaveholders following Lincoln’s election. They were insane from their fears, their guilty forebodings, their lust for power and rule, hatred of free institutions, their merited consciousness of merited judgments; so that they may be properly classed as the inmates of a lunatic asylum.

In 2020 Trump and his acolytes engaged in a conspiracy to overturn a legal election and effectively mount an insurrection after the failure of every court challenge he mounted. Today he was indicted on four counts for the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

The rest of the indictment goes into great detail regarding the timeline of the events and personalities involved from November 4th, 2020 and January 6th, 2021, and Trump’s central role at every turn. You can read the indictment in its entirety here. https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/08/trump-indictment.pdf

I took the time to read it, but like the Special Prosecutor’s first indictment in June, this is detailed and backed up by evidence, much of it previously revealed by Trump staffers in the House January 6th Hearings a year ago.

But here is where the danger lies. Trump and his supporters in Congress, and the media are practically calling for violence. Trump knew that his claims were false and had no qualms about inciting violence then, and will have no problem doing so today. After the indictment Special Prosecutor Smith told reporters, “The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy, it was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant.” In response, Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung compared the Biden administration to Nazi Germany and said that Trump was a victim of “disgraceful and unprecedented political targeting!”

The response of Trump’s GOP primary opponents, Congressional supporters and media defenders bordered on the insane. There were outright denials, attacks on the Justice Department, and anyone who believes in the Constitution, the peaceful transfer of power, our democracy, and the institutions that defend it.

The GOP is MAGA, and MAGA is Trump. With every passing day all become more unhinged from reality and willing to destroy out country to save Trump. Everything in the indictment can be interpreted as Trump’s intent to break his oath to the Constitution and destroy the Republic. His followers show equal distain for both. Such are not the actions of Patriots, but Nationalists.

In his book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder wrote:

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.' A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”

In 1861, Ulysses Grant wrote:

Whatever may have been my opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is to have a Government, and laws and a flag and they all must be sustained. . . . There are but two parties now, Traitors and Patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.”

I feel as Grant did towards Trump and MAGA, and I am not sure that enough Republicans will oppose him to keep the country from being torn apart by Trump and his Cult.

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