Republican Malignancy
More Republicans testified this week at the House Select Committee’s January 6 hearings as to how Trump and his team didn’t just unleash thugs to attack the Capitol Building to overthrow the election, but also sent goons to attack officials in swing states that Joe Biden won. The hearing is turning into a public purge by Republicans against Trump and as a result the polls are shifting. Six in 10 Americans say Trump should be criminally charged for his role in the Capitol riot. One year ago, 70 percent of Republicans wanted him to run for President in 2024 but that’s dropped to 56 percent, according to a recent report. Clearly, many members of the GOP want to remove what one committee member called the “dangerous cancer on the body politic”.
It’s little wonder that a growing number of members of the Grand Old Party are turning against Trump. After all, one Republican after another appears at these hearings, under oath, to describe serious misdeeds by Trump and his team. A case of seditious conspiracy is slowly being built by the committee, but that’s an arduous process. Much more dangerous legally for Trump is a less complicated illegality explained by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was threatened and bullied to break laws by the President personally. Trump called him for nearly an hour and pressured him to “find” 11,000 votes for him to “win” Georgia, despite Raffensperger’s repeated statements that he wouldn’t do that because the final count was valid.
This strong-arming is more likely to put Trump in the Crowbar Hotel — than the complicated conspiracy being uncovered by the House Select Committee — because Raffensperger taped the phone calls and has turned them over to Georgia’s Attorney General for investigation. He and his family were threatened with violence. In May, a special grand jury began hearing testimony as part of a sweeping criminal investigation into whether the former President and his allies violated Georgia laws. “A three-year felony in Georgia is a slam dunk,” said a legal commentator. “There are tapes of Trump.”
This week, Raffensperger testified, as did his chief operation officer, Gabe Sterling who became so outraged he held a controversial press conference in 2020 that captured national headlines. “It has all gone too far,” he said. “All of it. A man [Raffensperger] who served and is a patriot is threatened to be shot. Hung for treason. It has to stop. Mr. President you’ve not condemned these actions or this language. Senators you have not. You must step up. Elections are the backbone of democracy and all who haven’t said a damn word are complicit in this.”
Equally compelling was Republican witness “Rusty” Bowers, a former Trump supporter and Arizona Speaker of the House. He was badgered and bullied by the President’s team who claimed that 200,000 illegal immigrants and 6,000 dead people voted for Biden without corroboration. “We never got evidence. Never.” After he declined to help, Trump followers made threats, slandered him publicly, and harassed his family and neighbours.
The issue of whether federal charges against Trump should be laid or not is thorny. It’s more plausible that the Raffensperger tapes will do the trick and may sideline him permanently from political office. But a federal case involving seditious conspiracy has already been launched against the Capital rioters, the Proud Boys, and others involved in the January 6 mayhem. And Trump could be implicated for incitement, failure to call off the rioters or the hours-long delay to summon the National Guard immediately to stop the violence despite pleadings by his staff and daughter Ivanka.
But laying charges is fraught. Sitting Attorney General Merrick Garland must decide if enough evidence exists to indict and will succeed in a full-blown trial. He then must decide whether to step aside and let a special counsel pursue the matter to avoid accusations of conflict of interest. And finally, there’s the question of whether the national interest would be served best by prosecuting Mr. Trump or by not prosecuting. If he’s not indicted at all, it implies that Presidents are above the law, a belief that will lead to future lawlessness. On the other hand, if he is indicted his believers will simply weaponize this to gain support on the basis that this is an act of political vengeance by the Deep State and Democrats.
But the footage and mounting evidence in these hearings, accompanied by growing audience size, is demolishing the Trump “brand” and the Republican Party’s along with it. That is why it was interesting that, coming to its rescue this week was Republican doyen and former Reagan speech writer and advisor Peggy Noonan in her Wall Street Journal piece excoriating Trump. “Republicans can argue about Donald Trump’s single term. He was not strictly speaking a capable man, which surprised those who think the rich are. It’s not that he couldn’t make a deal; it’s that he never knew where the deal was, didn’t know who to go to because he didn’t understand Washington. The border is more overwhelmed than ever, the wall wasn’t built, China continues to loom.”
“The President’s people had told him he hadn’t won,” she added. “Their efforts were knocked down in the courts by Trump-appointed judges and rebuffed in the states by Republican officials. Mr. Trump tried to get his vice president to go along, but he refused. So he threw his most passionate supporters on the ground into it, and told them to march on the Capitol. `Be there, it will be wild!’ Those poor stupid people did.”
Then she said “he might have been the only Republican who could beat Hillary in 2016. But he’s a sure loser in 2024. The 1/6 hearings have been a powerful indictment, well-documented and undeniable. America isn’t going to elect him again. They’re not going to let that guy back in that house. Because everyone knows it: Let Donald Trump back there and he’ll do a 1/6 again. Because while his followers love America, he doesn’t. He likes it as far as it goes, appreciates it as the stage for his greatness, but beyond that . . .”
It was a powerful condemnation and sums up his inadequacies as well as his malignancy. He is a one-off con artist without conscience or credentials who hijacked a weak and lazy party then has caused chaos for years in America and globally. Left to metastasize, Trump and his core of crazies will exaggerate the country’s divisions, encourage more violence and continue to hold moderate Republicans hostage. If not eviscerated from the party’s ranks or charged criminally, he will announce his 2024 Presidential candidacy very soon in order to impede others from running, re-launch the lunacy, restore his dictatorship over the party, and allow him to get even.
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Thanks Diane. NBC's The Apprentice made him. He represents much of American national characteristics. Greed, b...sh.t, boasting, bullying and poor vocabulary, a conman. Did nothing to stop the spread of covid and reform the lack of gun control. Let his older sister Maryanne Barry have the last word: “All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”
Excellent newsletter Diane. Peggy Noonan summed up things nicely. If there is a dilemma over an indictment maybe they could arrive at a compromise and say ‘Trump, we won’t indict you but we will exile you to the American equivalent of the closed city of Gorky’. ‘There, you will dwell for 3 years until you are 79 years old. You will be banned from running for any political office’.
I write that in jest but really exile isn’t a bad punishment for Trump’s crimes. Bottom line, most Americans want him out of politics for good.
You tell me what that American closed city might be. I, farcically, suggest Erie, Pennsylvania.