The outgoing president’s post-hoc skullduggery aimed at winning the election he lost in November has all but played out. Americans celebrated in the streets after multiple media outlets declared Joe Biden had won days after Nov. 3. But the sense of relief that the U.S. would not descend into fascism under a second Donald Trump term was tempered by knowing that, whatever came next, the inveterate huckster always has another card up his sleeve.
Trump’s official power may be on the wane, but like Saruman that does not mean he cannot still work evil. His sway over the minds of men is not yet broken.
Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia elections official, stood before microphones Tuesday visibly angry at death threats being hurled at election workers there: from the highest elected officials to hourly employees.
“It has to stop,” Sterling, said. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language.”
Calling out other officials’ silence, Sterling added, “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much.”
Joe diGenova, a Trump campaign lawyer, had called for fired federal cybersecurity official Chris Krebs to be “drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot” for declaring the election untainted by fraud (NYT):
But Mr. Sterling said that “the straw that broke the camel’s back” had involved a threat against a 20-year-old contractor for a voting system company in Gwinnett County. He said the young worker had been targeted by someone who hung a noose and declared that the worker should be “hung for treason,” simply for doing a routine element of his job. Mr. Sterling did not provide any other details.
Reacting to Sterling’s emotional press event, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic told “All In with Chris Hayes” how Trump, insecure and paranoid, regularly demands Republicans prove their loyalty:
He’s created this increasingly absurd set of litmus tests that he requires the rest of his party to pass. First it was Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States … absurd conspiracy theory, completely untrue. People felt like they had to go along with it or at least wink at it in order to be taken seriously by the Republican base.
Then it was Muslim immigration should be banned. Then it was openly soliciting foreign interference in a presidential election. It’s fine, and we don’t have to care about it. Then it was the idea that the presidential election should be reversed. The outcome should be reversed by tossing millions of ballots. That’s currently the argument that Donald Trump’s legal team is making, and the vast majority of Republican elected officials are going along with it…. I’m pretty sure we’re going to hear pretty soon the idea that bribery for a presidential pardon is no big deal. That’ll be the next litmus test.
Trump has been doing this for years. And I think that what was so powerful about that clip that you showed wasn’t really the anger and indignation, at least to me. It was the desperation. It was like almost a sense of hopelessness, because he knows even as he’s giving this impassioned speech … he knows that President Trump is not going to forcefully condemn these threats. He knows that the vast majority of Republican senators, especially the ambitious ones, are not going to come out and condemn this. So it’s almost like a cry into the wind. He’s saying his peace, but he knows that it’s probably not going to make a difference.
Hayes recalled a column by National Review Online writer Michael Brendan Dougherty that Trump’s demands for loyalty echo the initiation rites of street gangs:
Allegiance to a plain insanity is a good test of loyalty, like being beat-in during a gang initiation… It demonstrates “commitment” or heart. Shared insanity can make people loyal to each other, sure. But it does so by rendering them useless or repulsive to the normal and decent people who need champions.
The paranoid style of the American right has a storied history dating from the McCarthy and Bircher eras and before. That paranoia, Dougherty wrote, once “expressed itself in the demand to believe Dwight Eisenhower was a communist.” Thirty years ago in another century, after the Berlin Wall fell, American conservatives declared Sir Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire and won the Cold War. Yet they are still fighting it.
International New York Times opinion writer Jochen Bittner cautions that Trump-world’s refusal to accept the loss echoes what he calls “arguably the most potent and disastrous political lie of the 20th century — the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth.”
Germany had been betrayed by internal enemies, by “Social Democrats and Jews.” The myth’s “core claim was that Imperial Germany never lost World War I,” Bittner writes. “Defeat, its proponents said, was declared but not warranted. It was a conspiracy, a con, a capitulation — a grave betrayal that forever stained the nation. That the claim was palpably false didn’t matter.”
As with Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign, Bittner cautions. As the South’s myth of The Lost Cause led to a reign of terror and nooses put to use, the festering German myth led in time to war, slaughter, and genocide.
Bittner writes:
In this way, the myth was not just the sharp wedge that drove the Weimar Republic apart. It was also at the heart of Nazi propaganda, and instrumental in justifying violence against opponents. The key to Hitler’s success was that, by 1933, a considerable part of the German electorate had put the ideas embodied in the myth — honor, greatness, national pride — above democracy.
It took Germany 15 years in a time before social media when commercial radio was still in its infancy. Today, Trump supporters are within a month making threats and calling for a coup d’état.
They cannot spell constitutional or get the date of the Georgia Senate runoff right (it’s Jan. 5), but they are by-god certain the election was stolen by “Foreign and Domestic enemies.” This means you, “corrupt Democrat/Socialist Party operatives.”
Bittner observes:
According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of Trump supporters believe that a Joe Biden presidency would do “lasting harm to the U.S.,” while 90 percent of Biden supporters think the reverse. And while the question of which news media to trust has long split America, now even the largely unmoderated Twitter is regarded as partisan. Since the election, millions of Trump supporters have installed the alternative social media app Parler. Filter bubbles are turning into filter networks.
In such a landscape of social fragmentation, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations about electoral fraud could do serious harm. A staggering 88 percent of Trump voters believe that the election result is illegitimate, according to a YouGov poll. A myth of betrayal and injustice is well underway.
Acceding to Trump’s regular demand for loyalty was always a slippery slope. Coppins sketches out the history of how we got to this point. Sterling is shaken by where the slippery slope leads from here. Bittner suggests we learn from the lessons of history: “Beware the beginnings.”