MAGA will “fight for Trump.” Will Dems fight for us?
Former D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone almost died defending the U.S. Capitol from the violent MAGA mob on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” Fanone told Huffington Post earlier this month. “I believe democracy in this country is dead, and it died when the Supreme Court granted the president of the United States immunity for official acts and then failed to define what the fuck official acts are.”
Unofficial acts by Trump’s followers committed against Fanone and his family continue four years later. To the point that he doesn’t report many of them to the police:
Someone threw a brick at his mother’s home a little over a month ago, he said. Fanone said there was another incident where his mother was raking leaves in her front yard and a man “pulled up and threw a bag of shit on her.”
Jack Smith will be watching his back for a long time.
After the Department of Justice released special counsel Smith’s report on the Jan. 6 insurrection on Tuesday, Greg Sargent spoke with historian Julian Zelizer about his recent piece in The New Republic .
If you believe Trump’s bullshit about destroyed and deleted information, his innocense and his landslide, he’s got a “university” in Manhattan to sell you. Sargent observes that Trump’s tweet gloats, I got away with it.
Michael Podhorzer at his substack confirmed Fanone’s assessment. The high court shielded Trump from prosecution and enabled him to run again for office (and win) by neutering the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Podhorzer wrote, “In any other country, we would understand that as part of an autocratic takeover, not a democratic victory.”
The Republican Party decided Trump was their best vehicle for maintaining power, said Zelizer. (Just as Christian nationalists have decided he’s their path to restoring their political and cultural dominance, I’d add.)
Zelizer advised Democrats in his piece “to “to embrace the power of partisan polarization.” Trump’s victory was narrow (despite his boasts):
Over the next two years, the party will have one shot to block the radical retrenchment of core government policies, the erosion of cherished American values, and the aggressive exercise of presidential power. They will need to use all the procedural and financial weapons available to keep their own members in line and to reward those who stand firm in their opposition, all the while communicating a compelling message through new media to win back voters before 2026.
There are a lot of ifs behind that recommendation.
Zelizer told Sargent on Tuesday:
And Democrats are really struggling, even with signs of the fight, to figure out what they’re going to do in the next couple years. Just all this added together with the fact he won reelection despite what Smith had been investigating says positive things for his political standing at the moment. But at the moment is different than in a year. And that’s part of what we’ll watch how it plays out.
[…]
Democrats not only have to be strong, but one of the things they can do is create very small fissures in the House Republican caucus, for example, and it will cause immense problems for the Republicans to be able to do anything.
There is a lot of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand to that assessment. But Democrats’ prospects are hampered by their own conflict-averse inertia. We saw some fight on Tuesday out of Democratic women during the Senate Armed Services Committee questioning of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s impossibly unqualified nominee for secretary of defense. It won’t be enough.
What Hegseth and Trump’s other nominees represent is not just the collapse of competence and the Republicans’ rejection of ethics, American values and democracy itself. It is their embrace of might making right.
David Hogg, candidate for DNC first vice chair, writes in a FB ad that “the people making decisions for the Democratic Party care more about keeping their jobs than about fighting for us.” Do they even retain the muscle memory? What worries me most right now is how much Fanone’s experience demonstrates that Trump’s MAGA brownshirts over the long haul are more willing to “fight for Trump.”