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Four Years Ago Today

Published by digby on January 6, 2025

He won

Four years ago today I watched on television as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol during the joint session of Congress to stop the certification of the presidential election and I thought to myself, “it’s finally over. Trump can’t possibly come back after this.” Until then I had assumed that he would immediately start his comeback. It didn’t occur to me that he could survive inciting this violent assault, especially since he egged it on as it was happening:

As we later saw on video, the crowd soon began chanting “hang Mike Pence!”

Later in the evening Trump finally emerged and put out a video telling the rioters he understood why they were so upset about all the evil people who stole the election but they needed to go home now. He said he loved them and they were very special:

Over the course of many hours we watched on TV as bizarre Trump supporters occupied the Senate floor and took possession of the dais, the Capitol was vandalized and trashed and rioters beat police over the head with American flags. It was the most shockingly surreal event I’ve ever observed in American politics. The whole world was stunned by the live pictures we saw over the course of that momentous afternoon.

Yet later that night, once the police and National Guard restored order and the rioters dispersed, the Congress returned to the Capitol and they certified the election. For many people that signaled that the guardrails had held, that the Constitution was intact and that American democracy was preserved.

But when 147 Republicans still voted to overturn the election even after all that had happened, it was clear to me that was premature and that Trump wasn’t done with us yet. They were all politicians with a much better knowledge of how the system works than most Americans and they knew his insistence that he’d actually won the election was a lie. Yet they voted to steal the election anyway, despite the violent insurrection that had taken place just hours earlier.

Oh sure, many Republicans did make statements condemning the insurrection and criticizing Donald Trump for his incitement. But within days you could feel them starting to pull back, especially after they experienced moments like this when faced with rabid Trump supporters:

Over the course of many months, between law enforcement and the media investigations culminating in the incredible work of the January 6th Committee, the evidence showed over and over again exactly what had happened. Donald Trump was psychologically incapable of admitting that he lost and certain people around him were more than willing to push the envelope to see if they could get away with overturning the results of the election.

Through sheer chutzpah and mind-numbing repetition, they first managed to persuade many of Trump’s most loyal voters that the election had been stolen. They flooded the zone with accusations and lies and when Republican officials denied that there were irregularities and recounts showed no discrepancies they attacked the officials. When the courts failed to find evidence of fraud and dismissed all but one case they claimed the courts were biased. They even managed to excuse Trump trying to cajole election officials into “finding” thousands of votes to put him over the top on tape. And it worked. In January of 2021, 66% of Republicans believed the election was stolen.

January 6th was their last ditch effort to overturn the election. Had Mike Pence agreed to pretend that there was a legitimate controversy about the election results in the swing states where they’d recruited activists to pretend to be alternate electors they might have succeeded.

The whole thing was a corrupt set-up engineered by Trump henchmen. The idea was to reject those states in order to lower the threshold of required electoral votes allowing Trump to win. If the Democrats objected, as they certainly would, the idea was to throw the election to the House (as the Constitution provides if it was a tie) in which case Trump would also win. (The mastermind of that coup plot, John Eastman,was even later revealed to have been counting on his good friend Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to step in to issue a stay of the Georgia electoral count to give them the hook they needed.)

It was a ridiculous idea made up out of whole cloth but Donald Trump 100% bought into it. On January 6th, when it became clear that Pence wasn’t going to play ball, Trump decided to shoot the moon and send his crazed, overwrought followers to the Capitol to intimidate the Congress and stop the count. There could be no other reason to tell them to march down there.

They didn’t succeed in keeping Donald Trump in office but they won something even more important. They proved that it was possible to beguile tens of millions of voters into not only believing a Big Lie when Donald Trump told it but even when they’d seen with their own eyes that it wasn’t true.

The whole country watched the riot unfold in real time, there were hours and hours more of video that emerged in subsequent days, witnesses from Trump’s own inner circle testified about his state of mind and how he behaved that day and there have been hundreds of court cases decided by juries finding that people who participated in the event were guilty of crimes.

The NY Times published a depressing article over the weekend examining how Trump and his minions have managed to completely turn January 6th upside down in his supporters minds. They’ve convinced them that the rioters not only did nothing wrong that day, they are now being held as political prisoners and hostages. They say there wasn’t much damage, Mike Pence wasn’t really in danger, the whole thing is overblown and it’s the January 6th Committee that should be jailed rather than those who beat cops nearly to death on the steps of the Capitol that day.

The article lays out the full trajectory of this new Big Lie that is so preposterous you’d think the people who believe it must be living in another dimension. But it’s had an effect on even the population that doesn’t believe the conspiracy theories that the Trump voters do. Many people understandably have come to accept that it really wasn’t a threat to democracy or the Constitution since Donald Trump was re-elected in what everyone agrees was a fair election and therefore, the system still works, no harm no foul.

But it didn’t work. Trump was never held accountable either because of partisan support in the Senate which voted 57-43 to impeach him after January 6th, just falling short of the 2/3rds which would have precluded him from running again. (Only seven Republicans voted to convict.) And the law was just too slow to hold him responsible even though both federal and state grand juries returned indictments of him and his co-conspirators for what they did. The Supreme Court weighed in in his favor on clearly partisan grounds.

We now know that if partisans are corrupt, deluded or just plain opportunistic enough and they have the will and the means to lie without shame or restraint, they can circumvent all the checks and balances that were built into the Constitution to prevent a president who plotted a coup against the United States from returning to power.

January 6th, 2025 should be a reminder of the assault on our democracy four years ago. Instead, I’m afraid it’s yet another reminder that far too few people in this country actually care about that.

Salon

Update—

Did I mentioned shamelessness?

Insurrection Denial

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 6, 2025

You wondered how the Holocaust kind got started?

It sounds almost Monty Python’s “inquisition” sketch. Among the ways the right attempts to rewrite the history of the attempted Jan. 6 coup….

We’ve already seen history repeat itself with the reemergence of white nationalist authoritarianism. A revival of the 1939 German American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden even.

Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield consider how insurrection denialism works. They suggest that misinformation is a sanitized description of how the internet warps reality. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 or Vince Foster were just warmup acts, either crude efforts at brainwashing or relatively harmless (The Atlantic gift link):

But there is another, more disturbing possibility, one that we have come to understand through our respective professional work over the past decade. One of us, Mike, has been studying the effects of our broken information environment as a research scientist and information literacy expert, while the other, Charlie, is a journalist who has extensively written and reported on the social web. Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one. This dynamic plays into a natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has not always been so easy. Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built.

There’s more on that and nothing on AI and deep fakes. But it’s worth a read. The fight to preserve a common reality is just warming up. Once again, our tech is running ahead of our ethics and undermining our cultural underpinnings.

I don’t have an answer for that. Except to remember.

View on Threads

You Watched, Didn’t You?

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 6, 2025

Four years ago

You didn’t imagine it, the images and videos, the injuries and deaths. They were not “deep state” fakes. Those people weren’t tourists. They weren’t patriots. The violent Trump mob consisted of MAGA rioters and insurrectionists. After four years of a Democratic administration left with cleaning up, Americans inexplicably elected Donald Trump, now a convicted felon, to another term. It’s almost as if they mean to prove the Constitution a suicide pact.

Trump is preparing to pardon a large chunk of the Jan. 6 convicted as victims of political persecution, just as woe-is-ME is as innocent as a babe.

The Washington Post:

Trump said he would issue pardons to rioters on “Day 1” of his presidency, which begins Jan. 20. “Most likely, I’ll do it very quickly,” he said recently on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added that “those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look. But, you know, if somebody was radical, crazy.”

His promise, made throughout his campaign for the White House, is shadowing events Monday as lawmakers gather to certify a presidential election for the first time since 2021, when Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol and temporarily halted the certification of an election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

And Trump did lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden. He’s spent much of his non-golf time since then trying to rewrite that history and will spend the next four doing so from the Oval Office.

More than 1,250 have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials in connection with Jan. 6, with more than 650 receiving prison time ranging from a few days to 22 years .

President Joe Biden speaks out this morning in the Washington Post, noting that his vice president, Kamala Harris, will faithfully fulfill her duty as president of the Senate to oversee certification of the election she lost [to Trump; Biden will not name him]. Americans must never forget the coup [Trump] attempted on Jan. 6, 2021 lest we see a repeat. Yet Trump and his MAGA followers will try to eradicate the memory:

An unrelenting effort has been underway [by Trump] to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand.

This is not what happened.

In time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.

Never forget, Biden urges.

How can people deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, the documentary evidence of trials and investigations, and the testimony of the survivors?

How indeed?

Dachau Memorial – Never Again – Detail. Photo by Treck08 via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Let Him Enforce It

Published by digby on January 5, 2025

John Roberts’ year-end message was rightly taken to task for implying that criticism of the court’s corruption was inciting violence. If the Chief Justice can’t defend the right of the people to criticize the Supreme Court then they really have gone down the rabbit hole.

But he made another point that’s worth looking at as well:

Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the court, popular or not, have been followed. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.

I can’t think of any prominent Democrats making that argument but I suppose there might have been at one point. But as Bill Kristol notes in his Substack:

[T]his sounds an awful lot like a subtweet of incoming Vice President JD Vance, who has repeatedly argued that Trump should ignore court orders that he believes unconstitutionally constrain his executive authority. “If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘you’re not allowed to do that’—like, that is the constitutional crisis,” Vance told Politico last March. “It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response.”

Roberts better hope asking nicely will do the trick. After all, he was the one who reached into his bag of tricks last year to carve out a broad new definition of criminal immunity for a president’s “official acts.” Like much of the rest of the country, Roberts appears to be entering the new year with a bizarre optimism: Sure, the incoming administration has openly said it will do many alarming things. But wouldn’t it be nice if they just didn’t?

Vance has been backing Musk’s embrace of the neo-Nazis in Germany so I think he really means it. Whether Trump wants that fight is unknown but I doubt he’ll care if his people want to wage it. He can observe it from the golf course and he knows he’ll suffer no repercussions.

It brings to mind the apparently apocryphal comment by Andrew Jackson, who Steve Bannon convinced Trump he most resembles: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” It sounds like Vance is pretty much saying the same thing. But really, all he has to do is ask John Roberts and he’ll do whatever they want.

Schizophrenic Media

Published by digby on January 5, 2025

So Biden obviously did an excellent job as president but he is self-indulgent and lacking in accountability? Interesting.

It’s also interesting that Baker notes the last time a president inherited such a prosperous country. You may recall that the press also vilified the man who accomplished it as being self-indulgent and lacking in accountability.

The press will never forgive Democratic success.

Good Luck Mike Part Deux

Published by digby on January 5, 2025

I’m afraid that’s exactly what they will be proposing. Trump wants a “one big beautiful reconciliation package.”

Speaker Mike Johnson told Republicans on Saturday that President-elect Donald Trump wants one reconciliation package, instead of the planned two that Republican leadership has been pushing, three people in the room where discussions took place told POLITICO.

Johnson’s message came as Republicans are meeting behind closed doors at Fort McNair to map out their strategy for passing a sweeping border, tax and energy package that will be the heart of their legislative agenda. Trump told Johnson that he wants “one big beautiful bill,” the Louisiana Republican recounted at the retreat, per three lawmakers.

Trump’s decision is a break from Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s pitch for a two-bill strategy that would have seen Republicans pass a border and energy bill first followed by a tax bill. Johnson had also previously indicated there would be two bills — though that was viewed as more of a deference to Trump’s perceived preference and a way to notch quick wins for his agenda. Thune stopped by the House GOP retreat on Saturday, a person familiar confirmed to POLITICO.

[…]

Every step of the process will require near unity among congressional Republicans, who are currently working with only a one-vote margin in the House.

“We can’t lose anyone,” Smith said in a brief interview after the GOP retreat.

Easy Peasy. All they have to do is agree to take a wrecking ball to all government spending, including mandatory spending like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, to please the Chip Roy, Thomas Massie extremists and make sure that none of the others object and it will all work out just fine.

There are some naysayers who see the writing on the wall:

“[The tax bill] can’t be the first order of business. It took us months to do the first tax cuts bill nine years ago. The bottom line is that, if that’s what the president wants, he’s going to have to wait until the summer for it all to get ironed out,” Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) told Fox News’ Fox News Live on Saturday.

It also throws a curveball into the House-leadership-struck agreement to raise the debt ceiling under reconciliation. House GOP leadership told members as part of last year’s government funding negotiations that they would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as part of the first reconciliation package and cut $2.5 trillion in spending as part of the reconciliation process.

They’re all girding themselves for the battle. For the moment they’re saying they’ll defer to Dear Leader: “No one is fighting it. If that’s the Trump call, that’s the play we will execute.”

Well maybe. President Musk will have something to say about all this. And executing Trump’s plans is always easier said than done.

4 Years Ago Today

Published by digby on January 5, 2025

Chesebro has admitted what he did and has been sanctioned numerous times, even pleading guilty in the Georgia case. But in the end it was a tiny price to pay and he was one of the few has paid anything.

What a slap in the face to honest people everywhere that these people have been put back in power. It’s a shocking indictment of our country one from which I wonder if we’ll ever be able to recover.

He Wants To Rule The World

Published by digby on January 5, 2025

You know that Elon Musk is sitting next to Donald Trump every night at Mar-a-Lago, talking to foreign leaders, kibitzing with fellow billionaires and whispering in the ear of the soon-to-be most powerful man on earth. You may have also heard that he’s exercising his own power on the internet to influence congressional leaders and fight for dominance over MAGA.

He’s branching out. He wrote an op-ed in a conservative German newspaper endorsing the neo-Nazi right party, saying they are Germany’s only hope (and causing the editorial editor to resign from the paper.) And now there’s this:

In the first three days of 2025, Elon Musk commandeered global politics through dozens of rapid-fire,often inflammatory posts to his 210 million followers on X.

The world’s richest person called for the release of a jailed British far-right extremist. He shared a post pressing King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and order a new general election, as he posted memes and a flurry of attacks directed at Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Musk accused Starmer of failing to prosecute “rape gangs” more than a decade ago, achild exploitation scandal that has prompted Britain’s Conservative Party to call for a full national inquiry.

Musk reposted a message from Rupert Lowe, a politician in the Reform UK party who serves in Parliament and who said he spent Friday talking to rape gang victims.

“Victims, past and present, don’t need ‘thoughts and prayers’ from politicians, they need justice,” Lowe said. “We will fight for that in Parliament.”

Musk also briefly turned his attention to the United States’ northern neighbor and praised an interview with Pierre Poilievre, a populist firebrand who leads Canada’s Conservative Party. Musk said that next week he would live-stream a conversation with Alice Weidel, the chancellor candidate for the Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party he has endorsed ahead of that country’s snap elections in February.

That rape gang story is from 2014 and has been fully adjudicated. I don’t know if Musk just heard about it or has decided that it’s a good way to rile up the wingnuts against immigrants again to obtain political power but he’s clearly making a move on UK politics.

Interestingly, he’s already stirred up a hornets nest inside the anti-immigrant far-right Reform party there, turning on its leader Nigel Farage. He posted today, “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”

Farage has been a huge Trump supporter and recently has been cultivating Musk who was reportedly planning to help finance the party. But even Farage can’t stomach supporting Tommy Robinson, a grifter extremist who was jailed for contempt of court:

But things took a turn after Musk called for the release of Tommy Robinson, a jailed far-right anti-immigration activist. Speaking at a Reform UK event earlier this week, Farage said Robinson was “not what we need,” The Telegraph reported.

“There are people in Britain who think that Robinson is a political prisoner. That’s the narrative that he’s pushed out. That’s how he earns his living but it isn’t quite true,” he said.

On Sunday, Farage responded to Musk, calling the billionaire a “remarkable individual” but saying that he disagreed with his view on Robinson.

“Well, this is a surprise! Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree,” he wrote. “My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles.”

Robinson is a disgusting figure who openly calls for violence against immigrants. Naturally Musk is a fan.

Why is he doing this? I suspect it’s largely because he can. He’s a megalomaniac, obviously, who believes that as the richest man in the world he has a right to run it. But it’s also because he knows that this level of influence makes his businesses downright impermeable from regulation and government interference and will make him even richer.

He’s also a monumental kook:

Yes, that’s a real tweet. God help us.

Coming Contractions

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 5, 2025

Rolling back your voting rights

Does this look like a target? To Trump 2.0 it looks like a target.

Michael Podhorzer finds, as Digby posted on Saturday:

the defining feature of American politics this century is that neither party can “win” elections anymore; they can only be the “not-loser.” 

Donald Trump was the not-loser in November. (It’s just what he wanted for Christmas.) Trump “won the same share of the eligible population” in 2024 as he did in 2020 while the Democrats’ share dropped 3.5% from 2020.

Hurrah!The country did not turn more MAGA. That’s little consolation for the left and doesn’t change the facts on the ground. In an age where facts don’t seem to matter, those facts nevertheless could get suckier under Trump 2.0, writes Sam Levin for The Guardian:

Donald Trump could use a second term atop the justice department to gut enforcement of US federal voting laws and deploy an agency that is supposed to protect the right to vote to undermine it, experts have warned.

Trump has made no secret of his intention to punish his political enemies and subvert the American voting system. His control of the justice department could allow him to amplify misleading claims of voter fraud by non-citizens and others, as well as investigate local election officials.

It could also cause the department’s voting section to largely scale back its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, returning it to the approach that it took under Trump’s first term.

Enter Pam Bondi of Florida fundraising infamy and Trump’s current nominee to lead the Department of Injustice. (Or has he now dropped that moniker?)

Trump harbors a gnawing need to prove somehow that he won the 2020 election and will task Bondi with delivering a verdict that contradicts all previous findings. He will endeavor to his dying day to bend objective reality to his will, no matter what he told “Meet the Press.”

Much of the discussion about Trump’s justice department has focused on the fate of its voting section, which is charged with enforcing the nation’s federal voting rights laws. Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who sought to overturn the 2020 election and has become a key figure in the election denial movement, has called for all of the lawyers in the voting section to be fired.

“They are all leftist activists and use taxpayer dollars and the power of the federal government to advance their leftwing legal theories,” she said in an email. “Their loyalty is not to the constitution and the rule of law. They should go back to the leftist advocacy groups they came from.”

Again, objective reality be damned. Levin continues, “Career attorneys in the justice department have apolitical jobs in which they are charged with representing the position of the United States, regardless of the administration.”

In the AfterBiden, you’re on your own

Trump has nominated “a sycophant loyalist to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division,” warns Democratic voting rights attorney, Marc Elias.

It is imperative that DOJ dismiss all of its pending voting rights cases and withdraw from those in which it has intervened. The Biden administration should not hand over cases in which Dhillon can have DOJ switch sides and undermine voting rights.We are on our own from here.

— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) 2024-12-10T02:37:29.637Z

Buckle up. Losing the election sucked for Democrats. Things are about to get suckier still. Trump will likely see to it that Bondi et al. launch investigations “to help build the narrative that voter fraud is a problem in the US” despite failing in his first administration.

Among voter fraud theorists, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

On Real Genius

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 5, 2025

Compare and contrast

On this Sunday morning, a question springs to mind: How much of an idiot is “Captain Underpants“?

Elon Musk is beside himself that President Biden awarded philanthropist George Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his pursuit of “global initiatives that strengthen democracy, human rights, education, and social justice.” (Biden gave the award to 18 others, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.) Musk posted a meme mocked up to show Biden handing the medal to the evil Emperor Palpatine. “Must be the lighting,” he quipped.

Naturally, the right is as incensed that their liberal bogeyman received the award as it wasn’t when Donald Trump awarded one to Rush Limbaugh during a State of the Union Address in recognition of Limbaugh’s Three Decades Hate.

What draws attention to Musk besides his infantile sense of humor, his inability to string more than 10 words together in most of his tweets, and his turning Jack Dorsey’s world forum into a MAGA cesspool, is the contrast with a real genius. One of Musk’s users (a bibliophile, believe it or not) posted a delightful thread about physicist Richard Feynman:

I thought I was crazy until I found Richard Feynman.

Feynman was not only among the most brilliant people on earth, but he transmitted something I’ve never seen in others.

Thread with some lessons from his peculiar way of being:

Feynman never did anything for the prestige he might get out of it.

He didn’t even want to receive the Nobel Prize.
Richard felt he had already gotten what matters.

The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.

People think beauty is only about aesthetics.

But Feynman believed that there’s something beautiful in depth, in understanding processes.

Knowledge contributes to beauty. It doesn’t subtract from it.

Richard Feynman embodied deep curiosity.

You don’t understand what “first principles” really mean until you listen to a physicist reasoning.

It’s about going to the end of the world chasing a chain of ‘whys’.
“Where does fire come from?”

You have enough time to pursue other interests.
Don’t listen to people who say you need to do only one thing to excel at it.

Feynman got a Nobel Prize in physics, but he still pursued other interests to a state worth of admiration.

Let’s explore a very peculiar one. 

Richard didn’t know how to express a profound feeling about the beauty of the world through a set of equations, so he began drawing.

“It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe .. which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe”

Feynman drew for over 20 years and even sold some of his work.

Charles Darwin was a giant of a man who greatly advanced mankind.
But he had one huge regret:

Not cultivating his appreciation for poetry and music.
“The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.”

It might be more about imitating Feynman in this aspect.

There is another real loss in life: The loss of one’s sense of humor.

It doesn’t matter how many labels, prestige, and wisdom you may have.
You don’t want to go through life without laughing.

Feynman was especially known for this.
This book compiles some of his funny anecdotes.

How did he get away with all of this?

Feynman’s ethos was rooted in independent-mindedness.
He developed great respect towards his mind and heart.

Not caring about what others think is a superpower.

Feynman was the real deal.

Update: VP-elect marked safe from being mistaken for a genius.

oh he’s doing comedy again

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) 2025-01-05T00:18:38.988Z