Millions of Americans who loathe Donald Trump are giving up on the chances that he’ll be prosecuted for anything, despite the numerous crimes he committed before, during and after his term in office. The charges of tax fraud against the Trump Organisation for example have so far only ensnared the hired help, with none stuck on Trump himself.
Although around 600 of his followers have been charged with participating in what has become known as the 6 January insurrection, its chief instigator remains untouched.
If Joe Biden and others were correct in saying that the invasion of the US Congress was “the greatest attack on American democracy since the Civil War,” then we should expect from them firm measures against the leading perpetrators. Yet those looking for such a prospect are likely to be disappointed, just as they were after the Mueller Report and the unprecedented two impeachments.
Soft on Trump
The Biden administration seems intent to go easy on Trump for several reasons. The most obvious is fear that any criminal prosecution will spark a violent reaction from the armed fascist groups which masquerade under the title of militias.
And Biden acts as if he can achieve some kind of bipartisan consensus with Republican senators, just like in the good old pre-Trump days, when moves like Roosevelt’s social security and labour laws, the anti-union laws of the 1940s and 50s, the civil rights and voting-rights laws of the 1960s, and Bill Clinton’s “end of welfare”, all depended on extensive “across-the-aisle” support.
This explains Biden’s approach of trying to nudge through infrastructure legislation and his failure to push to get rid of the Senate’s filibuster power, despite it being used to block laws protecting voting rights. Yet to treat Trump and his supporters with kid gloves and expect the Republican Party (“Grand Old Party”, GOP) to behave in a way that respects traditional norms and niceties ignores the transformation of the GOP into a party committed to overturning democratic norms and imposing in America a right-wing authoritarian regime akin to Orban’s Hungary. Its ultimate goal is the establishment of permanent white minority rule.
Demographic change and voter suppression
The Republican Party fears demographic change in American society, when people of colour forming the majority of the population will exclude it permanently from power. The traditional recourse to voter suppression has been ramped up. Texas is leading the way on this by imposing 20 new voting restrictions and threatening to arrest its Democrat lawmakers who left the state in an effort to stop the law being passed.
The other drive is to deny the legitimacy of election results unless they grant victory to the GOP.
Fresh revelations of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election have emerged, the most damaging of which is a conversation with acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen where Trump told him: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” It has also been learnt that another DoJ official, Jeffrey Clark, drafted a letter for Rosen to sign addressed to officials in Georgia ordering them to convene a special session of the state legislature to declare the election results invalid and hand over the Electoral College votes to Trump instead.
These attempts to overturn the election failed because Republican appointed officials in the DoJ and election officers in states like Georgia were not prepared to go along with them. Thus the push to remove these officials and replacing them with dyed-in-the-wool Trump loyalists.
The cult of Trump
The Republican Party is becoming a cult of Trump. To get anywhere in it today it is necessary to kiss the Godfather’s ring and accept his false claim that the election was “stolen”: even though 6 January failed on many counts, it has succeeded in welding a majority among Republicans who hold to the “stolen election” line. The history of the attack on the Capitol is being rewritten in numerous variants. Leading Republican politicians who in January denounced the attack and denounced Trump have now switched to Trumpist rewrites of the story.
Initially, the violence was blamed on Antifa and BLM “infiltrators”. Then it was talked down as being like a “normal tourist visit” or talked up by Trump as a “love fest”. Marjorie Taylor Greene, probably the most unhinged member of Congress, refers to those arrested in the riot as “political prisoners”, while Trump has lionised Ashli Babbitt, the protester shot by the police, as some kind of martyr.
Pushing back against the “phoney narrative” that there was an insurrection is an understandable position for those who want to portray any investigation into the events surrounding 6 January as yet another politically motivated “witch-hunt” against Trump. They hope to minimise the impact of any damaging revelations that may come out.
Normalising or trivialising what happened on 6 January lays the groundwork for a much more serious coup attempt in the near future, if there are more Republican office holders and top military officers in place ready to go along with it. (Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley was worried about the risk of a coup in the run-up to 6 January, and vowed to prevent it. Trump talked of sacking Milley, but didn’t push through against aides who demurred). There are grounds for supposing that there was much more coordination going on behind the scenes leading to the event, rather than the attack on Congress being some kind of spontaneous happening. The extent of plotting between Trump, Bannon, certain Republican congressmen and far-right outfits like the Proud Boys has yet to be determined.
Those wanting to prevent a future coup should not rely on the leadership of the Democrat Party. The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement shows that it is possible to build a mass movement which challenge the power structure.
A similar force needs to be built by the US left which fights to defend and extend democratic rights and calls for the coup plotters to be brought to book.
