In an appalling finale to the Court’s term, the conservative majority — three of whom were appointed by Trump — said that “official acts” that are central to the presidency are given “absolute immunity.” Other acts, even those at the “outer perimeter” of a president’s official duties, are “presumptively immune,” making them extremely difficult to prosecute. What is truly startling is not only the protection the Court has afforded Trump, but the unrestricted power it has granted him and his successors for whatever malice they might do in the future.

The majority opinion is “the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history,” writes Princeton Professor of American History Sean Wilentz. Securing the monumental disgrace of the John Roberts Court, it has “seized the opportunity to invent, with no textual basis, a decision so broad that it essentially places the presidency above the law” and “invests the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers.”

The Justices have essentially legalized a losing president refusing to leave office. The defeated president can use his presidential authority to find an “official” pretext for remaining in office. While aspects of the Constitution and the Framers’ intentions are debatable, the Founders of the United States certainly did not design a constitutional system of checks and balances that established a government that would allow someone to declare themselves president for life if they felt like it.

Yet that is what the Supreme Court decision enshrines. In authoring the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts often sounds like Trump’s lawyer rather than the impartial judge he pretends to be. He only provides a vague distinction between official and unofficial presidential acts, thereby bestowing full authority for any president to commit crimes up to and including assassination and treason with virtual impunity from criminal prosecution, as long as he can justify those crimes as part of his “official” duties.

By basing the possibility of any prosecution on this distinction and by then making that distinction virtually impossible to discern, Roberts eliminates any chance of resolving the underlying legal issues of Trump’s current federal prosecution before Trump has a chance to take power again. “The majority’s dividing line between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ conduct narrows the conduct considered ‘unofficial’ almost to a nullity,” writes Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her blistering dissent.If Trump wins, he can then — exercising the power of “absolute immunity” that the Court has conferred— dismiss the criminal investigations against him.

Roberts’s opinion illustrates just how broad this immunity will be in practice. He claims, for example, that Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for any discussions involving Justice Department officials — even when he urged Justice Department officers to pressure states to “replace their legitimate electors” with fraudulent members of the Electoral College who would vote unlawfully to install Trump for a second term. Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution even when he told the Justice Department, “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” If Trump had ordered the Justice Department to arrest every Democrat who holds elective office, he could not be charged with a crime as this is considered “official” conduct.

Juan Cole, Digital Image, Dream/ PS Express, 2024

Fallout from the Trumpist Court giving its MAGA master royal immunity was immediate. Judge Juan Merchan put on ice Trump’s July 11 sentencing for 34 felony convictions because the Court decision could absurdly be used to define some of Trump’s actions as “official” acts. Though ridiculous on its face, the signing of the hush money checks to pay off a porn star to influence an election occurred inside the White House Oval Office, so this pay-off might be an “official” act.

Further, the ruling will remand Trump’s election subversion case, brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, back to Judge Tanya Chutkan, in the D.C. District Court, to sort out what, if anything, is left of the indictment. Chutkan had previously rejected, and offered a sweeping condemnation of Trump’s immunity argument — one that constitutional law professor Michael Dorf also called “crazy.” The process will take lots of time and any ruling can be appealed, so the case will not go to trial before the election.

In the very week that the nation celebrated its founding, the Court undermined the reason for the American Revolution by giving presidents what Judge Sotomayor called a “law-free zone” in which to act, thus taking a leap toward restoring the monarchy that the Declaration of Independence rejected. The entire purpose of the Constitution was to create a government that was not bound to the whims of a king. Almost 250 years later, the Court’s self-styled “originalists” have put a crown within Trump‘s reach.

Presidents can still be impeached for their crimes in office, but it is hard to see how they can ever be prosecuted. The ruling creates a series of “nightmare scenarios” for what a president is legally allowed to do, writes Justice Sotomayor. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune.” She added: “The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”

Though the Court left open the possibility of prosecuting Trump for “unofficial acts” — such as, his conniving with campaign officials, it also implied that nothing a president does can be called unofficial. For example, the Extreme Court ruled that a president’s communications with the public likely fall “comfortably” within at least the “outer perimeter” of his official acts. And, in a another twist of the legal knife, the majority ruled that Trump’s “official” acts could not even be introduced as evidence in a trial against him.

That last twist was too much even for ultra-right Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who refused to join the majority in the ruling on evidence. She gave the example of how hard it would be to prosecute a president who takes a bribe for an official act. “The Constitution does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable,” she wrote. But the decision of her five fellow-extremists would require such blindness.

The ruling even said that courts could not evaluate a president’s “motives” in determining criminal accountability. Considering an alleged criminal‘s motives is exactly “what the Constitution itself plainly calls for,” writes Yale University Constitutional Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar. “Essentially, the Court in Trump v. United States is declaring the Constitution itself unconstitutional. Instead of properly starting with the Constitution’s text and structure, the Court has ended up repealing them.”

Summing up the question of whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution, Justice Sotomayor writes in her dissent, “The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.” For a conservative majority that pretends to rely on historical precedent, the newly created standards are remarkable for their lack of basis in the Constitution, law or any precedent of the court. The immunity standards are pure fabrications.

The Supreme Court has intervened directly in the 2024 presidential campaign by shielding Trump from being tried on major federal charges before the November election. No previous Supreme Court has protected a political candidate in this way. This outcome benefits the Court’s preferred presidential candidate by defacing beyond recognition the Constitution and the concept of democratic self-determination. Trump poses a unique threat to constitutional government, but it’s one that the Trumpist Judges just happen to support. These aren’t Justices, they’re Trump cronies.

The outcome of the Court’s majority runs counter to the long-settled understanding of a president’s exposure to criminal prosecution, regardless of whether his acts were considered “official.” That understanding endured until last week. The outstanding example in living memory is the case of Richard Nixon, who accepted a pardon from President Gerald Ford to avoid criminal prosecution. Nixon accepted the pardon for his role in the Watergate scandal because everyone agreed that his actions were legally prosecutable. Yet Nixon’s criminal behavior could easily be misconstrued by the Roberts Court as official acts.

As the Nixon pardon made clear 50 years ago, the country understood well that ex-presidents could face trial for their crimes in office. Last Monday, the court radically redefined the settled understanding of the liability of ex-presidents, an opinion that contradicts the entire notion of a government based on the rule of law. The president can violate the law, exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, and use his official power for malevolent ends. We want a president that is bold and fearless, even if he breaks the law in doing so. That is the majority’s terrifying message.

We have entered the era of the imperial presidency as well as the era of the “Imperial Supreme Court” as Stanford law professor Mark A. Lemly calls it. In casting aside the text, structure and history of the Constitution in favor of vague concerns about the need to “enable the president to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution,” the Court reveals that it will rule — and rule us all — based on its own free-floating and distorted vision of an optimal constitutional order.

The immunity ruling reflects a massive Supreme Court power grab that is also evident in the recent Loper Bright decision that overturned a 40-year-old precedent — the Chevron deference. The decision took judicial power over federal agency regulations — transferring policy-making authority from agency experts to a judiciary that lacks the personnel and expertise to evaluate the overwhelming array of policy questions that arise from legal ambiguity. 

The court’s three liberals denounced the ruling as a threat to American democracy by an un-elected branch of government. “A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”

In a further condescending flaunting of their power, Justices Thomas and Alito refused to recuse themselves from decisions related to any January 6 cases. Thomas’s wife — lawyer and activist Ginni Thomas — denounced the “fascist left” and posted on Facebook “love MAGA people!!!” on January 6. Connected to Trump’s coup attempt, she was implicated with the fake elector schemers in Arizona. Alito — a flag-flying Christian Nationalist — is openly aligned with the Big Lie traitors, having allowed the upside-down American flag, the “insurrection flag,” to be flown in his yard during the 2021 Capitol violence.

The anti-democratic determination by these Trump-supporting, Supreme Frauds could not come at a more dangerous time for democracy. The ruling has removed a major check on the office of the presidency at the very moment when dictator-for-a-day Trump is running for office on a promise to weaponize the apparatus of government against those he views as his enemies. The Trumpified Court’s decision that grants imperial powers to a future unscrupulous President Trump has raised the stakes of the election tremendously, and they were already too high. If Trump wins, he will have the presidency Nixon wanted, one in which nothing the president does is illegal.

The Court’s decision inflates the significance of Biden’s political self-immolation at the recent debate, in which the President spent much of his 90 minutes on stage staring into the middle distance, mouth agape, reiterating “the very idea” as if he was surprised and stunned by Trump reeling off lie after lie and insult after insult as he has done for years. When Biden did speak, his voice was shaky, and he sometimes lost his train of thought. Biden’s meltdown increased the wannabe tyrant’s chance of winning, according to the liberal Brookings Institute.

Now, while the convicted GOP candidate has been invested by the MAGA court with kingly powers, the Democrats are dithering about whether their impaired candidate is the best person for the job of running against the felon. The Court decision shows — if voters did not know it before — the incredible importance of putting progressive justices on the Supreme Court.

The next president might very well get two appointments to the Supreme Court — Thomas is 76 and Alito is 74. If a Democrat wins, he or she might possibly appoint two replacement justices that would return the court to a liberal majority, 5-4.  If Trump wins, the 6-judge majority will be chosen by a racist mob boss and the Christo-fascist Federalist Society.

The Trump Court’s decision is not only a grant of immunity for past crimes, but is also an  enthusiastic endorsement of the despotic power that Trump has vowed to assert. Promising “retribution” against his opponents, he will turn the Justice Department against critics. For example, he wants to subject Liz Cheney to a televised military tribunal on uncertain charges. Trump also said that he “has every right to go after” Joe Biden and his family. 

The Supreme Court essentially gave him the green light to do that as part of his “official” duties. The combination of new judicially invented presidential immunity and the longstanding pardon power means that a future Trump White House could become the site of a criminal enterprise that would make Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal look trivial.

Raging xenophobe Trump promises that he will set up vast camps and illegally deport millions of people from the U.S. He could invoke the Insurrection Act and use troops to lock down the southern border or crush protests. He’d stretch the powers of the presidency in ways not seen in our lifetime. He says this consistently and clearly — so it’s not conjecture.

The Supreme Court has radically changed the very structure of American government paving the way for MAGA authoritarianism. Though mind-bogglingly insane, a moronic conman has used his vile narcissism and pathological mendacity along with a maniacal cult to put him on the verge of having complete control of all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a France-like, anti-authoritarian voter turnout to stop the Gangster President.

Putting aside the chain of events leading to this case, it is, in essence about how politics prevails over law. The focus of the questioning by the various justices centered on Trump’s official acts as president. To what extent are certain acts within a president’s official duties and which ones could be subject to criminal prosecution, committed while in office once the president leaves office? The questions were an effort to distinguish between those official acts within a president’s legal authority that are spelled out in the U.S. Constitution and non-official or private acts, which could be prosecuted after a president leaves office.

The justices’ questions centered on ahistorical, hypothetical examples. This line of questioning began with Justice Thomas asking what defines acts which are part of a president’s official duties? Justice Kagan expressed skepticism in her response to Trump’s attorney questioning whether impeachment and conviction are prerequisites before a president could face criminal charges. Her hypothetical question was “Let’s say a president who ordered the military to stage a coup, he’s no longer president, he wasn’t impeached. He couldn’t be impeached but he ordered the military to stage a coup. And you’re saying that’s an official act?” A similar question was asked by Justice Sotomayer, but it was whether a president could decide “that his rival is a corrupt person and orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts from which he can get immunity?”

In another series of questions, the justices paid attention to what could be the difference between absolute and limited immunity. In addressing the issue of absolute immunity, Justice Jackson asked about the significance of Nixon’s pardon, which implies that a president could be prosecuted for his actions while in office. From her line of questioning, she appeared skeptical of a president having absolute immunity. Based on the line of questioning from the conservative majority on the Court, there was a willingness to entertain some form of immunity. In particular, Justice Alito expressed his concern over the danger of an incumbent president who lost a reelection be in as being put in a “peculiarly precarious position,” at the mercy of a prosecution by the incoming presidential administration. It needs to be stated that Alito’s concern is at odds with the historical record.

It is in my view, quite surprising, not just that the justices are willing to overlook Trump’s actions while in office, but most importantly that they ignore what the historical record tells us about the question of presidential immunity. This is where Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty is relevant. Schmitt’s insight appears in his theoretical construction of how politics exercised by a sovereign prevails over law. What his theory of the sovereign tells us is how presidents over time have been immune from prosecution. This immunity is evident in what are obvious violations of national and international law. So while the justices with their hypothetical questions appear to wrestle with the concept of immunity for presidents, historical examples demonstrate the matter of presidential immunity is settled. With the exception of the Nixon administration, presidents have been immune from prosecution.

Andrew Kolin, Trump and Trumpism: The Destructive Politics of American Fascism, Rowman and Littlefield. Click here to buy.

That is because presidents have acted in such a manner that their political actions as sovereigns prevail over law over time. How so? A representative historical samples indicates that presidents have consistently violated national and international legal norms. One way to sidestep law is to declare a state of national emergency. This option fits into Schmitt’s reference to a sovereign deciding on the exception. For example, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. President Wilson clearly violated key provisions of the first amendment prior to and during World War I, with the support of Congress, enacting legislation that led to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Espionage Act. These measures, in essence, made first amendment rights illegal.

During World War II, there was another political exception to the rule of law, with the confinement of Japanese Americans. In the 1950s, McCarthyism in the context of anti-Communist hysteria, undermined what are supposed to be civil liberties protections. Presidents Johnson and Nixon and Hoover, head of the FBI, made use of Cointelpro and undermined civil liberties while the Church Committee hearings exposed w the illegal actions of the Nixon administration and previous administrations. One significant result was a reform known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a noble effort to place legal restraints on how presidents made use of illegal surveillance, and yet over time the FISA courts led to illegal acts being ruled as legal.

Consider the response of the Bush administration to the attacks of 9/11. Under the guise of a “war on terrorism,” and given legal cover under John Yoo’s Office of Legal Counsel ruling, the U.S. government found the political means to torture, a clear violation of the Torture Convention, to which the U.S. was a signatory. There is ample evidence of torture practiced in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The question this: were any officials, including former President Bush, subjected to prosecution? The answer is no. In fact, President Obama wanted to move forward and not consider legal remedies, such as prosecution.

These examples point to the use of politics by a sovereign in a time of a declared emergency that serve to justify the sidestepping of the law, eliminating any potential for prosecution. Previous presidents have justified putting aside any possible legal restraints on the exercise of power by declaring states of emergency in either peacetime or wartime. Whatever the Supreme Court decides, presidents in the past have been able to make use of Schmitt’s exception to discard legal-constitutional limits so that presidents can act outside the law by justifying either a real or manufactured emergency and in so doing, become immune from prosecution.

What is unique is that Trump’s attorneys have requested that the Court rule to normalize immunity without any justification in relation to a declared state of emergency. If the Court rules to provide some form of immunity for Trump, it will be realizing Schmitt’s exception, which allows presidents to be completely above the law in all circumstances, acting, in essence, as fascist dictators.

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Featured image: “Donald I,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamworld v. 3, IbisPaint, by Juan Cole, 2024

He continued, “It is not a war between soldiers and soldiers. It is a war between a well equipped army on the one hand and women and children on the other.”

Lula is not the first world leader to compare Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Hitler over his actions in Gaza — Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan made the same comparison.

Since Hitler murdered six million Jews, the comparison is hurtful. It could also be rejected on grounds of scale. Hitler not only killed all those European Jews, he also killed 6 million Poles. And consider Ukraine: “of the 41.7 million people living in Ukrainian Soviet Republic before the war, only 27.4 million were alive in Ukraine in 1945. Official data says that at least 8 million Ukrainians lost their lives: 5.5 – 6 million civilians, and more than 2.5 million natives of Ukraine were killed at the front. The data varies between 8 to 14 million killed, however, only 6 million have been identified.”

The Times and the Sunday Times Video: “Brazil’s Lula likens Gaza war to Holocaust”

While Netanyahu’s policies are not like those of Nazi Germany in almost any respect if we consider absolute numbers and consider the scale of killing, Lula is not completely in error if we consider more qualitative aspects of history and look to European fascism as a whole and not just the German National Socialists (who were peculiar in many ways).

FIRST: KEEPING PEOPLE STATELESS ON THE BASIS OF ETHNICITY

For instance, the Fascists stripped citizenship from millions of people and made them stateless, without the rights that come from a direct relationship to a state of their own. Chief Justice Earl Warren defined citizenship as “the right to have rights.”

Hitler took citizenship from German Jews but also from the Roma and from persons of African heritage.

Netanyahu keeps 5.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories stateless and without citizenship. So his policies in this narrow regard are similar to those of the National Socialists in the 1930s. In essence, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are living under something like the Nuremberg Laws. Their establishments and homes are attacked by militant Israeli squatters with impunity in a sort of rolling Kristallnacht.

Note that by Israeli law, Israeli squatters in the occupied Palestinian territories have all the citizenship rights of other Israelis. So the lack of rights on the West Bank is not territorial. It is by ethnicity.

Netanyahu has boasted about derailing the Oslo Peace Accords and presents himself as the only one who can prevent a Palestinian state from being established. He reiterated his opposition to any international diplomatic track that leads to a Palestinian state just this weekend.

SECOND: DEPRIVATION OF BASIC INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

Another feature of Fascism, underlined by Robert Paxton, is the elimination of individual rights. Israel’s regime over the occupied, stateless Palestinians fully demonstrates this feature. Palestinians can be arrested under “administrative detention” without charge or trial or habeas corpus and held for months or years. We have seen a treatment of detained Palestinians in Gaza that constitutes war crimes. It is alleged that forms of torture are practiced.

THIRD: TOTAL WAR

Netanyahu’s Gaza campaign has demonstrated a reckless disregard for the lives of innocent noncombatants, who make up nearly all of the nearly 30,000 people so far killed, and who have been deprived of domiciles and sufficient food and potable water by the Israeli military.

Total war was adopted as a military strategy by fascist states, according to historian Alan Kramer. One academic summarized his argument: “Kramer indicated a very interesting question regarding the specificity of the kind of war implemented by fascist regimes during the thirties and the forties, characterized by its genocidal nature and opened, according to him, with the colonial war launched by Italy in Abyssinia [Ethiopia] in 1935. Kramer underlined that the specificity of this particular way of waging war typical of fascism would define itself by the final elimination of the «distinction between combatants and non-combatants», pointing how in the six years of this conflict between 350.000 and 760.000 Ethiopians were killed, victims of an asymmetric war based on the overwhelming use of air force, chemical weapons and politics of collective terror against any sign of real or imagined resistance.”

The fascist way of war eliminates the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and wreaks mass death on the latter to achieve military aims. There doesn’t seem much doubt that Netanyahu is waging total war on Gaza and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and a whole plethora of Israeli officials have repeatedly insisted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. This, even though half of Gaza’s population consists children.

Total war easily leads to genocide, of course, which is why the International Court of Justice has found it at least plausible that Netanyahu is waging a genocide in Gaza, attempting to destroy a people in part or in whole because of who they are.

So, no, Netanyahu is not a Hitler. But, yes, his policies bear a strong resemblance to those of inter-war Fascism.

In this article I’m going to outline why it is wrong for the British government to pursue such dangerous policy and why supporting the BDS is important for peace and democracy for Palestinians and westerns alike.

The BDS movement is a Palestinian-led global campaign for freedom, justice and equality. It upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity. It was established in 2005 in response to the failure of the international community to hold Israel to account especially after the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice which declared the wall being built around the West Bank by Israel as violation of the International Law. The BDS movement includes unions, academic associations, churches and grassroots movements across the world. It uses non-violent pressure on Israel to end its occupation of all Arabs land and dismantle the wall, to recognize the rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel and to respect the rights of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes according to UN resolution 194.

Novara Media: ” MPs Vote To Protect Israel; We Speak To The Founder Of BDS | #NovaraLIVE ”

Some of the notable supporters of the BDS movement include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Pink floyd musician Roger Watters and the renowned physicist the late professor Stephen Hawking who joined the academic boycott of Israel when in 2013 he famously puled out of a conference hosted by former president of Israel the late Shimon Peres in protest against Israel treatment of the Palestinian.

I find the British government move to prevent public bodies from engaging with the BDS disgraceful for several reasons. To start with, by its peaceful nature, the BDS movement allows larger public participation in politics and humanitarian issues where ordinary people and institutions can express their objection to Israeli policies, especially the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Putting increasing pressure on Israel peacefully including through cultural, economic and academic boycotts, is more likely to make Israeli politicians reconsider their inhumane treatment of the Palestinians. This has the potentials to prevent or at the least reduce bloodshed and save lives.

For any government to outlaw such harmless methods of protest and resistance means to push them in the opposite direction and to encourage more violence and bloodshed. This stance is astonishing, especially for the British government, considering Britain’s moral and historic responsibility in creating the suffering of the Palestinians. London accomplished this through the infamous 1917 Balfour Declaration in which it gave Palestine to the Zionist movement and allowed it to ethnically cleanse most of the Palestinians and turn them into refugees in order create Israel in 1948 based on ideas of supremacy, racism and bloodshed.

Inasmuch as it outlaws civil protest, the British government’s bill gives a green light to extremist Israeli politicians such as the Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Elyahu, who said that “one of Israel’s options in the war in Gaza is to drop the nuclear bomb.”

The legislation is also a threat to British democracy as it seems to be the case that supporting Israel oppression of the Palestinians by western governments is increasingly becoming a threat to free speech and therefore to democracy. Denying public sector organizations the right to decide their own policies in relation to ethical procurement of services and goods is an attack on their basic right to make their own decisions to reject dealings with governments and businesses involved in human rights violations.

For us as Palestinians, boycotting Israeli goods has been a method of non-violent resistance for many decades, wielded against illegal occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, land theft, killing, persecution and apartheid. Now, defending the right to boycott Israel and to stand for justice for the Palestinians is becoming a new battle ground in defending democracy and free speech in the west.

( Michigan Advance ) – Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said she “wasn’t surprised” by news that former President Donald Trump allegedly pressured Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers to refuse to sign the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Benson, a Democrat who spent most of 2020 warning about the potential for disinformation over election results, told CNN that the revelation, first reported late Thursday night by the Detroit News, was further evidence of Trump’s efforts to upend a free and fair election.

“It’s quite extraordinary,” said Benson. “We had a gut feeling and had lots of different pieces of evidence to suggest that this was happening. So, I wasn’t surprised by anything that was revealed or any of the revelations in the recording.”

The News said it had reviewed a recording of a phone call Trump made on Nov. 17, 2020, to the two GOP Wayne County canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann. 

“We’ve got to fight for our country,” the News reported Trump said on the recording. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”

Also reportedly on the call, which the News said was recorded by a person present with Palmer and Hartmann at the time, was Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a Wayne County resident and niece of U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

“If you can go home tonight, do not sign [the certification]. … We will get you attorneys,” McDaniel is reported to have told Palmer and Hartmann. 

Trump is then said to have added: “We’ll take care of that.”

President Joe Biden, a Democrat, won Michigan over GOP President Donald Trump by over 154,000 votes. Biden secured about 68% of the votes cast for president in Wayne County and Trump received about 31% of votes in the county. The blue county is home to Detroit, Michigan’s largest city and is 79% African American.

After initially voting against certifying the Wayne County election results, Palmer and Hartmann relented after sharp criticism from members of the public and voted to approve them, as the Advance reported at the time. 

Benson said on social media that moment was a turning point.

“Hundreds – hundreds (!) – of citizens showed up to the meeting of the Wayne County Canvassing Board to remind them of their duty under the law to ensure their votes counted,” she said. “Their voices mattered. Their votes mattered. In my view that turned the tide. Citizens and election officials in Wayne County and statewide didn’t flinch, stood firm, and demanded their votes be certified as required under the law.”

However, the News says it was 30 minutes after the meeting ended that Trump called, saying it would look “terrible” if they ended up signing the certification after initially voting in opposition.

Former President Donald J. Trump is seen in silhouette holding an umbrella as he talks to members of the press on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2019, prior to boarding Marine One to begin his trip to Hershey, Pa. | Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian via Flickr Public Domain

Following the phone call, Palmer and Hartmann left the canvassers meeting without signing the official certification document. Then they tried to rescind their votes the following day, an effort that proved unsuccessful and paved the way for certification in Wayne County, but also ultimately at the state level, confirming Joe Biden’s win in Michigan. He would be awarded all 16 of the state’s electoral votes.

“Had Trump succeeded in delaying or preventing a county or statewide certification in Michigan, that precedent would have been used to delay or block certification in Pennsylvania (which was certifying the following week), Georgia and so on, paving the way for the false slate of electors. We knew we were the first domino to go and that what Michigan did would impact the others,” said Benson on the social media platform X.

Trump also met with Michigan GOP leaders in the White House on Nov. 20, 2020, including former Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R-Clarklake) and House Speaker Lee Chatfield (R-Levering). Republicans have claimed they weren’t pressured to overturn election results.

The News reported that while Hartmann has since died, neither Palmer nor McDaniel and Trump, through spokespeople, disputed a summary of the phone call when presented to them. The paper noted, however, that Palmer in the past described the conversation with Trump as, “Thank you for your service. I’m glad you’re safe. Have a good night.”

The News said those comments weren’t included in the segments of the call the paper reviewed.

McDaniel, a former Michigan GOP chair, said she stands by her statements made at the time that there was “ample evidence” that warranted an election audit. 

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told the paper that Trump’s actions “were taken in furtherance of his duty as president of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 presidential election.”

Despite continued allegations of election fraud, no evidence has been validated, while multiple judges, many of them Trump appointees, have rejected every legal attempt to overturn the results.

Trump also faces both state and federal charges for illegally attempting to interfere in the election process. 

The day following the phone call to Palmer and Hartmann, Trump further boosted the pressure to stop the certification by making unproven and inaccurate statements.

“The numbers have not improved, it is still 71% out of balance”, stated Wayne County, Michigan,  Canvassers. “There is widespread irregularities in poll numbers.” There are “more votes than people”. The two harassed patriot Canvassers refuse to sign the papers!,” he posted on social media.

Similar false conspiracies were later brought up during a now-infamous Michigan House committee meeting featuring Rudy Giuliani, who was then serving as Trump’s personal attorney. Giuliani, who is also facing charges in Georgia for election interference, filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, days after a jury ordered him to pay nearly $150 million to two former Georgia election workers for defamation.

Peter Bondi, managing director of the nonprofit Informing Democracy, expressed concern about what Trump will do after the 2024 election if he loses again.

“Following Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, it’s easy to predict that he will loudly call for every local election official to refuse to certify the results of the election in 2024. What we can’t predict is how many will actually listen to him,” Bondi said. “Unfortunately, from what we’ve seen in Michigan, Arizona, and elsewhere, we know that some may follow his command, breaking their oath and disregarding the votes of the citizens they’ve sworn to serve — and in many cases breaking the law.”

Benson, meanwhile, was asked by CNN’s Abby Phillip that in light of the recording, if she thought charges should be sought against Palmer or McDaniel.

“I have great faith in our Attorney General Dana Nessel,” she responded. “She just today announced charges in a very different inquiry against former state employees for abusing their power [Robert and Anne Minard]. So when the law is violated, she will ensure there is accountability. So we’ll see how that unfolds. I think the other thing to remember here is at the end of the day, the commissioners and folks on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers did their job. They certified the election, as the state board did as well. So despite attempts to bribe or cajole or interfere, influence, it was unsuccessful. And democracy prevailed, in part because hundreds of citizens showed up that night to demand that the law be followed. And indeed, it ultimately was.”

Mark Brewer, an elections lawyer and former Michigan Democratic Party chair, was more blunt.

“Lock ‘em up: Trump, Palmer, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and everyone else who was part of this criminal scheme,” he posted.

Jon King

Jon King is the Senior Reporter for the Michigan Advance and has been a journalist for more than 35 years. He is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association and has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell.

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Michigan Advance

Stefanik implicitly characterized campus protests against the Israeli total war on Gaza and its reckless disregard for civilian life as a form of antisemitism, indeed as a call for genocide. Apparently the logic is that if Palestinians get their basic civil rights, then an Israeli ethnostate becomes difficult to maintain, and if Israel has to be a pluralist state rather than retaining solely sovereignty for Jews, that outbreak of equal rights equates to a genocide.

It is the same logic white nationalists use to argue that rights for African Americans equates to genocide against white people. That Stefanik is deploying Klan logic is no accident — see below.

Stefanik is supposedly a Roman Catholic. Here is what the head of her church said about brutalizing Israeli tactics in Gaza: “This is what wars do. But here, we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism.”

The Pope accused the Israeli army of terrorism against Palestinians. Would Stefanik let him come to the University of Pennsylvania and say that on campus? Or is she a cafeteria Catholic who likes the pro-life stance of the church regarding abortion but isn’t pro-life when it comes to war on Palestinians?

We can further tell that Stefanik is a hypocrite because she did not bother to criticize Donald J. Trump for saying that the Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville in 2017 were “very fine people.” (She did, in her earlier incarnation as a somewhat normal person, herself condemn the white nationalists at Charlottesville. But she never protested Trump’s characterization.)

When challenged on Trump’s association with Kanye West and other genuine antisemites, Stefanik lamely excused him on the grounds that he had recognized Israel’s illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. No wonder she can’t understand, like, college. She thinks breaking international law is a sign someone isn’t an antisemite.

It gets worse. In 2021, Stefanik began taking up the talking points of the Great Replacement Theory. It holds that wealthy Jewish businessmen are bringing in immigrants from the Global South to replace white workers, since the immigrants will work more cheaply. Stefanik perhaps did not utter the phrase, but she appealed to all the dog whistles of this odious theory.

Marianna Sotomayor noted last year at the Washington Post that Stefanik put out campaign ads saying, “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION . . . Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Guess who the “radical Democrats” might be, to which she refers? Could they possibly be people such as, oh, I don’t know, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and other Jewish American legislators who have worked for immigration reform?

Anti-immigrant hatred wrapped up with bigotry toward Jewish Americans has been responsible for mass shootings at Buffalo, NY and at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. It is perhaps the single most dangerous ideology in the United States.

Stefanik is up to her ears in it.

Democracy Now! “Peter Beinart on ‘Who is Elise Stefanik?’

I wrote earlier about the origins of the Great Replacement Theory:

“The phrase, and the most extensive elaboration of the theory, originated with the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957), who served during WW II in The Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, which consisted of French collaborators. You don’t get more fascist than that– the Charlemagne Brigade were the last troops to defend Hitler’s bunker before his suicide, and staged a failed, desperate fight against the Soviet army’s advance into Berlin.

Binet fulminated after the war against “the invasion of Europe by Negroes and Mongols,” by which he meant Americans and Soviets. He saw Americans as an impure mestizo “race” (he was a biological racist). He also launched diatribes against unbridled capitalism and the ways in which Jews were using it to abet the replacement of civilized white Europeans.

So this supposedly far right American nationalist idea actually originated in hatred for Americans and a denigration of their supposed “whiteness” by the European Right, which did not see Russians as “white” either . . .

As defenders of illiberalism and implicitly of hatred of Jews, these useful idiots of the far right are symbolically still deployed around Hitler’s bunker, defending it from the approaching Allies.”

The fact is that Stefanik was not defending Jewish American students on US campuses but attempting to silence non-white and progressive students and ensure that their speech is criminalized.

During the intense Israeli bombardment of densely populated Gaza, which has killed over 17,000 people, 70% of them women and children, many American students have felt traumatized. The gory images coming out of Gaza and the grim determination on the part of Israeli and Biden administration officials to continue the carnage have shaken many in the younger generation. Some 46% of young people aged 18-29 disapprove or strongly disapprove of the Biden administration’s handling of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, whereas only 19% strongly approve.

In addition, Palestinian American, Arab American and Muslim American students, along will many other students of color and progressives, including members of Jewish Voices for Peace, have demanded not only an immediate ceasefire but an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and freedom for the stateless, oppressed Palestinians. They have chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and called for a new uprising (in Arabic, intifadah.

Students (and professors) invested in chauvinist Israeli nationalism have charged that protesting against the Israeli assault on Gaza, or in favor of basic human rights for Palestinians, are forms of anti-Jewish bigotry. That charge is patently ridiculous. The issue is not discrimination against a minority but critique of the 18th most powerful military in the world and its shameful, blatant disregard for International Humanitarian Law.

Stefanik’s Democratic rival, Steven Holden, a veteran, replied to her stunt at Facebook, pointing out that she is implicitly assaulting the first amendment:

University Presidents should stop playing into the hands of wily sociopaths such as Stefanik, who is plotting to impose Trumpism and his promised dictatorship on all Americans, to take away a woman’s right to choose nationally, to ban Muslims, and to put the nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. They should simply say that in this country we have a first amendment and we can criticize any government we like– Argentina’s, China’s, Hungary’s, or Israel’s. That isn’t racism, that is responsible world citizenship, and the right of free citizens of a democracy.

“Maybe I’ll work for the Department of Defense,” my companion finally suggested all too logically.

I can see just where he’s coming from since, during Trump’s first term, with some notable exceptions, “his” generals made it a point to stick to the Constitution rather than allow “their” president to govern by tweet. I also believe that, whoever’s in office, politicians from both sides of the aisle won’t hesitate to continue to fund the Pentagon in their usual profligate fashion (regardless of the long-term human and financial costs of doing so).

My friend’s plans instantly provoked my sense of cynicism. During Trump’s first term, the only thing standing between him and a political takeover of the Pentagon was the mistaken conviction that his appointees would show ultimate fealty to him rather than the rule of law. He’s already threatened the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, whom he saw as disloyal, with death in a second Trump term. Now he knows one thing: he needs to loyalty-test anyone in a future administration of his ahead of time.

With all of this on my mind, I turned to my friend and said, “I think you should just get out of government. Why not go to the nonprofit sector?” After a pause, I added, “Voters like us also better show up so he doesn’t get reelected.”

Being the ethical public servant he is, he simply responded, “It’s not really our choice” and changed the subject. Feeling grateful that we still live in a society that, at least theoretically, respects the political neutrality of public officials, I shut up.

But I’ll say one thing about that future of ours: there are all too many intelligent Americans discussing the next election as though their own lives won’t change if Donald Trump wins a second term. As a military spouse, a clinical social worker who treats war-affected military families, and a scholar of war and political violence, I’m no stranger to the ways autocratic leaders can upend daily life, particularly during times of war when people thirst for meaning.

I’m thinking about our very own country, which, 22 years later, thanks to its never-ending post-9/11 “war on terror,” still has ongoing military operations in some 78 countries, making violence — and the gaping holes it leaves in American communities and our federal budget — this country’s endless new normal. But I also know that it could get much worse.

From the heart of our empire with its legions of injured, stressed-out, and broken troops and veterans, I’ve watched Trump demean and threaten institutions like our free press and public health agencies that still prop up what’s left of our American way of life. And I worry.

Doing in “the Deep State” (and You)

In July 2022, as a former president, The Donald predicted that, in a Trumpian future, the “deep state” would be dismantled and “we will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States.” And believe me, that won’t be all. Privileges you and I take for granted — like being able to get our health care paid for by insurance companies — could disappear if Trump were to retake the presidency in 2024.

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Perhaps you’ve noticed that, since he lost the last election, he and his cronies have been working with the ultra-right think tank the Heritage Foundation, along with dozens of other like-minded groups, to create Project 2025, an alarming plan for a potential second Trump term. It’s aimed at rescuing “the country from the grip of the radical Left” and turning the presidency into something approaching an autocracy. As part of that plan, his far-right allies are already screening some 20,000 potential MAGA appointees to be placed in every agency across the federal government.

Currently, a president can legally fill about 4,000 federal political appointments. In a second term, however, Trump plans to use an executive order to put an additional 50,000 such jobs into the same category. People who have spent their careers making sure that crucial services are delivered to American homes, that research benefiting the public good is conducted, and that people get to school and work safely could be replaced by those whose most crucial qualification would be loyalty to Trump and his whims.

And don’t think that my concern here is based solely on my obvious left-leaning political affiliations: career public servants of every sort are simply more effective than private companies (no less future Trump political appointees) because they know how to distribute resources safely and quickly to hundreds of millions of people. They are also more responsive to the public.

Take health care, for example. So many of us are dependent upon the whims of private companies for it. Only a thin veneer of government bureaucracy ensures that insurance companies comply with the law so that we all can visit a doctor when we need to. As a therapist, I’ve spent months trying to contact individuals in two private companies charged with administering taxpayer funds to Medicaid, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration. My claims weren’t getting paid until I finally contacted two of my federal congressional representatives who dispatched staff members to contact those companies. Within days, thousands of dollars of back pay landed in my bank account and I was able to continue my work with patients.

And consider that only a taste of what could come in a second Trump era. The same goes for other things we take for granted like the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture ensuring that medications and food on our store shelves don’t make us sick. Our often over-nourished bodies would become sicker, more vulnerable, and more worn down if it weren’t for that “deep state” Trump seeks to replace from depths all his own.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet

And the privileges of being American would become all the harder to access because our roads, bridges, tunnels, and water systems would only further deteriorate, instead of continuing to experience the green revival they’re undergoing thanks to a Biden administration infusion of cash. Under a second Trump presidency, count on initiatives requiring work and scientific expertise (rather than just bluster) not getting done. After all, his main economic campaign promise in 2016 was to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure like roads in America’s aging Rust Belt. In the process, he swore that he would bring back blue-collar manufacturing jobs. In reality, after his four years in office, spending on physical infrastructure like roads and bridges had stagnated.

And how about the infrastructure that protects the safety of our groundwater? Spending on clean water during the Trump administration fell to a 30-year low. In 2018, a major federal study reporting on groundwater contamination found that harmful chemicals called perfluoroalkyls, or PFAS, had already contaminated roughly 1% of the nation’s groundwater supply — disproportionately in military and veteran communities. Here, Trump’s appointees didn’t even pretend to do good. Instead, his White House tried to suppress the report and when the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry put it out anyway, the Trump Environmental Protection Agency’s response was to use administration-appointed scientists to write a new report minimizing the potentially harmful effects of PFAS.

Trump also rolled back a key 1970 law requiring that new infrastructure projects abide by environmental regulations that preserve wildlife and waterways, while avoiding further contamination of the environment — a change that disproportionately affected minority and military communities. All told, these and other environmental rollbacks led to thousands of more deaths annually due to pollution.

At stake in allowing our infrastructure to crumble is, of course, the condition of roads, bridges, clean drinking water, and so much else affecting everyday life. After all, to mention just one of so many problems, if roads are poor, people can’t get to the hospital as easily, which can mean the difference between life and death.

Enemy of the People

Trump has also made it clear that he sees those who oppose him politically as “vermin” and has pledged to destroy people who fall into that category. He has dehumanized journalists, in particular, calling them the “enemy of the people,” “dishonest,” “corrupt,” and “low-life reporters.” He’s questioned their truthfulness and sanctioned physical violence against them through memes like one he posted on Twitter of himself beating up a figure with a CNN logo superimposed on his face.

During Trump’s first term, his stream of verbal attacks on members of the press led to credible threats toward news organizations, among other figures whose lives, not just their ability to do their jobs, were endangered. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Trump stated at a rally that the journalists who had reported in advance on that decision should reveal their informants or face future rape in prison. And in a second Trump term, with the government and federal law enforcement reorganized along distinctly Trumpian lines, who would be there to block such horrors?

Working to destroy a free press would also, of course, have life (and death) implications. A simple case in point from recent years: after Covid vaccines became available to the public in early 2021, excess mortality in red states, where many believed Republican disinformation campaigns about such shots, soared more than a third higher than in blue states. Now imagine that happening at a national level.

It’s disturbing to contemplate what, in a second Trump administration, a chilling of the mediasphere could mean. Let me take an example close to my own heart. Military family members have relied heavily on our ability to access one another’s writings and social media posts to find validation and support for our daily struggles, involving constant moves, the mental anguish of loved ones, financial struggles, and isolation. In our world, any time a deranged Trump supporter threatens someone they disagree with, they puncture an already fragile social safety net of information-sharing and support among this country’s war-beleaguered troops and veterans. And in a second Trump era, that could happen to all of us on a national level.

The Threat from Within

Threats from the former president and his supporters would undoubtedly have real teeth in a second Trump term. Since the January 6th riots, it’s been no secret that the military, the Department of Homeland Security, and local and federal law enforcement agencies include significant numbers of extremists who sympathize with far-right groups that exhibit racist and anti-Semitic views. And keep in mind that members of the Republican Party have already successfully pressured the military not to screen its ranks for just such types.

Now, imagine an America in which Donald Trump has installed his own loyalists — and this time around they will indeed be loyal to him — in the top ranks of the Pentagon. As Axios recently reported, Pentagon officials speaking under anonymity have voiced concerns about the Trump-allied Heritage Foundation’s plan to “prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory [and] manufactured extremism.” They read into that plan’s very vagueness on the subject Trump’s intention to dramatically alter the role of the military in American life, including the possibility of employing the Insurrection Act — and so that very military — on his first day in office to suppress any civil demonstrations against him.

Electing Trump and crew, intent as they are on sowing hostility and contempt for the institutions of government, means putting into office those who embrace a future culture of violence. He and his supporters remind me of a family friend who, when we were little, used to get angry at me if I was beating him at checkers. I recall him flipping over our board the minute it became clear that my next move would mean victory for me.

The adults in our lives used to try to contain his rage by comforting him and, like sycophantic members of the Republican Party today, they effectively nurtured a bully. That kid would, in fact, grow up to become a federal law enforcement official who would indeed come under investigation for hateful social media posts. Under Trump round two, vigilantes with grudges like his would find a role model in the Oval Office and we would all face the repercussions.

If you don’t want violence to explode inside our borders against people like you and me, then each of us should do our damnedest to ensure that a candidate who prioritizes revenge over those who protect law and order, tell the truth, work hard, and play fair doesn’t make it into the Oval Office a second time. Otherwise, it’s likely that the solid ground afforded us by our imperfect union will be pulled from beneath our feet and it will be all too hard to reassemble the pieces.

Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as “the enemy.”

Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.

Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.

Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of “America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place and millions suffered from them.

The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were Japanese, Jewish, or African American.

In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued a report making clear that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

 Trump Threatens

It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration. Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be “huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as the New York Times reported recently, “to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken directly from the military budget.

Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but. After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic and the other from Slovenia, countries that most Americans would have to google to find on a map of Europe. Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami will, of course, be individuals and families from the global South. The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point, it is the point.

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Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated that such a new administration would build “camps” — think: prisons — that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told the New York Times, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

And rest assured about one thing: the next Trump administration won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump gang has stated that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for humanitarian reasons. 

Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House — a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more Trump-friendly federal judges — success (as he defines it) will be a given for many of these efforts.  

When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me — they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color), Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other enemies.

The Fascist Aims of America First

While Trump is the likely GOP nominee in 2024, the election is still a year away and any number of unforeseen developments could lead to someone else being nominated. At this moment, the other potential Republican candidates are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie excepted, there isn’t a sliver of policy difference between any of them and Trump. And notably, Christie supported Trump for nearly all of his administration. In addition, each of them would need the former president’s far-right MAGA base to win the nomination.

Trump’s people have cloaked themselves in an “America First” aura without in any way owning that as a meme. In fact, it harks back both to the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the American fascist movement of the 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the KKK had ballooned to between three and eight million members and, as scholar Sarah Churchwell notes in her remarkable book Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, it had already adopted “America First” as a motto. 

While both Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had used the term earlier to promote American isolationism, nativism, and “exceptionalism,” it was the KKK that truly embraced its white supremacist core ethos. As one example, 1,400 Klansmen chanted “America First” as they marched in a Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, in 1927. And consider it more than ironic that, as Churchwell documents, their presence evolved into a riot that led to the arrests of five Klansmen, one bystander (by mistake), and under circumstances that remain less than clear, Fred Trump, the father of the future 45th president of the United States. 

In 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) was founded. At its height, it would have more than 800,000 members. Initially, it was seen as isolationist — that is, against American entry into the war already being waged in Europe — and even anti-imperialist. As a result, its ranks initially included liberals, progressives, and socialists, as well as conservatives, libertarians, and avowed fascists. The latter, however, would eventually come to dominate, especially after the nation’s leading anti-Semite and pro-Hitler celebrity, pilot Charles Lindbergh, became its most popular spokesperson. The fascist-loving AFC then joined other U.S.-based far-right groups in celebrating German nazism and Italian fascism, while making America First their rallying cry.

Of course, the historically challenged Donald Trump undoubtedly doesn’t know much, if anything, about this history. But give him full credit. From the beginning, with the instincts of both a fascist and a white nationalist, he intuitively grasped the mobilizing value of seemingly patriotic but xenophobic slogans. Count on one thing, though: some of his allies know all about the noxious roots of “America First” and still embrace it. Such jingoistic patriotism has, in fact, become a thinly veiled cover for a revised and expansive contemporary version of white nationalism.

The proliferation of America First groups run by former Trump staffers and supporters is daunting. The dizzying array of them includes America First Legal, America First Action, America First Policies, America First Policy Institute, America First P.A.C.T. (Protecting America’s Constitution and Traditions), America First Foundation/America First Political Action Conference, and America First 2.0, the latter a contribution from Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.

America First Legal is run by Stephen Miller and promotes itself as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union, but its deepest focus is on defending whiteness and amplifying Miller’s white nationalist proclivities. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, it typically produced radio and television ads like this fact-free one:

“When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white people last in line for Covid relief funds. Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. Liberal politicians block access to medicine based on skin color. Progressive corporations, airlines, universities all openly discriminate against white Americans. Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under the law.”

Decrying (fake) racism against whites fits well with Trump’s hysterical, desperate accusations that Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are all “racists” out to prosecute him because he’s white, not because he broke the law in their jurisdictions. (So far, none of Trump’s Black supporters have echoed that call — perhaps a bridge too far even for them — but Miller and others on the far right certainly have.)

Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under Trump, is now the president of the America First Policy Institute, which claims that its guiding principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.” That well-funded group takes on policy and culture war issues. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that it recently held a gala at — yes! — Mar-a-Lago.

The America First P.A.C.T., led by former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, focuses on running state candidates on a far-right MAGA agenda and prioritizes raising funds for GOP candidates. Blasted across its website is the phrase “A weak republican is more dangerous than a democrat.” Ward is under investigation in Arizona for her alleged involvement in a 2022 fake-elector plot there. 

Perhaps this country’s best-known white nationalist (and former Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes is the founder and president of the America First Foundation. It sponsors the annual America First Political Action Conference, an unabashed gathering of white supremacists and other far-right and extremist elements. Fuentes founded AFPAC because he thought the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was too moderate. However, the political distance between the more traditional CPAC and AFPAC has narrowed. Noted Islamophobe Michelle Malkin, for example, spoke at both in 2019, as did conservative journalist Jon Miller in 2020. Neither Malkin, who is Asian, nor Miller, who is African American, called out Fuentes and other bigots at the conferences on their racism.

The 2022 AFPAC conference featured a who’s who of contemporary American extremists, including disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, defeated Arizona election-denier Kari Lake, longtime founder and publisher of the white supremacist American Renaissance Jared Taylor, Florida-based Islamophobe and anti-immigrant warrior Laura Loomer, extremist activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former too-toxic-for-even-the-House-Republicans Representative Steve King. Current Republican congress members who have spoken at AFPAC include (you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn) Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. 

Violence as Politics

Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. In October 1923, Klan leader and Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave a fiery anti-immigrant speech in Texas railing against the “polluting streams of pollution from abroad” that immigrants were bringing to the United States. This October, exactly 100 years later, Trump gave an interview to the far-right National Pulse in which he declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In his 2024 campaign, he’s not only planning to go after immigrants, but a broader group of liberal and progressive citizens and even Republicans who stand in the way of his fevered lust for heading a genuinely authoritarian government. If he returns to the Oval Office, he’s already declared that he’ll “root out” what he’s called “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

“Vermin” (a classic Hitlerian word choice) and those who would “poison” the nation must be wiped out, annihilated. Responding to criticism of such language, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the very notion “ridiculous,” even as he reinforced the point by insisting that the former president’s critics suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

None of what Trump and his allies plan to do is likely to be passively accepted. In fact, they’re already anticipating a massive popular revolt and preparing for it. As the Wall Street Journal noted, in 2020 Trump first contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to employ the military to enforce federal laws under special circumstances, to break up protests related to the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans by the police and racists. He was talked down. Its use was then suggested by Trump ally Roger Stone and evidently considered by the president as a way to “put down” any “leftwing protests” related to the 2020 election. Again, the idea went nowhere.

The third time, however, could be the deadly charm. The Washington Post has reported that Trump is now considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day back in office. One thing is certain: should he somehow, despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Copyright 2023 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com ) – This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government.

Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate — and I hope you won’t find this too startling — the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity.

This isn’t, in fact, the first time those two men and what they represented affected my life. Fifty years ago, each of them helped determine my destiny — a time when I had not the slightest hint that global warming might someday leave them again juxtaposed in my life.

In mid-October 1973, as the Walt Disney Corporation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, I found myself in the Argentine embassy in Santiago, Chile, where I had sought refuge after the country’s military had destroyed its democracy and taken power. Like 1,000 other asylum seekers, I was forced to flee to those compressed premises — in my case, thanks in significant part to Walt Disney. To be more specific, what put me in peril was Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), a bestselling book I had cowritten in 1971 with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart that skewered Uncle Walt’s  — as we then called it  — “cultural imperialism.”

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That book had been born out of Salvador Allende’s peaceful revolution, the first attempt in history to build socialism by democratic means rather than by conquering the state through armed insurrection. That Chilean road to socialism meant, however, leaving intact the economic, political, and media power of those who opposed our radical reforms.

One of our most urgent cultural tasks was contesting the dominant stories of the time, primarily those produced in the United States, imported to Chile (and so many other countries), and then ingested by millions of consumers. Among the most prevalent, pleasurable, and easily digestible of mass-media commodities were historietas (comic books), with those by Disney ruling the market. To create alternative versions of reality for the new, liberated Chile, Armand and I felt it was important to grasp the ideological magic that lurked in those oh-so-popular comics. After all, you can’t substitute for something if you don’t even know how it works.

Our goal was to defeat our capitalist adversary not with bullets but with ideas, images, and emotions of our own. So, the two of us set out to interpret hundreds of Donald Duck historietas to try to grasp just what made them so damn successful. In mid-1971, less than a year after Allende’s election victory and after 10 feverish days of collaboration, he and I felt we had grasped the way Walt’s supposedly harmless ducks and mice had subtly shaped the thinking of Chileans.

In the end, in a kind of frenzy, we wrote what John Berger (one of the great art critics of the twentieth century) would term “a handbook of decolonization,” a vision of what imperial America was selling the world as natural, everlasting, and presumably unalterable by anyone, including our President Allende. We did our best to lay out how Walt (and his workers) viewed family and sex, work and criminality, society and failure, and above all how his ducks and mice trapped Third World peoples in an exotic world of underdevelopment from which they could only emerge by eternally handing over their natural resources to foreigners and agreeing to imitate the American way of life.

Above all, of course, since the values embedded in Disney comics were wildly individualistic and competitive, they proved to be paeans to unbridled consumerism — the absolute opposite, you won’t be surprised to learn, of the communal vision of Allende and his followers as they tried to build a country where solidarity and the common good would be paramount.

The Empire Strikes Back!

Miraculously enough, our book hit a raw nerve in Chilean society. In a country where everything was being questioned by insurgent, upstart masses, including power and property relations, here were two lunatics stating that nothing was sacred  — not even children’s comics! Nobody, we insisted, could truly claim to be innocent or untainted, certainly not Uncle Walt and his crew. To build a different world, Chileans would have to dramatically question who we thought we were and how we dreamt about one another and our future, while exploring the sources of our deepest desires.

If our call for transgression had been written in academic prose destined for obscure scholarly journals, we would surely have been ignored. But the style we chose for Para Leer al Pato Donald was as insolent, raucous, and carnivalesque as the Chilean revolution itself. We tried to write so that any mildly literate person would be able to understand us.

Still, don’t imagine for a second that we weren’t surprised when the reaction to our book proved explosive. Assaults in the opposition press and media were to be expected, but assaults on my family and me were another matter. I was almost run over by a furious driver, screaming “Leave the Duck alone!” Our house was pelted with stones, while Chileans outside it cheered Donald Duck. Ominous phone calls promised worse. By mid-1973, my wife Angélica, our young son Rodrigo, and I had moved — temporarily, we hoped — to my parents’ house, which was where the military coup of September 11th found us.

Salvador Allende died at the Presidential Palace that day, a death that foretold the death of democracy and of so many thousands of his followers. Among the victims of that military putsch were a number of books, including Para Leer Al Pato Donald, which I saw — on television, no less — being burnt by soldiers. A few days later, the editor of the book told me that its third printing had been dumped into the bay of Valparaíso by Navy personnel.

I had resisted, post-coup, going into exile, but the mistreatment of my book convinced me that, if I wanted to avoid being added to the inquisitorial pyre, I would have to seek the safety of some embassy until I could get permission to leave the country.

It was a sobering experience for the man who had brazenly barbecued the Duck to find himself huddling in a foreign embassy on the very day the corporation that had created those comics was celebrating its 50th anniversary. Consider that a sign of how completely Uncle Walt had won that battle, though he himself had, by then, been dead for seven years. Very much alive, however, were his buddies, those voracious fans of Disneyland — then-American President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, masterminds of the conspiracy that had destabilized and sabotaged the Allende revolution, which they saw as inimical to American global hegemony. Indeed, the coup had been carried out in the name of saving capitalism from hordes of unwashed, unruly revolutionaries, while punishing any country in the hemisphere whose leadership dared reject Washington’s influence.

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Nor would it take long before the dictatorship that replaced Allende began enthusiastically applying economic shock therapy to the country, accompanied by electric shocks to the genitals of anyone who dared protest the extreme form of capitalism that came to be known as neoliberalism. That deregulatory free-market style of capitalism with its whittling down of the welfare state would, in the years to come, dominate so many other countries as well.

Fifty years after the coup that destroyed Allende’s attempt to replace it with a socialism that would respect its adversaries and their rights, such a revolutionary change hardly seems achievable anymore, even in today’s left-wing regimes in Latin America. Instead, capitalism in its various Disneyesque forms remains dominant across the planet.

Nor should it be surprising that, in all these years, the corporation Walt Disney founded a century ago has grown ever more ascendant, becoming one of the planet’s major entertainment and media conglomerates (though it, too, now finds itself in a more difficult world). Admittedly, with that preeminence has come changes that even an obdurate critic like me must hail. How could I fail to admire the Disney corporation’s stances on racial equality and gay rights, or its opposition to Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. How could I not note the ways in which its films have come to recognize the culture and aspirations of countries and communities it caricatured in the comics I read in Chile so long ago? And yet, the smiling, friendly form of capitalism it now presents — the very fact that it doesn’t wish to shock or alienate its customers — may, in the end, prove even more dangerous to our ultimate well-being than was true half a century ago.

True, I would no longer write our book the way Armand and I did all those decades ago. Like any document forged in the heat of a revolutionary moment eager to dismantle an oppressive system, imbued with a messianic belief in our ability to change consciousness, and tending to imagine our readers as empty vessels into which ducks and mice (or something far better) could be poured, we lacked a certain subtlety. It was hard for us to imagine Chilean comic-book readers as human beings who could creatively appropriate images and stories fed to them and forge a new significance all their own.

And yet, our essay’s central message is still a buoyant, rebellious reminder that there could be other roads to a better world than those created by rampant capitalism.

Warnings from the Fish

Indeed, our probe of the inner workings of a system that preys on our desires while trying to turn us into endlessly consuming machines is particularly important on a planet imperiled by global warming in ways we couldn’t even imagine then.

Take a scene I came across as I scanned the book just this week. Huey, Dewey, and Louie rush into their house with a bucket. “Look, Unca Donald,” they say, in sheer delight, “at the strange fish we caught in the bay.” Donald grabs the specimen as dollar signs ignite around his head and responds: “Strange fish!… Money!… The aquarium buys strange fish.”

In 1971, we chose that bit of Disney to illustrate how its comics then eradicated history, sweat, and social class. “There is a great round of buying, selling, and consuming,” we wrote, “but to all appearances, none of the products involved has required any effort whatsoever to make. Nature is the great labor force, producing objects of human and social utility as if they were natural.”

What concerned us then was the way workers were being elided from history and their exploitation made to magically disappear. We certainly noted the existence of nature and its exploitation for profit, but reading that passage more than 50 years later what jumps out at me isn’t the dollarization of everything or how Donald instantly turns a fish into merchandise but another burning ecological question: Why is that fish in that bucket and not the sea? Why did the kids feel they could go to the bay, scoop out one of its inhabitants, and bring it home to show Unca Donald, a displacement of nature that Armand and I didn’t even think to highlight then?

Today, that environmental perspective, that sense of how we humans continue to despoil our planet in an ever more fossil-fuelized and dangerous fashion, is simply inescapable. It stares me in the face as we now eternally break heat records planetwide.

Perhaps that fictitious fish and its castoff fate from half a century ago resonate so deeply in me today because I recently included a similar creature in my new novel, The Suicide Museum. In it, Joseph Hortha, a billionaire (of which there are so many more than in 1971), snags a yellow-fin tuna off the coast of Santa Catalina, California, a bay like the one where those three young ducks netted their fish. But Hortha, already rich beyond imagining, doesn’t see dollar signs in his catch. When he guts that king of the sea, bits of plastic spill obscenely out of its innards, the very plastic that made his fortune. Visually, in other words, that tuna levels an instant accusation at him for polluting the oceans and this planet with his products.

To atone, he will eventually make delirious plans to build a gigantic “Suicide Museum,” meant to alert humanity to the dangerous abyss towards which we’re indeed heading. In other words, to halt our suicidal rush towards Anthropocene oblivion, we need to change our lifestyles drastically. “The only way to save ourselves is to undo civilization,” Hortha explains, “unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for centuries.” He imagines “a Copernican swerve in how we interact with nature,” one in which we come to imagine ourselves not as nature’s masters or stewards, but once again as part of its patterns and rhythms.

And if just imagining a world without plastic is daunting, how much more difficult will it be to implement policies that effectively limit the way our lives are organized around a petro-universe now blistering the planet? You have to wonder (and Uncle Walt won’t help on this): Is there any chance of stunning the global upper and middle classes into abandoning their ingrained privileges, the conveniences that define all our harried existences?

Walt Disney and Salvador Allende Are Still Duking (or Do I mean Ducking?) It Out

On this increasingly desperate planet, I suspect the critique of Disney that Armand and I laid out so long ago still has a certain potency. The values symbolized in those now-ancient comic books continue to underwrite the social order (or do I mean disorder?) that’s moving us towards ultimate self-destruction globally.

Such a collective cataclysm won’t be averted unless we’re finally ready to deal with the most basic aspects of contemporary existence: unabashed competition, untrammeled consumerism, an extractive attitude towards the Earth (not to speak of a deeply militarized urge to kill one another), and a stupefying faith that a Tomorrowland filled with happiness is just a monorail ride away.

To put it bluntly, our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.

And what of Salvador Allende, dead this half-century that’s seen Uncle Walt’s values expand and invade every corner of our souls? What of his vision of a just society that seems so much farther away today, as would-be autocrats and hard-core authoritarians rise up everywhere in a world in which The Donald is anything but a duck?

President Allende rarely spoke of the environment in his speeches, but he did want us to live in a very different world. While he was no eco-prophet, he distinctly had something to say about the catastrophic predicament now facing us.

Today, we should value his life-long certainty, reiterated in that last stand in defense of democracy and dignity in Chile’s Presidential Palace 50 years ago, that history is made by unexceptional men and women who, when they dare imagine an alternative future, can accomplish exceptional things.

As the symbolic battle between Walt Disney and Salvador Allende for the hearts and minds of humanity continues, the last word doesn’t, in fact, belong to either of them, but to the rest of us. It’s we who must decide if there will even be generations, a century from now, to look back on our follies, no less thank us for subversively saving our planet for them.

Copyright 2023 Ariel Dorfman

Via Tomdispatch.com )