Or perhaps, because of poll numbers that fall as trial dates approach, the Republican Party won’t end up nominating the current frontrunner as their presidential candidate in 2024.

And, of course, in the general election, despite its lukewarm attitude toward Joe Biden, the American electorate could still unite in the face of the political equivalent of an asteroid strike to reject the greatest-ever threat to American democracy.

But sometimes you just have to face your nightmares. What would Donald J. Trump do to the world if he once again enters the White House in 2025?

Enter the Joker

The world of geopolitics is relatively predictable—until it isn’t. The greatest source of unpredictability are the wild cards: Vladimir Putin’s decision last year to invade Ukraine, the subsequent victory of political outsider Gustavo Petro in the Colombian presidential elections, the surprise announcement this year of a diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Donald Trump is the ultimate wild card, a joker-in-chief whose every pronouncement threatens to disrupt the status quo. When he became president in 2016, he certainly made some predictable decisions—canceling U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement, withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement—which fulfilled campaign promises.

But who could have guessed that he would sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un not just once (Singapore), not just twice (Vietnam), but three times (at the DMZ)? I don’t remember any pundits predicting that Trump would commit an impeachable offense by delaying aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. And what about Trump’s attempt to buy Greenland, his disparagement of “shithole countries,” his sudden decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and greenlight Turkey’s invasion of that country?

Unpredictability is not always a bad thing. Meeting with the North Korean leader could have been a shrewd move if Trump actually understood a thing or two about Kim Jong Un and his country. But there was no method in Trump’s erratic behavior. He was not a crafty “mad man” trying to emulate Richard Nixon. He was just going with his (fast-food-filled) gut.

So, the first thing to know about the prospect of another Trump term, when it comes to foreign policy, is that all bets are off (along with all gloves).

Battling the State

Trump and his MAGA followers have an almost pathological disgust for government. His future plan to fire huge numbers of federal employees, based on an executive order he pushed through in the waning days of 2020, targets about 50,000 civil servants who have the most impact on federal policy: the so-called deep state.

But Trump and company don’t simply want to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon famously said. They want to remake the state to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of themselves and their wealthy friends. That requires removing the checks on executive power that are embedded in the federal bureaucracy.

Basically, Trump wants to transform a system that already tilts dangerously in the direction of oligopoly into a full-blown patronage state along the lines of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Vladimir Putin has accomplished in Russia.

The same can be said for his attitude toward the institutions of the international community. In 2025, Trump will again try to wreck as many global deals and bodies as possible, from the Paris agreement on climate change to the UN Human Rights Council. He’ll do his best to undermine NATO, even withdrawing from the security pact, according to his former national security advisor John Bolton, himself no friend to internationalism.

Trump despises everything global beyond his own business empire. He’s not against free trade per se, and he is certainly not thinking of improving the lives of U.S. workers. But he fancies himself a great dealmaker who can force the Europeans, the Chinese, and everyone else to negotiate more favorable terms for U.S. businesses. For Trump, this must be in a bilateral context, mano a mano. That’s why he opposes multilateral trade deals, even if they would ultimately advantage the United States.

If he wins, Trump has promised to create a tariff wall around the United States at a rate of 10 percent for all countries. Right now, some countries face practically no tariffs while a country like China has to deal with an average rate of 19 percent. Trump’s proposal, which has the odor of something composed on the back of a cocktail napkin, is designed not so much to protect American interests as to reward nations (with tariff reductions) that kowtow to Trump and stimulate a global trade war among everyone else.

This stance might eventually cost Trump the election, because Wall Street doesn’t trust him to make good deals. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal upbraided Trump for his scattershot protectionism. Sure, such populist moves might win him some votes in battleground states—though progressives and conservatives alike argue that those policies actually lost jobs in the Rust Belt—but it will probably send a lot of high-level donors to the Democrats. Alas, in the United States, money doesn’t just talk, it votes.

War and (Not So Much) Peace

Trump is positioning himself as the peace candidate. Like everything else about the man, it’s a sham.

Trump has claimed that he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours by using threats to goad both sides to the negotiating table. The plan, specifically, would be to threaten Ukraine with a cut-off in aid and simultaneously threaten Russia with a sharp increase in aid to its adversary.  Trump makes no mention of the other countries that supply Ukraine with substantial military assistance or the current difficulty of pushing additional Ukraine aid packages through Congress.

The plan consists of a double-bluff—and is, itself, a bluff. Having shown his hand, however, Trump would find it rather difficulty to execute his plan.

Elsewhere, Trump is likely to escalate not de-escalate. Having wrecked the Iran nuclear deal, Trump will likely pick up where he left off. During his time in office, Trump risked war with Iran on two occasions, ordering the assassination of a top military leader and contemplating missile strikes in his last days in office. Because the ayatollahs will never contemplate a Trump Tower Tehran, thus rebuffing the most transactional and self-serving president in U.S. history, the Donald will no doubt turn up the volume of his attacks on the country.

There are other possibilities for war under Trump. After all, he’s irascible, quick to anger, and trigger-happy. During his presidency, he threatened North Korea, Venezuela, and Syria.

But honestly, the most terrifying war that Trump is planning is his attacks on America: on the Constitution, on democracy, on the state. The only reason that Trump in a second term might not end up waging war on another country is because he’ll be too focused on destroying his own.

The world awaits the judgment of the American voters. Democracy is all about learning from collective mistakes. If America makes the same mistake again, it will have committed democratic harakiri.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Applying a different standard to a powerful person reflects only contempt for the rule of law.

Mitchell Zimmerman

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

A Grand Jury empaneled by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has issued an indictment (full text here) against Donald John Trump on four counts,

Smith delivered a statement, saying, “Today, an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The indictment was issued by a grand jury of citizens here in the District of Columbia and sets forth the crimes charged in detail. I encourage everyone to read it in full.”

This indictment follows a federal indictment for mishandling classified documents and an indictment by the Manhattan district attorney on election fraud involving the payment of hush money to a porn star and a Playboy model to prevent voters from learning about his simultaneous affairs with the two women while his wife Melania was pregnant with their son Barron.

Although the four charges are specific, the over-all implication of the most recent indictment is that Trump set in motion complex machinery in order to overthrow the lawfully elected government of the United States, the first time a US president has behaved this way. Who else wanted to see the US government fall? King George III, Jefferson Davis, Adolf Hitler. Trump joins this rogue’s gallery. Smith’s indictment goes into the details of a meticulous plot to prevent the electoral college from voting Joe Biden in and to prevent Congress from certifying the win, which involved setting up fake electors, pressuring state ballot counters, threatening Vice President Mike Pence, and encouraging an armed insurrection at the Capitol.

I wrote in early 2017 even before Trump was inaugurated about the dangers I saw of his sort of personality assuming the presidency, and it seems to me that I was prescient. In the light of this indictment it is worth revisiting my thoughts in that essay, in which I may have coined the term “psychopathocracy.” Now you see what I meant:

“We are now on the brink of a new form of government, undreamed of by Aristotle, who spoke of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. We are headed to a psychopathocracy, which has something in common with the degraded form of classical regime types that Aristotle warned against (he thought monarchy can deteriorate into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into demagoguery). Psychopathocracy is the rule of persons who lack a basic ability to empathize with others, to feel their pain or to feel guilty about harming them.

“Psychopathocracy is different from mere bad policy. We can all disagree about the direction of government or particular initiatives. Often people backing a policy that harms others do not understand the harm, or think it is averting a greater harm. It isn’t true that all high politicians are psychopaths who don’t care about injury being done to people. And high politicians have put in programs like social security that have lifted millions of elders out of poverty over decades. They did it because they cared about people.

“About 1% of the population is comprised of born psychopaths. The condition of a lack of conscience and inability to empathize with the pain of others or feel remorse may well be a condition one is born with, and in a third of cases can be tested for with an MRI scan. It is thought that another 5 percent of the population loses its ability to empathize through brain damage, trauma or other sorts of physical or psychological injuries.

“It is further thought that about 12% of the population is easily manipulated by psychopaths into pyschopath-like behavior or ideas. This 18% of the population is potentially extremely dangerous. They do not have a feedback loop for emotional or physical distress. They are the sort of people who would run somebody over and flee the scene without calling for medical help for the victim.

“Psychopaths in power are dangerous because of their inability to feel the pain of others. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney set of a chain of events in motion that left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, and they displaced from their homes (i.e. made homeless) 4 million of Iraq’s then 30 million people. This is not to mention the 4,486 Us troops killed the 500,000 wounded physically or psychologically). They set up a chain of events that led to a dangerous cult, Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) taking over 40% of Iraqi territory. But if you ask them if they regret what they did, they so ‘no.’ And I think they are being honest. They cannot empathize with the victims they helped create.

“Politicians who want to deprive people of their health care so as to lower taxes on billionaires, who want to make women bear the babies of their rapists, who want to torture helpless prisoners, who want to burn fossil fuels for profit when they endanger the planet, who want to carpet bomb or nuke millions of non-combatants to get at a few guerrillas– these are psychopaths.

“Psychopaths are not necessarily criminal or violent, though there are four times as many psychopaths in prison as in the general population. All serial killers are psychopaths. Fraudsters like Bernie Madoff are psychopaths.

“CEOs of corporations and successful politicians are also disproportionately likely to be psychopaths. Robert Hare developed a 20-point checklist for the condition, which, however, does not exactly overlap with the definition in DSM-V, the description of mental conditions put out by the American Psychiatric Association. Hare did some of his research in prisons and so his checklist is skewed a bit for criminal activity.

“You don’t need to be a psychologist to recognize that Donald J. Trump and several nominees to his incoming administration exhibit obvious signs of psychopathy. Having psychopaths in the White House is not unprecedented. It seems pretty obvious that Dick Nixon, a pathological liar who actually derailed the 1968 peace negotiations with Vietnam to keep his rival Hubert Humphrey from looking good to the voters, had this condition. Untold American soldiers and Vietnamese peasants died so Nixon could be president.

“What is remarkable about Trump and his cronies is that their hatred is raw and broad-spectrum. Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, Muslim-Americans, white liberals (coded by the Neo-Nazis as N-lovers) and some of them don’t like Jews very much. That is, they seem to hate an absolute majority of the American population.

“Trump’s psychopathy is evident in his exaggerated estimation of himself, his need constantly to troll the public for stimulation, his superficial charm, his need to lie, his inability to feel remorse or guilt, his emotional shallowness, his promiscuity and lack of impulse control and serial sexual assault, his use of bankruptcy to avoid paying his creditors and his attraction to a business like casinos which preys on people (many games in casinos are skewed for the House at rates of 11% and on up even to 20%). Trump is more disciplined and single-minded about his career than most psychopaths manage, but otherwise he seems a classic case. He also suffers from a distinct but related condition, of narcissistic personality disorder.

“Many of the people around Trump, who speak for him on television, who are tapped to advise him on national security, on the environment, on issues like net neutrality, also exhibit clear signs of psychopathy. Since only about 3 million Americans are born psychopaths, the idea that a whole group of them is moving into power in Washington together is pretty scary. And remember that some 38 million Americans are so ethically and emotionally fragile that they will easily fall under the spell of the psychopaths. That is, if directed to beat up members of minorities, they will gladly do so.

“Since about a third of psychopaths can now be diagnosed with an MRI for brain abnormalities, maybe it is desirable that candidates for high office in business and government be scanned: Psychcentral writes, a “study found that [cold-blooded psychopathic] offenders displayed significantly reduced grey matter volumes in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles compared to [impulsive psychopathic] offenders and healthy non-offenders.”

“Until such scanning can be carried out, the safest thing is to assume that someone who talks and acts like a psychopath is one.

“You cannot reason with a psychopath, you cannot shame such a person or appeal to their better instincts. There is no point in writing open letters to them. The usual way of dealing with politicians who develop some wild ideas in the course of their search for voters and campaign funds will not work.

“The only thing you can do is recognize their damaged character and try to protect yourself and others from it. When they encourage minorities to be beaten up, we have to stop that. When they encourage universities to put professors on trial, we have to reject that. When they begin beating drums for war, we have to try to avert it. Pressuring the normal people in Congress can be done (they responded quickly to angry telephone calls about plans to weaken ethics requirements for people in congress).”

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The damning Jan. 6 public hearings revealed a plethora of historical detail, but they also shed light on character. Some of these revelations were profiles in pusillanimity.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), one of the slimiest creatures ever to crawl into the halls of America’s legislature, gloried in a raised fist toward the assembled fascist hordes of the far right summoned by the lunatic-in-chief. A member of the DC police told the committee that she found the gesture deeply offensive, more especially since Hawley thought himself safe in the halls of Congress after having riled up a crowd she had to face (and which gave Officer Brian Sicknick two fatal strokes after nearly crushing him to death in a doorway to the Capitol– while injuring 146 other policemen).

When the crowd he had helped instigate invaded his supposedly safe space, did Hawley greet them with another raised fist? Did he join them in their mission?

No.

He lit out like a craven poltroon, whose frantic flight is impossible to watch without a melancholy hilarity. The mirth wells up from the Warner Brothers cartoon-like reversal that led to his frenzied retreat, the melancholy from watching a benighted fool to whom the misguided people of Missouri had unwisely entrusted their fates.

I propose that we alter the American idiom “to haul ass” from now on, substituting “to hawley ass.”

Trump himself, having lit the fuse, allowed himself to be squirreled away back at the Fox News situation room in the White House, rather than leading the crowd, as he had promised to do. One does not lead from a vehicle, and Trump knew his Secret Service agents would never let him be driven into the midst of a mob, so whatever drama he staged was a mere matter of protesting too much. He could have gone to the Capitol if he had really wanted too. He was still the most powerful man in the world. He chose to let his useful idiots take the heat, and has not gone to visit any of them in jail after they were quite rightly convicted of every crime from seditious conspiracy to trespassing.

There were the Republican members of Congress, who, having been spirited away into tunnels and undisclosed locations, fleeing with all the alacrity of a panic-stricken hawleyism from the QAnon Shaman and other assorted gun nuts, turned around and voted to overthrow the US government by refusing to certify Joe Biden’s win, and ever after suffered the vapors, wrist to pasty forehead, at the very thought of censuring the Apricot Adolf.

Then, take Steve Bannon– please! Here is a blowhard who urged on Trump and the insurrectionists and blew off a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. When he was indicted and faced a courtroom, he thundered, as Jose Paglieri points out at the Daily Beast, that he would make the trial “the misdemeanor of hell.” In the event, he did did not take the stand to denounce the perfidious proceedings for his three-sheets-to the-wind geriatric YouTube audience. He did not have his attorneys even put on a defense, and skipped attending himself, too bashful to withstand the stern gaze of the judge. T.S. Eliot in The Hollow Men, observed, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” Eliot was haunted by the figure of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel of the European colonial rape of the Congo, The Heart of Darkness. The Hollow Men of the black shirt Trump insurgency have also dwindled from a roar at their predation upon the nation to the mewling of broken clowns hawking snake oil at a brigade of gullible washouts. The horror, the horror, indeed.

The gallery of the yellow-bellied goes on, including Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, who briefly found their cojones somehow with a flashlight under the covers after four years of suffering from cryptorchidism, and managed to at least protest that Trump had nearly succeeded in having them lynched. After this momentary brush with manhood, they quickly turned choirboy in the church of Trump, praising him and seeking his approval, for all the world as though the Munich city elders had sucked up to Hitler after the failed beer-hall putsch.

Most Republican senators refused even to meet with Brian Sicknick’s mother Gladys when she lobbied them to form a commission to investigate Jan. 6. Even the dozen, out of 50, GOP senators who did meet with her voted against the commission. If it hadn’t been for the courage of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, with whom I likely agree on very little else, in joining Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 Special Committee, the entire exercise could have been dismissed as Democrat (that’s what they call them) partisanship.

Much of the Republican Party has been reduced to quivering protoplasm, whimpering under the lash of Trump’s whiny invective, alternating between morbid algolagnia and contemptible dastardliness.

They say that the investigation is a two-track one. The first track looks at the possibility of charging Trump with seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct a government proceeding, charges already leveled against some of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and planners on the far right.

The second track focuses on possible fraud charges growing out of the pressure Trump put on government officials to declare the him the winner of the election, as well as the scheme to come up with phony electors to substitute for the real thing.

They reveal that evidence has been presented to a secret grand jury, and that massive numbers of documents have been subpoenaed, including from Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

They caution that many investigations are conducted behind the scenes that do not result in charges, implying that the DoJ efforts could be wound up without an indictment.

Still, their reporting is the first time that DoJ insiders have leaked the explosive news that Trump is being looked at seriously, to the extent of grand jury proceedings.

The United States does not have much of a history of holding its high office-holders to account. No former president or vice president has been convicted of crimes committed while in office. Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President, Aaron Burr, was tried three times for treason on the basis of his Western adventures after leaving office under a cloud for shooting dead Alexander Hamilton in a duel. He was never convicted.

Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were all impeached by the House of Representatives but not impeached-and-removed-from-office by the Senate. Ulysses S. Grant, Johnson’s successor, may not have been personally corrupt, though he engaged in nepotism, but many of the people around him were on the take big time, including a cousin. He was not ever charged.

Tricky Dick Nixon’s one-time vice president, Spiro Agnew, for whom the hack William Safire wrote the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” to describe Nixon’s political opponents and critics, resigned the vice presidency under a cloud. An investigation of him for corruption while he had been governor of Maryland implicated him in tax evasion and bribery schemes. He copped to the tax evasion charge to avoid prison.

I’m not sure what Nixon would have been charged with. Conspiracy to commit burglary? But he resigned the presidency in 1974 and was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, so we’ll never know.

Since the sedition charges against Trump would be based on his actions while in office, he differs from Aaron Burr, who went west after he resigned as VP in 1805.

Aaron Bur, painting by John Vanderlyn, public domain.

Burr was full of big talk, which the British ambassador dutifully recorded, about getting the Western territories to secede from the union. Worldhistory.us explains that the ambassador, “Anthony Merry, wrote to London that Burr asked for funding ‘to effect the separation of the Western part of the United States.’ He said Burr even requested that the Royal Navy seize New Orleans during the takeover.

Via Wikipedia. Sources: Natural Earth and Portland State University (https://gist.github.com/wboykinm/05756ac2e625bae9ed81). This file was derived from: Louisiana Purchase.png
Author, William Morris, (Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

In fact, Burr seems to have been trying to leverage some money out of the British to buy up land from Mexico in what is now Texas. Burr’s loud scheming created a widespread impression in the East that he was trying to lead a secession of territories in the Louisiana purchase, The trials ended with a not guilty verdict, though his attorney, Henry Clay, eventually became convinced that his client was indeed guilty and had lied to him.

As for Jefferson Davis, he was a senator from Mississippi who in the 1850s served President Franklin Pierce as Secretary of War (people were more honest about language in those days). When the South seceded, he resigned and went to Richmond as president of the Confederacy. He was not very good at it.

Jefferson Davis. Public Domain.

Davis was captured in 1865 and was considered a traitor, spending two years in the brig. But no formal charges were ever brought and after the two years he was released. Later in life he urged reconciliation of the South and the North.

So Trump now joins this abject company, this rogues gallery of former high officials of the United States of America who were considered guilty of sedition or treason. Burr and Davis escaped any punishment. The question is whether Trump will, as well.

The House Committee had wanted some 19,000 Eastman emails, but he only released less than half that number. He claims attorney-client privilege over the rest, alleging that he was serving on Trump’s legal team. Eastman was the one who came up with the crackpot theory that Congress could refuse to certify Joe Biden’s victory. He also once questioned whether Kamala Harris, who was born in the US, could be vice president as the daughter of two immigrants. The answer is yes.

The Jan. 6 Committee is trying to convince Chief Judge Philip S. Gutierrez and his colleagues that Eastman’s claim of privilege is bogus and to order him to turn over the remaining emails.

The filing argues that many of Eastman’s emails to which it seeks access are to persons other than Trump and wouldn’t be affected by privilege, even if Eastman had been Trump’s lawyer, which they dispute. They say there is no evidence that he represented the former president. Their relationship appears rather to have been that of two politicians.

The committee argued,

“And even if Plaintiff could establish an attorney￾client relationship and some broad common interest agreement, Plaintiff chose to distribute these communications over an unprotected university server even after he was expressly admonished by the University President and reminded that he was not free to use University email and computers in support of a political candidate. Finally, Plaintiff admitted that President Trump authorized him to discuss their communications in public, apparently in an effort to establish some form of defense for President Trump’s conduct. Any privilege over these subjects was, therefore, waived.”

In addition, they say, they can’t find any evidence that Eastman worked as a lawyer for Trump in the sense of like, you know, preparing for a court case or some other actual attorney stuff.

Finally, a client can’t plot a future crime with an attorney or even using the attorney, and then claim that privilege shields the two of them from investigation. I mean, the attorney can, indeed must, keep privileged a client’s admission of guilt for a past crime. But if the client is scheming to commit a future crime with the attorney or even just uses the attorney in some way to further that crime without the latter knowing it, that is a deal-breaker for privilege. It comes down to the intent of the client.

So this is where the Committee’s bombshell accusations come in. To break Eastman’s claim to privilege, they are alleging that he and Trump were plotting a crime together, to wit, the overthrow of the elected US government.

The Committee reviews some of the evidence it has gathered for this criminal conspiracy:

“…on January 2, 2021, the President and Plaintiff convened a video conference with hundreds of state legislators from swing states won by candidate Biden.19 The Trump team reportedly urged the legislators to “decertify” the election results in their States. 20 According to Michigan State Senator Ed McBroom, this call focused (without any valid legal or factual basis) on the purported power of state legislators to reject the rulings of federal and state courts and overturn already certified election results.21 That same day, President Trump spoke with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pressing false and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and ultimately asking Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” for Trump in the State.

Georgia officials are investigating whether Trump’s attempt to pressure Raffensperger was a crime.

The Committee further points out that Eastman made inflammatory and false remarks about a stolen election to the mob on the mall on January 6. Their filing adds,

“Shortly thereafter—with the assault on the United States Capitol already underway—Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m., “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” The evidence obtained by the Select Committee indicates that President Trump was aware that the violent crowd had breached security and was assaulting the Capitol when Mr. Trump tweeted. The evidence will show that rioters reacted to this tweet, resulting in further violence at the Capitol. Indeed, rioters at the Capitol were shouting for the Vice President to be hanged.”

There you have it. That is huge. The committee is saying that Trump was using Twitter to egg on the insurrectionists, of whose rioting he was already aware.

Are they saying he was trying to get his vice president, Mike Pence, killed, so as to pave the way for a more pliable figure who would help overthrow the election?

The implications of the Committee’s findings are dark, very dark.

Senators, acting in the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump that begins on Feb. 9, will soon have to decide whether to convict the former president for inciting a deadly, violent insurrection at the Capitol building on Jan. 6.

A majority of House members, including 10 Republicans, took the first step in the two-step impeachment process in January. They voted to impeach Trump, for “incitement of insurrection.” Their resolution states that he “willfully made statements that, in context, encourage – and foreseeably resulted in – lawless action at the Capitol, such as: ‘if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’”

Impeachment proceedings that consider incitement to insurrection are rare in American history. Yet dozens of legislators – including some Republicans – say that Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol contributed to an attempted insurrection against American democracy itself.

Such claims against Trump are complicated. Rather than wage direct war against sitting U.S. representatives, Trump is accused of using language to motivate others to do so. Some have countered that the connection between President Trump’s words and the violence of Jan. 6 is too tenuous, too abstract, too indirect to be considered viable.

However, decades of research on social influence, persuasion and psychology show that the messages that people encounter heavily influence their decisions to engage in certain behaviors.

How it works

The research shows that the messages people consume affect their behaviors in three ways.

First, when a person encounters a message that advocates a behavior, that person is likely to believe that the behavior will have positive results. This is particularly true if the speaker of that message is liked or trusted by the target of the message.

Second, when these messages communicate positive beliefs or attitudes about a behavior – as when our friends told us that smoking was “cool” when we were teenagers – message targets come to believe that those they care about would approve of their engaging in the behavior or would engage in the behavior themselves.

Finally, when those messages contain language that highlights the target’s ability to perform a behavior, as when a president tells raucous supporters that they have the power to overturn an election, they develop the belief that they can actually carry out that behavior.

Consider something we have all encountered in a more lighthearted context – messages designed to motivate exercise. These messages often tell us one (or more) of three things. They tell us that exercise will lead to positive outcomes – “You will get physically fit!” They tell us that others exercise or would approve of our taking part in exercise – “Work out with a friend!” And they tell us that it is within our power to begin an exercise program – “Anybody can do it!”

In this context, these messages are likely to increase the message target’s likelihood of exercising.

Unfortunately, as we saw on Jan. 6, these principles of persuasion apply to less benign behaviors as well.

How Trump did it

Now let us return to what happened in Washington on Jan. 6.

Even in the weeks before the election, Trump’s rhetoric was belligerent. His campaign solicited supporters to “enlist” in the “Army for Trump” to help reelect him. Following the election and in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol, President Trump made repeated false claims of election fraud, arguing that something needed to be done to remedy the alleged fraud. His language often took an aggressive tone, suggesting that his supporters must “fight” to preserve the integrity of the election.

By inundating his supporters with these lies, Trump made two key beliefs acceptable to his followers. First, that aggression against those accused of trying to undermine his “victory” is an acceptable and useful means of political action. Second, that aggressive, possibly violent attitudes against Trump’s political adversaries are common among all his supporters.

Words have consequences

In the weeks following the election, allies of President Trump, including Rudy Giuliani, Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and others, only reinforced these beliefs among Trump supporters by perpetuating his lies.

With these beliefs and attitudes in place, Trump’s Jan. 6 speech outside the White House served as a key accelerant to the attack by sparking the raucous crowd to action.

In his pre-attack speech, Trump said that he and his followers should “fight like hell” against “bad people.” He said that they would “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to give Republican legislators the boldness they need to “take back the country.” He said that “this is a time for strength” and that the crowd was beholden to “very different rules” than would normally be called for.

Less than two hours after these words were spoken, violent insurrectionists and domestic terrorists breached the Capitol.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

In the case of Donald Trump, the relationship between words and actions never seems clear. But make no mistake, there is a scientifically valid case for incitement.

Decades of research have demonstrated that language affects our behaviors – words have consequences. And when those words champion aggression, make violence acceptable and embolden audiences to action, incidents like the insurrection at the Capitol are the result.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 12, 2021.

Kurt Braddock, Assistant Professor of Public Communication, American University School of Communication

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Bloomberg Quicktake: “Trump’s Guilt Inciting Riot Is ‘Unmistakable,’ Democrats Say”

In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that President Donald Trump has no immunity, by virtue of being president, from a state grand jury subpoena for his business and tax records in a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney.

“[N]o citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion.

The court rejected the president’s claims that permitting subpoenas from state prosecutors would open the floodgates to prosecutors nationwide, distracting him from his presidential duties. It reiterated what the court had said in a previous case in which President Bill Clinton had tried to avoid giving a deposition, Clinton v. Jones: The Constitution does not require protecting the president from state grand jury subpoenas.

While a victory for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., the ruling does send the case back to the lower courts to determine if the president has any other basis available to any citizen to object. The courts typically respect the scope of grand jury subpoenas, and reject attempts to limit them.

And because grand jury proceedings are secret, the public is unlikely to see any of the subpoenaed documents unless Vance charges Trump with a crime.

Striking a balance

Two companion cases, also decided 7-2, involved congressional subpoenas for some of the same Trump financial records. These were a major test of Congress’ ability to exercise oversight of the presidency.

[Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

The court held that concerns about separation of powers in disputes between the president and Congress require the courts to balance the competing interests of both. Since Congress’ ability to subpoena records is tied to its authority to legislate, its demands for materials from a president must be “no broader,” the court said, than is necessary to aid in enacting legislation – especially where that legislation may affect the presidency.

“The more detailed and substantial the evidence of Congress’ legislative purpose the better,” wrote Roberts.

The court sent the two consolidated cases back to the lower courts to apply this new standard. Upholding Congress’ oversight power will require legislative committees to make a stronger and more specific link between the records they want and legislative proposals than they had made before.

Congressional oversight limits

Not since the “Red Scare” subpoena cases from the 1950s-1960s, where Congress conducted hearings that many called political witch hunts against alleged communists, and the Watergate era in the 1970s, when President Nixon claimed through his attorney that he was “as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment,” has the Supreme Court taken up such far-reaching questions about the ability of Congress to oversee and check the president’s power.

Congress is investigating whether Trump used his power as president to profit his business, whether he accurately reported his finances as all government employees are required to do and whether he accepted gifts from foreign governments without permission from Congress, which is banned by the Constitution. This ban reflected the framers’ concern that no official be subject to foreign intrigue or influence of any kind – a common practice at the time among foreign sovereigns.

Trump v. Mazars related to those investigations. Trump tried to stop his accountants and the bank he deals with from providing information subpoenaed by two House committees – oversight and intelligence.

Trump objected to these subpoenas on the grounds that they lack a legislative purpose and that their true aim was to obtain personal information for political advantage.

The Court of Appeals rejected this argument. It found that the records the congressional committees wanted were relevant to Congress’ legislative duties, and thus the subpoenas were legitimate.

All subpoenas from, and investigations by, Congress must have a legislative purpose. By law, Congress has the authority to pursue any “subject on which legislation can be had” as well as inquiries into fraud, waste and abuse in government programs. The broad standard for upholding that investigative power is affirmed in the Supreme Court’s ruling in McGrain v. Daugherty in 1927, which established that “the power of inquiry – with process to enforce it – is an essential and appropriate” aspect of how Congress carries out its legislative function.

The case that was consolidated with Mazars was about House committee subpoenas for Trump companies’ bank records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One. As with the Mazars case, Trump tried to stop the banks from handing over the documents.

Those subpoenas were related to reviews by the House Financial Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee of the movement of illicit funds through the global financial system and money laundering. Deutsche Bank, which has loaned large amounts of money to Trump businesses, has already been fined US$10 billion for a money-laundering scheme unrelated to Trump.

The Court of Appeals rejected Trump’s argument and said Congress was legitimately entitled to pursue and get the records.

They wrote that the committees’ focus on illegal money laundering was not on any purported misconduct by Trump but instead on whether such activity occurred in the banking industry, the adequacy of banking regulation and the need for legislation to fix any problems – all legitimate oversight goals.

Nixon, Clinton precedents

None of these cases involved the president claiming executive privilege – the doctrine that keeps confidential many of the communications between the president and his closest advisers. Nor did the cases involve any challenge to the performance of his official duties.

All concerned only his private business activities before he assumed office. The records from before he was president were relevant because he refused to divest from his businesses, raising the concern of whether his official actions once in office conflict with, or appear to conflict with, his existing business interests.

Two previous Supreme Court cases weighed significantly in the court’s decisions in these cases.

One is United States v. Nixon, which took place during the Watergate scandal, when Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski subpoenaed the tape recordings of conversations between the president and four of his advisers who had been indicted. President Richard Nixon tried to claim executive privilege, saying the recordings of conversations between him and his advisers were confidential and should not be given to the special prosecutor.

The court ruled unanimously that the need for the tapes in the aides’ upcoming trial outweighed the president’s claim of confidentiality. And although no case applying the Nixon case precedent to a congressional subpoena has reached the Supreme Court, the implication drawn from the case was that if his privilege can be overcome by a subpoena for conversations with his closest aides, business records generated before a president came to office could legitimately be subpoenaed by Congress.

The other case relied on in the Trump financial documents decisions is Clinton v. Jones in 1997. The case stemmed from a sexual harassment suit against Clinton concerning his conduct before his presidency. Clinton had refused to give a deposition in the case, insisting that it would be a distraction from his duties as president and an invitation to litigants to harass any president while in office with lawsuits.

The case description on the Supreme Court website asks, “Is a serving President … entitled to absolute immunity from civil litigation arising out of events which transpired prior to his taking office?”

The court’s answer in 1997: No.

On July 9, 2020, the court gave the same response, this time to presidential claims of absolute immunity to grand jury requests for information in a criminal investigation. And it reaffirmed that, while Congress might have to provide better reasons for asking the president to produce records, it has a right to exercise strong oversight of the presidency.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article originally published on May 8, 2020.

Stanley M. Brand, Distinguished Fellow in Law and Government, Pennsylvania State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

ABC News: “Supreme Court rules president cannot block subpoenas for financial records”

However, Trump’s stepping back from the precipice of a hot war with Iran does not obliterate his history of chest-thumpng war mongering and his repeated commitment to war crimes. Following Soleimani’s murder, Trump threatened to attack Iranian sites of cultural significance, tweeting: “the US has targeted 52 Iranian sites . . . some at a very high level & important to Iranian culture.” This is a war crime. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property and the Geneva Conventions prohibit acts of hostility directed against historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute people’s cultural or spiritual heritage. “Trump’s threat to attack Iran’s cultural heritage shows his callous disregard for the global rule of law,” said Andrea Prasow, acting Washington director at Human Rights Watch.

Prasow’s assertion is bolstered by Trump’s violent actions throughout the world and reflect his administration’s broader disregard for human rights and civilian lives in Iran and elsewhere. The United Nations mission in Afghanistan reported recently that U.S. airstrikes and Afghan security forces killed more civilians in the first half of 2019 than the Taliban did, according to the Los Angeles Times. In Syria and Iraq, Airwars — an independent group monitoring civilian casualties — says that between 8,000 and 13,000 noncombatants were killed in the war against the Islamic state, with the biggest increase during Trump’s administration.

In Yemen, where U.S. – equipped Saudi Arabia bombs insurgents, the U.N. says almost 20,000 civilians have been killed. Last September, a U.N. panel warned that the United States may be complicit in war crimes that not only includes indiscriminate bombing and shelling, but also torture, sexual and gender-based violence.

Throughout his presidency and even prior to his election, Trump has repeatedly supported potential atrocities and expressed enthusiasm for war crimes. During a Republican debate in 2016, Trump said he “would bring back waterboarding,” adding that he would also “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” — a violation of the Geneva Conventions prohibition against torture. Trump also argued during the GOP primaries that he wanted to torture suspected terrorists even “if it doesn’t work” in producing valuable intelligence, because “they deserve it anyway.” He further vowed, on Fox and Friends: “When you get terrorists, you have to take out their families.” A deliberate attack on a civilian or a non-combatant must be regarded as a war crime.

Once in office, Trump acted in support of accused war criminals, intervening in their cases in defiance of military leaders’ wishes, and dismissing charges against Americans accused of deadly brutality. In four separate cases since the beginning of his presidency, and for the first time in the history of modern warfare, an American president has pardoned service members accused or convicted of war crimes. On Twitter, Trump complained, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” Making no distinction between killing combatants and killing the innocent, this philosophy demonstrates that the Commander-in-Chief recognizes no legal restraints and runs a gangster administration that celebrates war crimes.

—-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

“Trump threatens to hit 52 more targets in Iran | DW News”