‘So what?’: Trump’s real threat to democracy
How sweet it is that Donald Trump’s crimes in the wake of his 2020 defeat are finally back in the headlines, just in time for the final sprint to the 2024 election.
Thank you, Jack Smith, for the recently-released court brief that meticulously details the federal case against Trump. And thank you, Liz Cheney, for crossing the aisle and warning voters that Trump’s “depraved cruelty” – putting his own vice president’s life in jeopardy on Jan. 6 – is proof that he “can never be trusted with power.” And thank you, Tim Walz, for those final minutes in the VP debate, exposing JD Vance as a election-denying MAGAt who hates democracy.
Trump has been rage-posting about Smith and Cheney (of course), and it’s easy to see why. He’s terrified of losing his campaign to stay out of jail, and the timing of Smith’s evidentiary brief could not be worse for him. Even though he’s horrifically stupid about substance, he instinctively understands media optics, so he knows it’s politically perilous to have the coup criminal case in the news between now and Nov. 5.
Granted, there’s a huge pool of potential voters who’ve inexplicably forgotten about the violent Capitol insurrection, and who don’t know or care about Trump’s relentless efforts to overthrow the free and fair election he lost – like plotting with various conspirators to scream “election fraud” where none existed, pressuring local authorities to “find” him votes that didn’t exist, trying to bully some key counties to stop tallying ballots, and ginning up slates of fake electors, and much more. For millions of feckless or oblivious voters, the developments will not matter a whit.
But with less than a month left on the clock, in a race that’s supposedly close, the chilling factoids in special counsel Smith’s court document could resonate with enough Trump-averse independents and Republicans to buttress Kamala Harris’ campaign in the home stretch.
In Bruce Springsteen’s endorsement of Harris, he said that our fight for a democratic future depends on “women and men with the national good guiding their hearts.” It’s those people, across the political spectrum, who might well heed the tidbits in Smith’s narrative. Especially these:
– On Jan. 6, after Trump personally tweeted his Capitol goons with the news that VP Mike Pence was refusing to play ball, the goons went ballistic and Pence (plus his family) had to be whisked to safety because his life was in danger. Trump, alone in his dining room, watched the violence on TV. When an aide informed Trump that Pence was imperiled, his answer was: “So what?”
– Trump told family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.” (Translation: If you vote against a totalitarian, your vote doesn’t count. The totalitarian will say he won anyway.)
– When Trump’s lawyers told him that his baseless election fraud claims wouldn’t hold up in court, Trump ordered them to file lawsuits anyway. The fight was all that mattered; in his words, “The details don’t matter.” (Example: At one point Trump spread word that 36,000 non-citizens had voted in Arizona. Fuve days later, he upped the figure to “a few hundred thousand.” Then “40 or 50,000.” Then back to 36,000. All those numbers were illusions.)
– One Trump aide, who repeatedly told Trump that his loss was legit and that his election fraud claims were delusional, got so fed up that he emailed a colleague: “It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”
– Trump wanted Republican national chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to circulate a lie about (non-existent) election fraud in a key Michigan county, but McDaniel told Trump that even Michigan’s Republican House Speaker thought the claim was “fucking nuts.”
At the tail end of the VP debate, slick Trump supplicant JD Vance tried to dodge questions about the 2020 election aftermath, insisting that he’s focused on the future. Too bad his boss didn’t get that memo, because in Michigan last week, Trump focused yet again on the past. Referring to 2020 he said: “We won, we won, we did win.”
I doubt Trump knows who William Faulkner is, but he clearly hews to one Faulknerism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The bloody chaos he inspired in the wake of that election – for which he’s been indicted on four counts by a federal grand jury – is a harbinger of what’s to come unless Harris wins by the most decisive possible margin. If that were to happen, he might finally be held accountable in court for the havoc he has wreaked on our core democratic institutions.
Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com
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