End-of-the-year clarity starts with an email I received from Donald Trump.
“Ken, Our Founding Fathers warned that America would be “A
Republic, IF you can keep it…” So, will WE “keep it?”As we now
prepare to close out 2023 – one of the darkest years in American
history where a tyrant attempted to JAIL his leading opponent for
life as an innocent man and NULLIFY your vote before voting
even begins – this question rings louder than ever.” (Printed as he
wrote it.)
Reflecting on that took me back to 2015 when I wrote a cover magazine
a story that said:
“Explaining how American voters went from the first black American
president with high approval ratings, a high Dow-Jones Market Index and
global adulation to a president-elect with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan is
not easy.”
Eight years later the question remains: how can this man have so conned
and polarized a nation, broke the law violated his oath of office and
still have a chance to be elected again as president?
The answer is in the 1952 Japanese movie Rashōmon. Various
characters saw the same murder, yet provided subjective, alternative and
contradictory versions of the incident.
The Rashōmon effect was amply demonstrated on January 6, 2021, when
thousands of people watched on television as a mob of Trump supporters
broke windows and invaded the US Capitol building. They fought with
police in a failed coup attempt to keep Donald Trump in office.
It was a political Hail Mary pass to keep the losing candidate in office as
the clock ran down on his term. And like most sports plays as the clock
runs out, it failed. In the aftermath, nearly 1,000 people have been arrested,
hundreds convicted, and investigations have concluded that the badly
planned coup was not spontaneous.
In two years the interpretations of what happened have morphed into
legends that contradict observed reality. Ah ha, the conspiracy theorist says
to me and I quote, “It was all perpetrated by the FBI, CIA, ANTIFA,
and/or radicals who hate Donald Trump.”
Various media forms ranging from Fox News to Little Old Ladies in Bemidji,
Minnesota has amplified multiple alternative explanations of what
happened. The movie explains the murder of a Samurai in a forest where
everyone lies to their advantage. And so it has been with the
insurrection, the follow-up to months of lying about election results. The Jan
6th events were designed as a major step in murdering democracy and
installing a fascist dictator who cannot lose an ‘election”.
Hours and hours of Congressional testimony, under oath, primarily from
Republicans in the Trump Administration, make clear that Trump sat and
watched the chaos unfold on Capitol Hill unwilling to tell his supporters to
stop. Of course, hours earlier in a rambling speech he explicitly had urged
this behavior: " We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell,
you #39; are not going to have a country anymore.”
Most people have an inherent sense of taste and smell and can apply this
to more than just sour milk. The new Republican speaker of the House has
a different view. He believes faces should be obscured in any publicly
released footage to prevent crowd-sourced identification. Incredulous
journalists recorded him saying," We have to blur some faces of persons
who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to
be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ.”
It has been 36 months since the attack. More than 1,237 defendants have
been charged in nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Approximately 444 defendants have been charged with assaulting,
resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 120
individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous
weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted at the Capitol,
about 80 from the U.S. Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan
Police Department.
Approximately 714 individuals have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal
charges, many of whom faced or will face incarceration at sentencing.
Approximately 210 have pleaded guilty to felonies. Another 504 have
pleaded guilty to misdemeanors. For so-called “tourists” these are
astonishing statistics. More astonishing is how perfectly normal people
with significant sensibilities about so many things can suspend all of that to
side with ideological political positions that are misbegotten.
Trump’s rhetoric for the past months has been inspired by the multiple
indictments and legal issues he faces. Winning is critical because another
term may immunize him against many of the legal problems he faces. This
is consistent with Trump’s belief that the only person who counts
is “me, me, and I.” Lately he has been channeling the ghost of Adolph
Hitler with literal translations of Main Kampf:
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists,
and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our
country.” Hitler and Mussolini used these terms to dehumanize people and
encourage their followers to engage in violence. This attack on
immigrants— “nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right
now … It’s poisoning the blood of our country”—was absurd considering his
mother was an illegal immigrant to the USA. The “poisoning” comment was
a white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point.
In case you missed his intent to ignore the Constitution and create a new
America in his image, he told his MAGA supporters “I am your warrior.
I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I
am your retribution.
His fund-raising emails are insistent and frequent, as are his attacks on
George Soros. This writer gauges Trump’s anxiety level by how often he
attacks the elderly Soros. As a teenager, the European-born Soros
survived the Holocaust to make a fortune in America by investing wisely.
As a philanthropist he has supported liberal causes, which annoys Trump
on two levels—that Soros has real money, while Trump has pretend money
and because Trump has never been inclined to donate to anyone.
Asked about his presidency, Trump said it was one of the great
presidencies.“Even the opponents sometimes say he did very well.”Yet, he
appeared to juggle language and intent when he added, “We’ve been
waging an all-out war on American democracy.”
Or maybe it was his only truthful statement of the day.
By: Kenneth Tiven