It was November 22, 2020 at approximately 1215 pm. I was waiting at the corner of Saticoy Avenue and Telephone Road in Ventura, CA with my daughters in the car. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was taking them out of the house to get some air; we were going to go browse for Christmas presents.
As I approached the stoplight at the intersection, a Harley Davidson motorcyclist cruised to a stop directly in front of me and in the middle of the crosswalk, blocking myself and other traffic. The motorcyclist held his hand down low, as if to tell me to stand back. A caravan of Trump supporters — flags flying from their cars — proceeded to drive by in front of us. “Who the fuck does this guy think he is?” I said out loud. I was incredulous. This Harley guy, with an American flag on the back of his motorcycle, was blocking traffic for his fellow Trump supporters. He was pretending to be a traffic cop. But he wasn’t a traffic cop.
Who does this guy think he is?!?
Indeed.
The caravan of aggrieved Trump supporters were angry that Joe Biden won the election, and one of the approximately twenty cars in the caravan had “stolen election” written on the rear window.
As I sat there for at least a minute or two waiting for the Trump supporters to pass and glaring at the Harley Trump guy — dressed all in black, with a “veteran” patch on his leather sleeveless vest — my ten-year old daughter rolled down her car window and yelled out, “Trump lost! Trump lost!” I warned her sternly to be quiet. The last thing you want to give these Trump white-trash types is an excuse for a fight.
But I did call the local police afterwards and inform them that Trump supporters were acting like traffic cops and violating traffic laws. The dispatcher dutifully took my report but I knew even at the time nothing would come of it.
In retrospect, it is probably best for the police to turn a blind eye to such peccadillos and let the Trump trash have their day to blow off steam.
I thought the exact same when the Black Lives Matters protesters last June spilled into the streets around the Ventura Government Center and got into it with drivers trying to navigate the nearby roadways.
“I’m angry! Watch me pout! Pay attention!”
Yet I wake up this morning and see multiple stabbings and a shooting took place last night at Trump protests around the country. Groups like the “Proud Boys” take to the streets, and then “counter-protesters” clad in black show and wearing helmets show up to shout at and fist-fight them — or worse. It reminds me of the grainy black-and-white videos of fascists and communists fighting in the streets of 1930s Weimar Germany I watched back in my high school history class —
Past a point, I take all this extremism with a grain of salt. Antifa left-wing radicals and their right- wing counterparts are a worrisome element of the political landscape, but they are relatively few in number. Nobody who is anybody pays much attention to them, yet they are guaranteed to get outsized media attention. They are social media whores — like Donald Trump — and any attention is better than no attention. It is best to ignore them.
It is an entirely different matter when 17 Attorney Generals in conservatives states and 126 Republican House members decide to sue four “swing states” to try to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election. There was a movement to try and undo the results of elections in the Electoral College, and to have Republican state legislatures decide the matter instead. I had never heard of such a thing before! This was a direct effort to subvert the will of the voters in those states which had narrowly voted for Joe Biden, and to try and switch their votes to Donald Trump. This effort by a good chunk of the Republican Party to alter the results of the 2020 presidential election is frightening in a way that assholes looking for a fight in the streets on a Saturday night is not.
Donald Trump has done a lot of shady shit as president, and even gotten impeached for it. Trump claims he is just “draining the swamp” and “acting independently.” But what he is doing is breaking the rules, because he says he can, because he’s the president. And a not negligible portion of the populace — 20% of the country? — supports him for it. There is a reason we have these rules.
The Supreme Court swiftly rejected his legal challenge. Almost every lawyer I heard admitted it had next to no chance. All of Trump’s and his supporters’ lawsuits claiming that Biden and Democrats stole the election were rejected — many of them rejected in vituperative language by conservative judges Trump himself appointed to the bench. Nobody could find any real evidence of large-scale election fraud. The judges were clear in their rulings.
But that doesn’t matter to Trump and his hardcore supporters.
The election was stolen. Just like Obama was born in Africa and therefore ineligible to become president. Or whatever other kookiness QAnon or the “Proud Boys” preach, or conspiracy theories spread by conservative talk radio or social media nutjobs.
But a good chunk of the Republican Party supported what amounts to an organized effort to change the results of the popular vote in the 2020 presidential election. Bill Paxton is the AG of Texas, and he supported this. Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority leader, from my own state of California, was voluntarily on this crazy Trump train to nowhere? Actively trying to undermine democracy and elections in these lawsuits? Making all this shit up about fraud in a brazen attempt to hold on to the presidency?
Wtf?
Luckily, our independent courts stopped it cold in its tracks. Just about everywhere. Forget about the “just about” — it was everywhere.
But it is scary stuff.
My eyes used to gloss over when I heard the usual liberals preach about how Trump was a “fascist” and “trying to end democratic government” in America. The man was constrained by the boundaries of his office in our political system, I thought to myself.
But right at the end of his presidency, I am coming around to seeing Trump as a genuine threat. The guy would do almost anything. Rules mean nothing to him. Expediency and “winning” is his principal, and “by any means necessary,” apparently. There is more than a little whiff of Aaron Burr and the election of 1800 in the air, in a contested election and crisis over the transfer of power from one party to another — incredibly explosive stuff in any democracy. I look at this desperate lawsuit by Paxton and efforts by Republican state legislators to overrule the popular vote in their states, and Trump’s inability to do what all persons in his position have done previously all during my adult life — concede the election and allow for a peaceful transition of power — and I say —
Who the fuck do you think you are, Donald Trump?!?
Seriously.
Democracy in America is not a real-estate deal to fudge and then walk away from, like in your business dealings. This is not a reality TV show to stink up with your ego and bombast. It is not a plaything for a spoiled child to wreck. As James Madison predicted, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Indeed.
Trump will be gone from the Oval Office in 38 days, and good riddance, motherfucker. But the Republican Party will need to reckon with the spirit of Trumpism. I read that many Republican politicians who supported his last ditch efforts to reverse the will of the American people in spurious lawsuits with made-up charges of election fraud did so because they were unwilling to cross Trump’s base — the hardcore 20% or so of conservative brownshirts who will have Trump as leader, or nobody else. Trump’s own little cult of personality. They felt they had to support Donald Trump, or else. It is the logic of the mafia don — Trump as a mob boss, an authoritarian strongman — the United States as a wannabe banana republic with its own wannabe caudillo. It is hard to believe.
You look at these populist strongmen around the world and wonder. Putin, Edrogan, Orbán, Xi, Balsonaro, Duterte, and Trump: an ill wind blows across the land. I cannot control what happens in other countries, but I have some say in my own. And I say this: America, time to get our house in order. Trump has got to go. The sooner, the better. I will settle for January 20, 2021, but no later.
A few weeks ago I wrote about how as an independent centrist I am willing to vote Democratic or Republican, depending on the candidate and the situation in the country at the time. But now more than ever, I am convinced I will have next to nothing to do with the Republican Party as long as it is led by Donald Trump.
The man is poisonous. And poison for our country.
If not in anything else, Trump’s actions to reverse the results of the election prove this.
John Adams hoped in the United States for a “government of laws, and not of men.” So it has gone these past few weeks as the legal decisions came down decisively against Donald Trump.
The federal courts have held the day against Trumpism here at the ugly, dangerous end of his opportunistic, amateurish administration. They deserve our thanks. Especially the conservative jurists appointed by President Trump who saw they had more of a duty to the law, than to the person who appointed them to the judiciary.
But extreme partisanship and political anger — on the left and the right — will not go away after Joe Biden is inaugurated as President of the United States. Some 20% of the country still supports Trump, despite everything — even if he “stands in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoots somebody,” they will vote for him. That problem is not going away. Even if the symptom which is Donald Trump departs, the underlying illness remains.
But President Biden, you have the support of the “silent majority” of Democrats, Republicans, and independents who make up the political center and the regions thereabouts. The far left and far right will savage you no matter what you do. Ignore them, President Biden. Lead from the center. You have my support. And there are many millions like me. This is why you beat that socialist Bernie Sanders like a drum in the primary, even in states you hardly campaigned in. This “healing centrism” is the platform you ran on, President Biden, and you won.
The angry termites of the left and right eat away at the timbers of American society, but the solid planks of our democracy will weather this storm — that Lincoln’s great democratic hope shall not perish from the earth —
Lead on, President Biden. Lead on.
Amen.
“Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau”
by William Blake
MOCK on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.
The atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
One Comment
Jay Canini
It says a lot that both AOC and Bernie Sanders (yep!) begged their constituents/followers to vote for Joe Biden. There were far left people unhappy that Bernie wasn’t chosen and were thinking of sitting it out and perhaps they rolled their eyes at that.
Now even the far left have come to see voting for Joe Biden was choosing survival and democracy.
In my opinion the GOP has committed a grave act in trying to legitimize Trump’s sedition and they should stop doing this immediately.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is considering prosecuting Trump for tax-related crimes, something that Mike Pence cannot pardon away. I would fully support this prosecution.