The $1.9 trillion Biden plan? Turns out, that is the price of unity.

It was a scene out of a bygone era, a few weeks back, when ten Republican senators met with Joe Biden in the Oval Office to talk about the COVID relief package. The differences were substantial. $1.9 trillion vs. $618 billion. A trillion dollars is apparently a bridge too far for those ten Republicans. They were all for unity, but unity comes at a price. If unity is what Joe Biden wants, apparently he needs to take things down a bit. Into the billions, preferably. 

Decades ago, at a time when humor was still allowed in the nation’s capitol, Senator Everett Dirksen commented on how spending federal money can easily get out of control. “A billion here, a billion there,” the Illinois Republican quipped, “and pretty soon you're talking real money." It took the better part of a half-century, but ‘trillions’ finally eclipsed ‘billions’ as the metric of serious money in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. Trillions of dollars lost as a housing bubble burst. Trillions of dollars pumped into the banking system by Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank. And, as things turned out, trillions of dollars of wealth created along the way for the wealthiest Americans.

Maine Senator Susan Collins, who spoke for the group of ten, seemed to be under the illusion that hers was still the Republican Party of Everett Dirksen. The GOP used to be the party of fiscal responsibility, that believed that balanced budgets were a moral obligation of leadership, as Dirksen’s quip hinted. But Ronald Reagan put an end to all that, as tax cuts became, along with judges and guns, the raison d'être of the Republican Party. It is not that people should not be concerned about the growing public debt; it is just that it is the GOP that destroyed the moral and fiscal rules that used to govern the public finances. For the modern GOP, the calculus of debt and deficits is as simple as it is cynical: They are a horrible, immoral scourge... if there is a Democrat in the White House. 

The past four years have been a case in point. After all, how could an extra trillion dollars be a bridge too far for Republicans who had pushed through a $1.5 trillion tax cut in 2017 for little ostensible reason other than to enrich their donor base? Nor had any of them uttered a word of protest as Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to pay off the national debt in eight years, instead ramped it up by nearly $8 trillion in four – the largest increase in the national debt relative to the size of the economy of any U.S. president other than George W. Bush or Abraham Lincoln. They were on board as Congress appropriated $3.5 trillion in Covid relief last year, on top of the $3.9 trillion made available by the Fed to shield corporate America from the turmoil unleashed by the pandemic.

But for that sordid history, the concerns raised by the group of ten about the Biden proposal might have gotten traction with colleagues across the aisle. That Republicans have become deficit hawks now that a Democrat is in the White House may be the height of hypocrisy, yet the word ‘trillion’ does have a way of spooking some people. Centrist Democrats, who assumed the role of debt scolds as Republicans retreated from their historical role as the grownups in the room on fiscal matters, continue to express trepidation about the sheer scale of the Biden proposal. Many fear that further stimulus spending could revive long-dormant inflation and question where the endgame lies with respect to the escalating national debt, while others simply suggest that limited debt resources would best be spent on infrastructure investment.

With vaccinations accelerating, a flicker of light visible at the end of the pandemic tunnel, and already-massive sums of Covid relief dollars flowing into the economy, estimates for economic growth have risen to the 6-7% range. Inflation concerns reflect an assessment of “output gaps,” which refer to the size of the economic hole that fiscal stimulus is designed to fill when an economy is underperforming. To the extent that the Biden plan exceeds the size of the current projected “output gap,” theory has it, those excess dollars will push the country into an inflationary spiral. 

If inflation fears are met with skepticism, however, there is good reason. Time and again, over the past several decades, many economists warned that inflation lay on the horizon, pointing to deficit spending, expansive monetary policies, and plummeting unemployment rates as factors that economic theory dictates must each ultimately lead to inflation. Indeed, federal deficits have averaged over $650 billion a year over the past twenty years – and closer to a trillion dollars a year over the past ten – driving the federal debt held by the public from $3.5 trillion to over $20 trillion. Over the same time period, the Fed has pushed interest rates toward zero across the yield curve, and flooded dollars into the economy at any sign of trouble. Yet, despite all that, and unemployment falling to historically low levels, the Consumer Price Index has remained in the low single digits for 30 years. Indeed, the Fed has struggled to push inflation up to its 2% target. 

Warnings of the consequences of our growing national debt similarly did not pan out as feared. In the wake of the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s, growing federal deficits and federal borrowing were expected to lead inevitably to higher interest rates, ballooning interest costs in the federal budget, and squeezing out private investment. Instead, as long-term interest rates declined steadily over the ensuing decades, the interest cost on the national debt remained remarkably steady in dollar terms, and declined as a share of GDP. After reaching a peak of 3.2% of GDP in 1991, net interest costs in the federal budget declined dramatically, even as the national debt continued to grow, ultimately reaching a low of 1.2% of GDP in 2015. The Congressional Budget Office now projects that the interest cost on the federal debt will remain under 2% of GDP until the 2030s, despite federal deficits continuing to exceed a trillion dollars a year and a doubling of the federal debt over the next decade. Even fears that we were doomed to be increasingly dependent on China to finance our deficits as the national debt continued to rise have proven to be unfounded. While China remains one of the two largest holders of Treasury bonds – Japan is now the largest – Treasury yields remain near historically low levels, despite China’s not having increased the dollar amount of its holdings since 2012.

It has not been lost on a lot of Americans that economic policies over recent decades – whether intentionally or incidentally – have served to enrich the wealthiest Americans. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the Occupy movement on the left and the Tea Party movement on the right were animated by Wall Street bailouts, and both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders ran for President in 2016 arguing that the system was rigged. And so it was. While inflation has remained low over the past quarter century as measured by the Consumer Price Index, inflation in asset prices has been rampant, as declining interest rates have pushed up the value of real estate, stocks, bonds, and other financial assets dramatically, increasing the net worth of America’s wealthiest families. 

While much attention has been paid to growing income inequality in the United States, disparities in wealth are even more pronounced. According to data from the National Bureau of Economic Research, from 1983 to 2016, the average net worth of the top 1% of households grew from $10.6 million to $26.4 million in real terms, an increase of 150%, and the top 0.1% of households grew from $43.3 million to $100.1 million in real terms, an increase of 133%. In contrast, the bottom 40% of the population saw their 1983 net worth of $6,900 decline to a negative net worth of ($8,900) over the same period. Looked at another way, in 2019, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the bottom 50% of families – roughly 64 million families – had an average wealth of $22,000, which represented only 1% of total U.S. household wealth. This compared to $411,000 for the next 40% of families, and $5,716,000 for the top 10%.

“You all just got a lot richer,” Donald Trump told his friends as he arrived at Mar-a-Lago over Christmas in 2017, just days after he had signed his $1.5 trillion tax cut into law. There had been no economic rationale for the tax cuts. The economy was already steaming along, and there was no material “output gap” to be filled. Yet none of those gathered at Mar-a-Lago admonished the then-President about the possible downstream inflation that the $1.5 trillion of economic stimulus might produce, or ragged on him about tacking an additional 10% onto the national debt. And, of course, Susan Collins and her colleagues who met with Joe Biden in the Oval Office, voted for those tax cuts, and never once suggested that they would stand their ground and vote no because $1.5 trillion was just too much.  

Against that backdrop, should anyone be surprised that 68% of Americans support the $1.9 trillion Biden plan, as the latest Quinnipiac poll suggests. Or that 78% – including 64% of Republicans – support the proposed $1,400 stimulus checks. Could inflation be a problem? Perhaps, perhaps not. Is the national debt looming down the road? Surely. But for most Americans, apparently, the answer is simple. Someone is putting money into their pockets this time around, and they are all for it. Republicans complaining about Democrats doing something that is too big and too wasteful might consider the irony of their stance, and perhaps rethink their opposition to the Biden plan. After all, 68% of Americans supporting anything is the closest thing to unity we have seen in a long time. 

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. 

The Big Lie, not January 6th, is Donald Trump's greatest crime against democracy.

It’s over now. In the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, 43 Senate Republicans cast their oath of office and oath as jurors to the wind, and decided to give the former president a pass on the charge of Incitement to Insurrection. The fact that he was guilty as charged went without saying. After all, incitement has been Trump’s modus operandi dating back to his Central Park Five days. Was Donald Trump guilty of incitement when he tweeted out “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and a MAGA militia heard his call to arms and promptly prepared to kidnap and kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer? According to the Senate Republicans, the answer is no: It is just how he rolls. 

Presently there remains the problem of whether we can find our way back to the status quo ante. Not the state of things before the impeachment trial, or even before the January 6th Insurrection, but to the world before Donald Trump. To a world where presidents see upholding the core institutions of our democracy as their most sacred duty, and the public at large accepts the results of elections. For all the death and destruction that ensued in the wake of Trump’s incitement of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, his greater crime was not incitement, but his continuing denial of the outcome of the election and undermining faith in our democracy.

On January 6, 1961 – sixty years ago to the day from the storming of the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump – Vice President Richard Nixon presided over a joint session of Congress for the counting of the electoral votes from the 1960 presidential race. Nixon had just lost an excruciatingly close presidential election to Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, and rumors of fraud were rife. 

It was a different, more opaque time. Unlike today, when widespread election fraud is “nearly inconceivable” – as Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose argued recently – deals could be made and conspiracies hatched in smoke filled rooms, and no one might ever be the wiser. Rumors were widespread that ballot boxes in Texas had been stuffed by political allies of JFK’s running mate, Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson, tipping the balance to the Democrats; while in Chicago, it was either Mayor Richard Daley’s political machine or Joe Kennedy’s deal with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana – or perhaps both – that had secured JFK’s victory in Illinois. Had those two states gone the other way, Richard Nixon would have won the Electoral College and the presidency.

It was against that backdrop that Nixon found himself – as Mike Pence did on January 6th and Al Gore had in 2000 – presiding over the final constitutional step in his own defeat. When the tabulation of the electoral votes was complete, Nixon reflected on the significance of the moment. “This is the first time in 100 years,” he observed to the gathered elected leaders from the two political parties, “that a candidate for the Presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated and announced the victory of his opponent. I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing, respecting, and honoring institutions of self-government. In our campaigns, no matter how hard fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict, and support those who win… It is in that spirit that I now declare that John F. Kennedy has been elected President of the United States.” 

It never occurred to me before the past few months that democracy in America was anything less than immutable, and forever etched in stone. At some point in the distant past, I had read the Federalist Papers, and recalled the emphasis that James Madison placed on “republican virtue” as a cornerstone of our democracy. Yet, before experiencing the mayhem that Donald Trump inflicted on the nation over the past three months, and watching his enablers in Congress amplify his lies about electoral fraud, it never had occurred to me that democracy itself depended on such a simple notion as “those who lose accept the verdict.” Now, as we have seen the ease with which public opinion can be manipulated by social media and the news-entertainment complex, and a large percentage of one political party convinced of fraud claims made up out of whole cloth, the frail underbelly of our democracy has been exposed. For all the talk about the importance of the rule of law, our democratic system ultimately rests on a far shakier foundation: the vicissitudes of human nature and willingness – or not – of individual candidates to accept the results of elections. 

Democracy is not easy. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross famously described the five stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance; the same can be applied to losing an election. Standing before the voters after losing a bruising campaign is a test of character that every person who runs for office has to be prepared to face. One moment, a years-long campaign is coming to its climactic moment, and then, in a sudden, clarifying instant, it is over. Then, even as the candidate is processing the shock of having lost – often after having run a race pointing out how the other candidate is one step short of being a spawn of the devil – they are expected to bring their supporters along, not just in accepting the fact of the defeat, but in congratulating the victor and offering their support. Such is the demand of Madison’s “republican virtue” of every candidate who chooses to enter the arena. And every so often, candidates with particular strength of character take it a step further. They remind their supporters, in the midst of their grief, that they are part of something greater than winning and losing. They are part of the historic American experiment in self-government.

There is no small irony in seeing Richard Nixon as a champion of the essential role of individual virtue in the viability of democratic self-government. After all, even as he celebrated the moment where he declared JFK the president-elect as evidence of our success as a nation in developing, respecting, and honoring institutions of self-government, it was the pain of losing that election that led, in a relatively straight line, to Nixon’s reformulation of the GOP from the party of civil rights to the party of southern and working class whites (his Southern Strategy), to the rising power of white evangelical voters within the GOP, to the election of Donald Trump, and, ultimately, to the January 6th Insurrection. 

Yet, even as we have witnessed the transformation of the GOP from the Party of Abraham Lincoln to the rise of Donald Trump as the candidate and president of seething resentments, there was nothing particularly new about the hatred embodied in his politics. Historians widely credit the election of 1800, which pitted the southern and rural populations that supported Thomas Jefferson against the urban and coastal elites who backed John Adams, as the nastiest in the nation’s history. And so it has been for the ensuing 200+ years. The names and alignment of the political parties may have changed, but partisan hatreds have remained with us. 

It is against that backdrop of a nation riven with sectarian divisions that honoring the will of the voters from one election to the next has been an indispensable obligation of political leadership. It is so basic that until recently, we have not been forced to grasp how elemental it is. On January 6th, just moments before the insurrectionists began their assault on the Capitol, Mitch McConnell made exactly that point as he sought to rein in mutinous members of his caucus, each of whom saw a path of personal advantage in continuing down Donald Trump’s perfidious path. To seek to overturn the verdict of the voters “would,” McConnell stated in no uncertain terms, “damage our Republic forever…. our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost.”

In his concession speech to George W. Bush in 2000, after the Supreme Court forced an end to the Florida recount, Al Gore quoted the words that Senator Stephen Douglas said to Abraham Lincoln in his 1860 concession speech. "Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I'm with you, Mr. President, and God bless you." Gore then mirrored those words with his own. “I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country….I also accept my responsibility, which I will discharge unconditionally, to honor the new President-elect and do everything possible to help him bring Americans together in fulfillment of the great vision that our Declaration of Independence defines and that our Constitution affirms and defends.”

Every Senate Republican knows these words, and knows their obligation. Yet this week, they did all they could to sidestep the obvious facts of Donald Trump’s incitement and duplicity, and once again showed their obeisance to a man whose conduct, time and again, has been destructive to the nation. He is not going away, and the stakes are only going to get higher. Trump's term in office may have come to an end, but his power over his MAGA movement – where love of Trump has replaced love of country – continues to grow. According to an American Enterprise Institute poll released this week, despite Trump’s losing virtually all 60+ cases in court – including the Supreme Court – and the testimony of leading constitutional scholars and Republican secretaries of state across the country, Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the election is deeply rooted. According to that poll, two-thirds of Republicans continue to believe that the election was stolen, and fully 40% believe that violence may be necessary to put things right in the nation. 

Since election day, we have heard that a civil war was looming within the GOP to wrest control from Donald Trump. Yet week after week, the loudest voices have been those of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, and innumerable others, who understand exactly the treachery of their conduct, even as they are enabling Trump’s destruction of our democracy. Now the state parties are piling on to censure the conduct of any public official who strays from the MAGA fold. Our democracy is hanging in the balance. If there was going to be a civil war in the GOP, it had best begin soon. Or perhaps it is already over.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. 

January 6th: The day democracy became possible again.

The sacking of the U.S. Capitol – the most enduring symbol of democracy in the world – was a shattering blow. Yet, it may have been necessary.

January 6th marked the capstone event of a four-year presidential administration that has – with overwhelming support across the Republican Party – worked diligently to undermine democratic norms and institutions, and destroy public trust in the rule of law. Some kind of massive shock to the system may have been necessary if we are to have a chance of putting the Trump presidency behind us and rebuilding our democracy. 

The insurrection was the natural outgrowth of years of incitement by Donald Trump. For years, dating back to his Central Park Five and Birtherism days in New York, Trump has worked diligently to cultivate a loyal following, pandering to the resentments of groups who felt little loyalty to either of the major political parties. Over the course of the past year, intimidation and threats of violence by his supporters have become regular events. In response to Trump’s earlier call to arms in the wake of Covid-related restrictions, they brandished automatic weapons and other firearms as they entered state capitals and plotted the kidnapping of state governors and violent overthrow of the Michigan state government. Before and after the election, long caravans of SUVs and pickup trucks, adorned with giant American and Trump flags flying side by side, careened through the streets of communities across the country, blurring the lines between free speech and voter intimidation. 

For weeks, Trump has known that the day when a joint session of Congress was scheduled to meet to officially count the electoral votes would be his last chance to act. In tweets, for all the world to see, he called for his supporters to gather on January 6th for what he assured them would be the climactic moment of his efforts to overturn the results of the election. He needed them – his "patriots" – to heed his call, and they responded enthusiastically. Their purpose was simple: the election had been stolen, and their goal, through sheer force of numbers, was to force members of Congress to give it back. 

And as ludicrous as this plan might have seemed to a casual observer, no one should have doubted the seriousness of Trump’s intent to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes and declaration of the winner. Orchestrating riots as a means of intimidation to achieve a political outcome is a tactic that Trump’s aides have used to great effect over the years. In 1992, Rudy Giuliani led the infamous New York City police riot, a deeply racial protest where 10,000 police trashed cars and storefronts and stormed City Hall in an effort to block the creation of the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The riot failed to stop the reforms but nonetheless served Giuliani’s purposes: the following year, he defeated Mayor David Dinkins, who had led the reform effort, to become Mayor of New York. In 2000, during the contested Bush/Gore presidential election, Trump advisors Roger Stone and Matt Schlapp orchestrated the “Brooks Brothers riot,” a violent protest that succeeded in stopping the recount that was underway in Miami-Dade County, and contributed to George W. Bush’s successful effort to secure intervention by the Supreme Court and win the presidency. 

As Trump supporters gathered on the morning of January 6th, one speaker after another laid out the litany of crimes committed against Donald Trump by state election officials and the courts that together nullified what they claimed to have been Trump’s massive landslide victory. Trump attorney John Eastman laid out how the fraud was perpetrated, as he described in detail how Dominion voting machine software had been used to create thousands of illegal votes for Joe Biden and swing the outcome of the election. Rudy Giuliani declared that “trial by combat” was the appropriate remedy for the fraud that had been perpetrated against the nation. 

Rudy’s suggestion that violence, rather than the rule of law, was the best way to resolve disputes was met with a roar of approval by a crowd. Finally, Trump took center stage. After he laid out once again the crimes committed against him, he urged the crowd to “stop the steal” and head to the Capitol, where they could disrupt the counting of the electoral votes and secure him a second term. He would be there with them, he promised. “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong… If you don’t fight like hell, you are not going to have a country anymore.”

How else could the Trump presidency end? For two months, since he lost the election, it has been all conspiracy theory, all the time. The tag team of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Peter Navarro, and the Trump kids drilled contempt for the results of the election and the rule of law into the minds of Trump supporters. The melding of American flags with Trump flags was emblematic of the essential conflating of support for Donald Trump with patriotic duty. 

And why would they not answer his call to arms to redress the stealing of the election? Evangelical leader Eric Metaxas summed up the view of those who continue to believe that Trump won a landslide and that the election was stolen: “My attitude is, who cares what I can prove in the courts?… We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” Trump inculcated in the minds of his supporters from early last year that any result in the presidential election other than victory could only be evidence of fraud, and fully believing his rendition of the facts, they marched. 

January 6th may have been necessary because it was imperative that the maliciousness of Trump’s intent and the extent of the damage that he and his enablers have done to the country be revealed in its totality. It may have been the only way the Trump presidency could end if the nation was going to have a chance at restoring honest discourse and mutual commitment to the rule of law. 

The January 6th insurrection came just a few days after the recording of Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was released. Just as it took the Nixon tapes for all but the most devoted Nixon supporters to realize the depth of his duplicity, the hour-long recording of Trump’s call with Raffensperger revealed to any doubters the truth that Ted Cruz explained four and a half years ago: that Donald Trump is either a criminal or a sociopath, if not both. For those erstwhile Trump supporters who were shaken from their stupor by hearing Donald Trump in his own words shake down the Georgia Secretary of State to find him 11,780 votes – just enough to beat Joe Biden by one vote – what they saw on January 6th should have sealed their contempt for the President.

Is QAnon the future of the GOP?
(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

For the good of the country, it was essential that the complete unmasking of the President occur before the end of his term in office. Had Trump made it to January 20th without the explosion that we witnessed, we were bound to spend the next four years battling the brush fires, if not forest fires, of Trumpism and conspiracy theories. As it is, election conspiracy theories will continue to propagate, and meld seamlessly into QAnon. Were it not for the events of the past days, the GOP would likely remain captive of Trump’s power over the party base, and the nation frozen in partisan stalemate. 

Instead, the unmasking of the President, first through the phone call and then through the sacking of the Capitol, should cleave a clear line through the Republican Party. Were it not for January 6th, and the explosive culmination of Trumpism, it is hard to imagine how it would have been possible to restore even a modicum of bipartisan commitment to fundamental democratic principles that has been torn apart over the past four years. It still may not be possible, but the events of the past week seem to offer a glimmer of possibility. 

The GOP can never shake its racial politics
(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

January 6th should stand as a lesson that the words of presidents and the language that political parties adopt matter. The image of an insurrectionist holding a flag of the Confederacy, walking through the Capitol in front of portraits of Senator Charles Sumner and Vice President John Calhoun – the first an abolitionist and the second a defender of slavery – is a reminder that the challenges that we face today, as a multi-ethnic nation with a history of enslavement of African Americans and theft of native lands, have been with us since our founding. 

At the Neshoba County Fair in 1980, when Ronald Reagan picked up the mantle of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and spoke about states' rights as he sought to lure southern and working-class whites from the Democratic Party to the GOP, racial dog whistle politics came of age. As laid out by storied Republican political operative Lee Atwater, racial dog whistles – using code words to animate resentment and anger around race to motivate election day turnout – endured as an essential GOP political strategy for decades. 

That strategy, once lodged in the Republican DNA, has proved impossible to dislodge. Long after Atwater recanted his racist crimes in a deathbed confession, and RNC Chair Ken Mehlman apologized to the NAACP for Republican tactics leveraging racial resentments for political advantage, Donald Trump unapologetically embraced it. From the Central Park Five and Birtherism, to Charlottesville and to January 6th, the politics of racial division and demonization won him a devoted following on the right, and has been essential to binding those supporters to him. One can draw a straight line from Ronald Reagan’s words in 1980 to the events of January 6th.

Speaking on the floor of the Senate in the hours following the sacking of the Capitol, Mitt Romney castigated his Republican colleagues for contributing to the events of the day. Many, if not most, of them had lied to their constituents, fanning the flames of election fraud conspiracy theories, even though, by Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse’s account, none of them actually believed Trump’s claims. “Do we weigh our own political fortunes,” Romney asked, “more heavily than we weigh the strength of our Republic, the strength of our democracy… What is the weight of personal acclaim compared to the weight of conscience?” 

It was the question that needed to be asked. Trumpism, and its companion, conspiracy theories, are built on lies. If the nation is going to recover, Romney suggested, telling the truth is the only way out.

Restoring truth and facts to political discourse is the essence of the challenge that we face. January 6th was a tragic event, but perhaps it will also be a moment that creates new possibilities. Rather than a pivotal moment of our unraveling, it may come to be seen as the moment when the trajectory of the country changed, and building a common commitment to democratic values became possible once again. 

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. 

Donald Trump is exactly what kept George Washington up at night.

"Men make their own history,” Karl Marx wrote in his historical treatise about Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, “But they do not make it as they please.” Nor do they get to choose how they will be remembered. Triggered by deep-seated fears that he will be labeled a “loser” for all of eternity, Donald Trump is working diligently to make certain that, whatever accomplishments he might want to be remembered for – a strong stock market and economy, taking on China, peace in the Middle East – his legacy will be defined by his continuing efforts to destroy the democracy he was elected to lead.

Bull markets come and go, as do pandemics, but liberal democracy was supposed to be forever: the highest and best achievement of human society. And for more than two centuries, America has been a beacon of democratic promise – as Barack Obama describes so eloquently in his new book – not because of the circumstances of life on the ground at any given moment, but for what it aspires to be. The notion that he is the caretaker of that long history has never occurred to Donald Trump, as he has taken a sledgehammer to our core democratic institutions whenever it served his purposes. But nothing he has done to date has been more destructive – and looms to be more irreparable – than his continuing efforts to undermine public faith in elections themselves.

Louis-Napoléon might well have been a role model for Donald Trump. Elected President of France in 1848, Louis-Napoléon chafed at the notion that his legal term as president was coming to an end, and led a coup in 1851 against the government he had been elected to lead. Like Trump, the aristocratic Bonaparte fashioned himself a working class hero. He was successful in leveraging his support among the working class and – unlike Trump (as yet) – proclaimed himself Emperor in 1851. 

Europeans understand the fragility of democracy in a manner that eludes Americans. Louis-Napoléon reigned as Emperor Napoléon III for twenty years, before France took its next stab at fulfilling the dreams of the French Revolution and continued down its own halting path toward democracy with the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. Most Americans know Adolf Hitler as the dictator who killed millions of Jews, gypsies, and others in extermination camps, until he was defeated by the US and our allies in the Second World War. But fewer realize that Hitler was democratically elected at a time when Germany, like France, was struggling to build a democracy, and once in office used legal means – along with the rage and resentments of his supporters – to transform Germany into a dictatorship. 

Despite the long history of democracies being overthrown or migrating into illiberalism – often with the support of a large share of the population – most Americans never really imagine that such a thing could happen here. Yet the parallel with Louis-Napoléon looms large. As the world watched Rudy Giuliani’s deranged news conference a few weeks ago – Rudy with his hair dye streaming down his face, Sidney Powell with her QAnon-tinged rants – many concluded that the end of the Trump presidency had finally arrived in the form of a vaudeville routine disguised as a press conference. Trump’s cadre of national law firms had jumped ship on his efforts to overturn the vote of the people – having apparently decided that being co-conspirators in a latter-day anti-democratic putsch would not be good for business – leaving Trump to be represented by Rudy and his gang of legal misfits. Axios reporter Jonathan Swan summed up the absurdity of it all in a tweet: “The publicly-stated position of President Trump's legal team is that the reason Trump lost Georgia is because Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has been bribed by a Venezuelan front company in cahoots with the CIA to throw elections to Communists.”  

Yet, even as the widespread presumption was that Giuliani and Powell had gone rogue, and the Trump team officially cut ties with Powell, the President doubled down, insisting that a wide-spread conspiracy along the lines that Powell and Swan described did indeed deprive him of a massive electoral landslide. Far from being new, the rigged-election conspiracy narrative is one that Trump cultivated during his 2016 campaign, and this time around he worked diligently from early in the election season to condition his supporters to believe that only a massive conspiracy – with a focus on mail-in ballots – could deprive him of victory in November. 

And it worked. Polls over the past several weeks have consistently shown that large majorities of Republicans believe that the election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden, and that a majority of Republicans – meaning tens of millions of Americans – believe that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the election. It is safe to say that today, Americans are living in alternate universes. For most of the country, we held an election, and Joe Biden won. He and Kamala Harris are now assembling their cabinet and preparing to take office on January 20th, as the Constitution provides. For those following Trump’s lead, he remains the rightful winner, and there is no such certainty of what will, or should, transpire next month. Speaking from the White House this week in a speech he posted on Facebook and described as the most important he has ever made, Donald Trump asserted that “If we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can’t be President.” 

George Washington might not have been able to imagine Donald Trump, but he did envision the situation that has transpired. Washington, along with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton,  feared that the rise of political parties and the manipulation of partisan passions could lead to the undoing of the constitutional republic they had worked so hard to create. In his farewell address to the nation in 1797, Washington specifically warned that a group of people – "a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community" in his words – might succeed in leveraging heightened partisan passions to hijack a political party and use it as a vehicle – “an artificial and extraordinary force” as he described it – for pursuing their own interests “in the place of the delegated will of the nation.”  

And so we are watching today. A major political party, animated by tribalism and stripped of the core principles for which it once stood, has become the tool and cudgel for one man and his family. It is a story that has played out throughout history in other countries; it just wasn’t supposed to happen here. Before our eyes, the transcendent notion that vox populi vox dei – the underpinning principle of democratic government that the voice of the people is the voice of God – is being put to the test by the President. 

There was a brief moment this week when it appeared that the light of truth might pierce the reality distortion field that Trump has created around the election. Gabriel Sterling, a senior Georgia Republican election official – one of many local government officials in battleground states who will be recorded as the heroes of this moment – denounced the President, and his enablers in Congress, for continuing to rile up his supporters.

“It. Has. All. Gone. Too. Far. All of it.” Sterling began, standing before a phalanx of microphones, his voice shaking in anger. “Joe diGenova [a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia and a Trump campaign attorney] today asked for Chris Krebs, a patriot who ran CISA, to be shot. A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out, saying he should be hung for treason... Tricia [the wife of the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger] is getting sexualized threats through her cell phone. It. Has. To. Stop. This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy. And all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this… Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.”

Sterling’s press conference was reminiscent of a similar time in our history, when many across the nation’s capital cowered in fear of a bully, and a single person’s words broke the spell. That earlier moment came during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, when Joseph Welch publicly shamed Senator Joseph McCarthy for his reckless cruelty, with words widely credited with ending McCarthy’s reign of terror. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”  Welch admonished the Senator – and his 27-year-old chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who would go on to be Donald Trump's cherished advisor. “Have you left no sense of decency?”

Of course, this is not the 1950s. Decency has no place in the Republican Party of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Sterling’s words did nothing to shame the President, and his impassioned plea could not shake Congressional Republicans from their disgraceful silence. In today’s world, there is no shame and there are no confessions of complicity. Responding to Sterling’s reprimand, Trump tweeted a link to Sterling’s press event under the words “Rigged election,” and moved on.

To any dispassionate observer, the President’s efforts to overturn the election have quickly migrated from tragedy into farce, as he continues to move forward with claims of massive, systemic voter fraud despite his 1-41 record in lawsuits challenging state election results, and assertions by his own Attorney General, along with Chris Krebs, that no such fraud has been found. Most of the country is ready to move on, if only Trump would accept the will of the voters, as has the losing candidate in every presidential election since George Washington defeated John Adams in 1789. Yet, to suggest that Donald Trump is becoming a comical figure, a caricature of himself, is to ignore the enormous damage that he has done to the nation since it became apparent that he lost the election. What will come next remains to be seen; but if we have learned nothing else over the past four years, it is that we need to learn to imagine the unimaginable, as it may well be what happens over the weeks to come.

Trump’s speech from his bunker in the White House was a rambling forty-five minute tour de force of conspiracy theory, finger-pointing and self-pity, as he staked his claim once again that he was the rightful winner of the November election. In time-honored style of authoritarian demagogues, he wrapped himself in the flag: “If we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that has taken place in the 2020 election, we don’t have a country anymore” – even as was doing his level best to undermine the future of the republic he had been elected to lead.

To watch that speech is to realize how close to the precipice we have come. As Trump spoke, it seemed as if at any given moment he wanted to give the call to arms that many of his supporters are clamoring for. Each time he paused in the speech and then began “Today I will …”, I fully expected that this was the moment when he would declare martial law, and suspend the Constitution, as suggested by his former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. 

It didn’t happen, of course. But that does not mean it couldn’t. A few brief words are all it would take, and the future of the nation would be transformed.

 

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces.