Barton Gellman: Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

Trump is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection in the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace. Virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that Trump could compel the whole party’s genuflection to the Big Lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs. Today the few GOP dissenters are being cast out. “2 down, 8 to go!” Trump gloated at the retirement announcement of Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans to vote for his second impeachment.

Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.

Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/

Eugene Robinson: If we are to save our democracy, there must be a reckoning for the Jan. 6 attack

One year ago, ours was a nation on the brink. We must never forget.

The first week of 2021 brought an unprecedented rupture in the democratic process that Americans have taken for granted since the election of John Adams in 1796. A sitting president, Donald Trump, was trying desperately to remain in office despite his defeat in a free and fair election. He summoned a mob to Washington as an intimidating show of force, and that violent mob — whipped into a frenzy by Trump and his cronies — stormed the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s loss.

Much has happened since, both domestically and in foreign affairs. Now, as then, the biggest factor in most Americans’ day-to-day lives is the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. And the leadership of the Republican Party dearly wants us to forget that the Jan. 6 insurrection ever took place.

But the nation cannot just move on from such an attack on our constitutional order. Not since 1814, when British soldiers marched into Washington, had the Capitol been overrun and pillaged. Not even during the Civil War was the orderly transfer of presidential power disrupted. Never had a defeated presidential candidate — much less a defeated incumbent who had sworn to defend the Constitution — refused to accept the result of an election.

We need to know everything that is knowable about these events. And those who inspired, organized and committed the insurrection need to be brought to justice.

President Biden and Vice President Harris intend to deliver remarks Thursday to mark the anniversary of the failed putsch. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has planned a series of events, beginning with prayer and a moment of silence in the House chamber, where so many of her colleagues sheltered in terror on Jan. 6 as a crush of thugs and zealots tried to smash their way inside. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/03/jan-6-capitol-insurrection-reckoning-trump/

Dana Milbank: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says

And because Democrats are in charge of the White House and Congress, most Republicans will do their best to pretend that the commemoration is more about politics than nationhood. Trump is also expected to speak Thursday, and he will surely repeat his lies and gibberish about the election somehow being stolen from him and his supporters. He and the GOP — his GOP, make no mistake — have been trying to make the insurrection into a partisan issue. Don’t let them.

What happened last Jan. 6 was much bigger and more important than politics. And holding accountable the perpetrators of this attack on our democracy must take precedence over any political concerns. This is bigger than who wins the midterm elections or who runs for president in 2024. This project of reckoning is about the continuation of the American experiment. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/03/jan-6-capitol-insurrection-reckoning-trump/

Opinion by Robert Kagan: Our constitutional crisis is already here

The House select committee investigating the attack (appointed by Pelosi only after Republicans refused to form a proper blue-ribbon commission) appears to be doing an admirable job of collecting new information, including about Trump’s actions that day. The committee must not let stonewalling by Trump and his inner circle cause delay — a full year has already passed. It is good that the committee plans to issue an interim report this summer but, in the meantime, it should hold public hearings and release as much information as possible. Their work is not just important but also urgent.

Simultaneously, Congress as a whole must shore up the weaknesses in our transfer-of-power process exposed by the insurrection. The mob’s aim was to halt the official counting of electoral votes — and the mob succeeded, at least for several hours. Even the libertarian Cato Institute agrees that the 1876 Electoral Count Act is a mess of ambiguities and contradictions and needs to be reformed. Legislation to do so should begin making its way toward Biden’s desk.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department must continue to press criminal charges against the insurrectionists. It is not enough to prosecute and sentence those who participated bodily in the assault. The puppet masters who assembled the crowd and sent it off to sack the Capitol must be held to account as well.

And no one, including Trump, can be considered above the law. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/03/jan-6-capitol-insurrection-reckoning-trump/

Paul Waldman: Will American democracy survive the next few years?

There was a period early last year when it seemed that Donald Trump, defeated, disgraced and banned from his beloved Twitter, would see his political power seep away as he put his energy toward new grifts to milk his shrinking band of loyalists for a few last dollars.

But today, his return seems inevitable. He will probably run again in 2024, and if he does he will definitely be the Republican nominee. Who in that party of simpering sycophants would even try to defeat him? So Trump will once again lead one of our two parties, and perhaps seize the White House.

We have not yet begun to grapple with what will happen if he does. Would a second Trump presidency be more restrained, more committed to the rule of law, less corrupt, less determined to twist our system into an autocracy? We all know the answer.

If you try, you can write an optimistic story for 2022. The omicron wave could be the beginning of the end of the pandemic, after which covid-19 will settle to a mere nuisance, always with us but not shaping the contours of our lives. Democrats could pass some version of Build Back Better and then another reconciliation bill this year, which would ease the burdens Americans face and begin to create a more humane system of social supports. Inflation could fall as supply chain bottlenecks ease.

All that is possible. But all of it will occur against the backdrop of a sweeping effort to destroy what we thought our system was supposed to embody. That is not in doubt; the question is how successful democracy’s enemies will be. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/03/american-democracy-survive-2022/

Dana Milbank: Marjorie Taylor Greene is a wart on the body politic. Facebook is a melanoma.

The Georgia Republican’s latest deadly lie — this time disinformation about “extremely high amounts of covid vaccine deaths” to discourage people from receiving the lifesaving protection — earned her a permanent ban from Twitter. And Facebook? The social media behemoth dithered for a day and then decided it would ban Greene for … 24 hours.

It was the tech equivalent of Dr. Evil holding the world ransom with a nuclear warhead for one million dollars in “Austin Powers.” It allowed Greene (and Donald Trump and “my Kevin” McCarthy) to cry about censorship, yet it did nothing to stop the lies.

Facebook reasoned that “removing her account for this violation is beyond the scope of our policies” — as if Facebook is utterly powerless to do anything to alter its own ridiculous policies.

If the testimony and documents provided last year by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen weren’t enough to show that Facebook’s “policies” are destroying democracy, encouraging racist violence and ruining the mental health of a generation, a new investigation by a team from The Post and ProPublica leaves no doubt about Facebook’s malignant impact and its dishonest corporate behavior:

"Facebook executives have played down the company’s role in the Jan. 6 attack and have resisted calls, including from its own Oversight Board, for a comprehensive internal investigation. The company also has yet to turn over all the information requested by the congressional committee studying the Jan. 6 attack, though it says it is negotiating with the committee.

But the ProPublica-Post investigation, which analyzed millions of posts between Election Day and Jan. 6 and drew on internal company documents and interviews with former employees, provides the clearest evidence yet that Facebook played a critical role in the spread of false narratives that fomented the violence of Jan. 6.”

Specifically, there were more than 650,000 Facebook posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory — more than 10,000 a day — between Election Day and the Jan. 6 coup attempt. Facebook’s attempts to temper the content “were ineffective and started too late.”

This failure to police itself by Facebook, and social media generally, is well-established pattern. “Their years of dawdling and denying responsibility allowed hate to take root,” Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt writes in a book out this week, “It Could Happen Here,” about the dangerous spread of white supremacy. “Their algorithms enabled this intolerance to expand and spread across the internet, entrancing users who often didn’t even realize what they were encountering and feeding this content to those who affirmed their interest. And even now the industry’s collective response remains spotty and insufficient.”

Facebook and its ilk have proved themselves entirely too willing to serve as the medium of choice for those who would supplant self-government with lies and violence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/04/facebook-marjorie-taylor-greene-ban-section-230/

Greg Sargent: The smoking gun that Liz Cheney is looking for on Trump comes into view

Cheney has repeatedly suggested the committee is examining whether Trump, in refusing to talk down the mob, might have done so as part of a deliberate effort to obstruct Congress’ counting of electors.

The committee is reportedly looking at whether to make that the basis for recommending criminal prosecution. The grounds would be that it violated federal law barring obstruction of an “official proceeding.”

Determining whether Trump’s conduct constituted such a violation is complicated. It might require determining whether Trump saw the violence as instrumentally helpful in subverting the electoral count, and deliberately refrained from calling off the attack to serve that express goal.

The committee has established that numerous Republicans frantically urged Trump to call off the riot, even as he enjoyed watching it all unfold on TV. Journalist Jon Karl reports that Trump didn’t take at least one of their calls

The committee wants to determine whether Trump indicated a desire to see the mob continue disrupting the electoral count. We don’t know if it will prove this.

Then there’s the question of whether disrupting the electoral count constitutes obstructing an official proceeding, and whether Trump, in inciting the mob to descend on the Capitol during that count, participated in that obstruction. We don’t know exactly what we’ll learn there, either.

Goodman said the committee could recommend this while avoiding implying that Trump’s conduct did not violate current statute. It could recommend “enhancing the criminal penalties for obstructing the electoral count.”

This would write an explicit protection against obstructing the electoral count into the law, Goodman said, but without undercutting the idea that “obstruction of congressional proceedings is already criminal.”

This goal would undercut the Republican talking point that the committee lacks no real legislative purpose and is illegitimate. Mulling such a re n form is obviously a legitimate legislative purpose, as is mulling reform of the Electoral Count Act.

In an important sense, we already have our smoking gun. As Cheney told ABC News:

We have firsthand testimony that his daughter Ivanka went in at least twice to ask him to please stop this violence.

Any man who would not do so, any man who would provoke a violent assault on the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, any man who would watch television as police officers were being beaten, as his supporters were invading the Capitol of the United States, is clearly unfit for future office, clearly can never be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.

How many congressional Republicans would agree with this statement? How is it possible that the answer is: Very few?

This is why it will be interesting to see if Republicans will support strengthening the criminal code against disruption of the electoral count, and whether a certain pair of Democratic senators will support ending the filibuster to pass such a safeguard.

We may soon get answers to those questions. And they probably won’t be to our liking. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/04/liz-cheney-trump-jan-6-smoking-gun/

Jonathan V. Last: Next Year Will Be Worse

So yes, lots of good, normal things will happen in 2022. But none of that will change the basic trajectory this country is on.

We have a major political party which is now explicitly anti-democratic. In 2024, this party will have the support of at least 44 percent of voters. This level of support might be enough to win a legitimate victory via the Electoral College. But if not, this party is openly preparing a series of novel legal maneuvers to seize the executive branch through alternative means.

This is the backdrop of 2022: A period of procession on the way to a showdown which will either uphold or overturn America’s democratic order. https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/next-year-will-be-worse

New York Times editorial: Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now

One year after the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.

This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet.

On the surface, we have achieved that. Our political life seems more or less normal these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.

It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/opinion/january-6-attack-committee.html