Trump's regime is leading America in an insurrection
On Friday, Donald Trump praised Robert E Lee. Slaveholder. Sadist. Traitor. Loser. It was his way of offering another “attaboy” to the neo-Nazis that marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, even after they killed Heather Heyer, beat an African American man, and chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
Trump’s statement was a clear nod to his base. That would be the same base that sent pipe bombs to the Clintons, Obamas, congressional Democrats and CNN. The same base that gunned down African Americans at a grocery store in Kentucky after failing to gain entrance to a black church. The same base that killed Jews while in Pittsburgh and then followed up with another slaughter in Poway, California. The same base that burned down three black churches in Louisiana and the storied civil rights center, the Highlander Folk School. The same base that had a hitlist of Democrats, including Representative Maxine Waters, and an arsenal of weapons to do the job. The same base that pretends to be border patrol as it kidnaps and cages human beings and defies law enforcement to do anything about it. The same base that invaded a bookstore in a tony section of Washington DC to intimidate an author who was laying out the pathology that places whiteness above everything else, even living.
America is in the middle of an insurrection. Led this time by another rogue government, only this one is not ensconced in Montgomery or Richmond. The architects of rebellion are in the White House. While they have ignited the base by conjuring up a vision of whiteness imperiled by “illegals” crashing the US/Mexico border, “black identity extremists” gunning for the police, and terrorists who, apparently, can only be Muslim, they haven’t stopped there.
In a multi-front attack, Trump’s regime has laid siege to the very pillars of America – elections, the rule of law, “We the People” and the constitutional bedrock that Congress and the judiciary are co-equals with the executive branch.
In the process, the White House has dared Congress to fire back. There was that moment while testifying before the House financial services committee, when the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, sneered at Representative Maxine Waters that if she continued to “grill him” and make him miss a meeting, that “I will not be back here. I will be very clear.” That defiance also included blowing right past a congressional deadline, despite the clarity of the law, to release Trump’s tax returns.
Also “indelible in the hippocampus” is supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s snarling at US senators for daring to ask him about the things that make a person unfit to be on the highest court in the land. And, while sworn to uphold the constitution of the United States, the attorney general, Bill Barr, “misrepresented key points”, “truncated” sentences and omitted the context of the Mueller report’s findings, while refusing to release an unredacted copy to congressional members who have the highest security clearance. Barr has also refused to testify before Congress unless he can determine the format of the hearings. Representative Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House judiciary committee, has threatened to issue a subpoena to compel Barr to come to the Hill, but Trump’s White House has made clear that it will fight all congressional subpoenas. As far as his regime is concerned, there is no constitutional oversight function. And Congress is nothing more than a rubber stamp for his nominations, policies and whims. That’s it.
The judiciary hasn’t fared much better. It too, has been shredded. Trump’s regime has blatantly ignored a court order to reconnect parents and guardians with the children his regime ripped away and caged. He has berated a judge as unqualified simply because the man was Hispanic. He has singled out the ninth circuit as being a “disgrace” and “out of control” because the judges dared to find his anti-immigrant policies unconstitutional. He has flooded the federal judiciary with a slew of unqualified federal judges who cannot answer basic questions about the law because their only role, really, is to be an ideological battering ram on Americans’ civil rights. He’s looking to recreate the Reconstruction/Jim Crow-era courts that gutted the law against the Ku Klux Klan, removed the federal government’s ability to stop domestic terrorism against African Americans and defanged the 14thand 15th amendments. Trump has, therefore, maligned the courts as “‘stupid’, ‘horrible’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘incompetent’. ‘a laughingstock’”. And he is convinced that the US supreme court has now been remade in his image and, like all good lieutenants, will do his bidding and protect him.
As for the election system, four words sum up how Trump bayoneted American democracy and the right of the people to choose their representatives: “Russia if you’re listening …” That display of treachery has been amplified by a refusal to fix the vulnerabilities that allowed Russian entrée into the nation’s voting machinery in 2016. Indeed, in Florida, “Russian actors scanned databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases successfully penetrated a voter registration database.” Despite clear documentation of these efforts, the Trump regime doubled down on leaving the United States open to another attack by eliminating the “cybersecurity coordinator position at the White House, a move that was widely interpreted as deprioritizing cybersecurity efforts despite threats from Russia and Iran”.
The White House assault on democracy is further magnified by Trump’s hunt for “massive rampant voter fraud”. Instead of arraying America’s might against a foreign invader, Trump and his Republican troops in half the states amassed the nation’s machinery against America’s own citizens. He has either made repeated false claims or pounced on numerous lies about millions of people illegally voting in New Hampshire, Texas, California and across the United States.
This lie of “voter fraud”, to be clear, is a Republican-led barrage, under the guise of protecting democracy, that has purged, gerrymandered and initiated targeted hits “with nearly surgical precision” to destroy the right to vote for millions of Americans. Similarly, the citizenship question on the census is supposedly aimed at strengthening the Voting Rights Act. But it, too, like the claims of “voter fraud” is a Trojan horse created by Trump’s regime to skew and screw over the United States for at least the next decade by obliterating the law and the reliability of the constitutionally mandated count.
So, while Trump idolizes Robert E Lee, Democrats have a fateful decision to make. They, too, can look to the civil war and choose which leader exemplifies how they’re going to deal with this threat to American democracy.
On one hand, there’s Union Gen George B McClellan, who, despite the enormous resources entrusted to him to protect and save the United States, was afraid to engage Lee and the Confederacy. He chose, instead, to just keep drilling his troops in Washington DC, waiting for some mythical, optimal time when it would be best to confront the forces determined to destroy the United States.
Or, on the other hand, they can model themselves on Gen William Tecumseh Sherman, who recognized that it was time to take the gloves off, fight with everything within reach to defend the United States of America, and make it clear to those who set out to destroy this nation, you can’t win.
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candlerprofessor of AfricanAmerican Studies at Emory University and a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy.