I was looking forward to writing a happy Christmas post. I think I'll do that still, but with what we just observed in the nation's capital on this last Wednesday, I feel it would be foolish not to make my thoughts in the moment known.
For context: following election day of November 3, there was a significant delay in declaring the winner in various states due to inadequacies in counting mail-in ballots. There were a lot of mail-in ballots because, yes, there's still a pandemic on. By November 7, the states had reported enough results that all the major media outlets declared Biden the winner. Every single step in our electoral process has been wrung out to its most absurd extreme, with people arguing nits at every corner, making distinctions without any difference. The states don't finish certification of their votes until around early December, following which the electors in each state gather to cast their ballots.
Because in almost every election in modern history, the loser concedes the race following media projections, all these steps are mere formalities. The last exception was the 2000 election where the outcome was difficult to determine in Florida (fewer than 500 votes separated the candidates), which ended up being the deciding state. This time, with margins of 10,000 or greater in each state, the loser cried fraud, not in one state but in several, and specifically, only the states where the loser lost. To further increase the difficulty, only the presidential portion of the ballots were alleged to be fraudulent.
Now, is electoral fraud possible? Sure it is. America has a lovely history of fraud, and as such, has slowly taken many steps to minimize it. Far more common than inventing votes whole cloth, is preventing votes from being cast in the first place. White conservatives have become really good at this by doing things like restricting the number of polling places available to areas where the opposition lives (poor, browner neighborhoods), onerous registration rules followed by purging existing voter rolls, and ID requirements. New to this cycle was the administration's deliberate degradation of the USPS capability to timely deliver mail-in ballots, with the express objective of causing ballots to miss the deadline. Despite these headwinds, the white conservative party lost the presidential election. Interestingly, they gained ground in the House and appeared to narrowly hold their ground in the Senate, although two senatorial elections in Georgia were forced into a runoff. Regardless of these facts, the game was on--massive, systemic fraud had to be the reason the presidential candidate lost!
What followed were months of allegations and lawsuits by the white conservative party, the vast of majority of which underscored how little the party in power even seemed to understand their own electoral system. I say this because of the 62 lawsuits filed, only 1 was ruled in their favor (in Pennsylvania, where first time voters were required to present ID for their votes by Nov 9 rather than Nov 12). The rest were either rejected completely by the court or unfavorably ruled. There was even a desperate attempt by Texas, a white conservative party-led state, to appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn the election because they didn't like how the election was conducted in other states. It was rejected unanimously (conservative pedants rejoice that 2 justices believed that the case should have been heard, although they also wrote that they would not have ruled in Texas' favor even if it was heard). For the massive fraud believed to have been perpetrated on the "American people," no evidence was ever uncovered to prove that the white conservative party had been disenfranchised.
That didn't stop the grievance train from rolling. From the president, to his toadies in Congress, to his red-hatted masses, they worked themselves into frothy rage over their impotence and frustration. Surrogates in Georgia literally declared all elections to be untrustworthy, and that no one should even vote in the Senate runoff. The president and his toadies tried to pump the brakes while the president simultaneously floored the gas on this idea, resulting in a wild political spin cycle that ended with two Georgian Democrats winning the state for the first time since the Bush era.
As each milestone in the presidential election process was checked off, a new desperate plan was hatched to somehow prevent the democratic process from working. The final step, prior to the inauguration of the new president, is for Congress to count the Electoral College votes and formally declare the winner. The date was set for January 6, 2021. Donald John President Trump set up a rally in Washington D.C. on this day to gather in his faithful for one last hurrah to assuage his wounded ego. Presumably, they would give courage to the Trump party's toadies in Congress to object to the electoral votes that they were assembled to count. The objections are permitted, but with schisms even within the white conservative party showing, the Trump portion of the party was doomed to fail as the majority of each congressional chamber must uphold the challenge. The objections would be raised, ostensibly, until a congressional committee can "audit" the election that was audited 3 ways to Sunday in each state. A farce on so many levels, the day was promised to be full of sound and fury but signify nothing but the forgone conclusion of the election.
Instead, incited by the loutish lazy loser of a president, the crowd pressed on to the US Capitol, where the joint session of Congress was assembled. Trump lied about marching with them before slinking back into the White House to watch the proceedings on television.
The throng pressed against the police barricades, and suddenly, on cue, they cast down their Trump paraphernalia, donned black masks, and shouted "Death to Facism!" Or, at least, according to some in the Trump party, this is what happened.
In reality, dressed in Trump flags and "MAGA" red hats, waving Gadsden and Confederate banners, rioters pushed past the suspiciously small contingent of Capitol Police and into the capitol building itself. Windows and doors were broken, pipe bombs were scattered around the building, including a cooler filled with Molotov cocktails.
The House and Senate suspended their business and sheltered in place or were evacuated to more secure locations as the barbarian horde sacked Rome at the invitation of Caesar. They made off with trophies, posed and danced in offices of the nation's leaders, and they felt like they had won. What they actually accomplished was the culmination of MAGA-theory--unbridled white conservative populism. They brought the rebel flag into the Union's heart in an attempt to stop the business of democracy. Their goal was to disenfranchise over 80 million people because their contingent of 75 million is upset. Never mind that there is disappointment every election year. Never mind the tradition of respecting the voice of the people. The new tradition is to attack the government itself when you're in the minority.
Make no mistake, the Trump toadies were not chumming around with the mob after they breached the security line. Even though they had stumped and rallied for this exact moment, even hours earlier pumping their fist in solidarity to the gathering crowd. The proverbial toothpaste was not going to get back into the tube. One of the few members of the white conservative party that has any scruples is the last Republican presidential candidate that I have voted for, Mitt Romney, who declared to his colleagues that this chaos is exactly what they chose.
Eventually, enough law enforcement was dispatched to expel the revelers. The president-elect called on the sitting president to condemn the insurrection and to tell them to disperse; instead he egged them on with his usual false grievances before begrudgingly telling them to go home and that he "loved" his "very special" Trumpians. The legislative bodies reconvened and eventually counted and declared Biden the victor of the Electoral College, although fewer white conservative senators were willing to proceed with their planned objections.
5 Americans lay dead in the aftermath, more than at the consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi. In the weeks to come, many more Americans will die of the virus spread by the anti-mask contingent of Trump's followers in Washington, some who likely had no involvement at all in the events of the day. The unending coronavirus horror that doesn't make good TV continues to be a lasting legacy of Trump's uninterested selfish policies.
Suddenly, the white conservative party is circling its wagons and saying that now it is time to start healing. The cancer that they've fed for years has taken over a major political party. People like Ted Cruz, for whom I must self-flagellate for electing back in 2012, who smugly sit back and say that everything is fine and that the insurrection was an anomaly. People like Josh Hawley, the Missourian who never lost the state's historical mob-mentality legacy, who express support for would-be vandals, then hide from said vandals, and then return to the Senate floor to attempt to overturn an election on their behalf. Cancer must be excised. These seditious toadies of the Trump party should no longer hold any place in politics.
At long last, we have multiple social media sites expelling the rabble-rousers at the top. Conveniently, the white conservative armchair constitutionalists start crying foul for the First Amendment, forgetting that social media sites are private companies. They wouldn't forget this is if it were a Christian bakery denying a gay couple a wedding cake. Somehow, the president is being silenced without his Twitter account, despite having TV cameras and press correspondents swarming the White House.
All this boils down to a fundamental nastiness of the white conservative party--nothing is a problem if it doesn't harm them. January seems to mark successive nadirs for the Trump administration. The government shutdown in January of 2019 was marked with his supporters complaining that "[h]e’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting." January of 2020 was marked with Trump's impeachment ending in an acquittal by the Trump party, with only one white conservative (guess who) voting to convict him of his abuse of power in attempting to gain foreign support in harming a political opponent. Now, we have January of 2021, where Trump's faithful complain about the police, whom they supported in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 (guess what they were protesting), in an insurrection in the nation's capital. As chaos broke out and the police attempted to prevent the Capitol from being overrun, one "patriot" decried that "[t]hey’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots."
Trump's chickens have come home to roost, and his faithful are finding out, that in the end, it was never about them. It was about him. He dragged the white conservative party along with him, infecting them with his virus, until it is a sad form in an overcrowded intensive care unit, struggling to breathe.
