On July 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Roseberg were executed by electric chair for treason in delivering classified information to the Soviet Union which enabled that government to detonate its first atomic bomb. Hmmm. The electric chair has been eliminated from the US laws that punish treason, but the US has reinstated death by firing squad in its stead. If this is a (fair & balanced) call to send The Loser of the 2020 Election And His Minions to the wall to face firing squads, without blindfolds, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
Trump’s Reckoning—And America’s
By Susan B. Glasser
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
At 3:40 AM on Thursday, after the longest, most terrible twenty-four hours of a long and terrible four years, Congress finally did its duty. Donald Trump hadn’t stopped it. The rampaging mob chanting Trump’s name hadn’t stopped it, nor had the dozens of Republican members who had joined Trump’s coup. It was worth staying up all night to see Vice-President Mike Pence reading out the electoral results that ended Trump’s Presidency—and his own Vice-Presidency—once and for all. “Joseph R. Biden, Jr., of the state of Delaware, has received three hundred and six votes,” Pence said. A grudging statement from Trump himself soon followed. “There will be an orderly transition on January 20th,” the statement said. It was done.
That this moment came two months after the election in which Biden decisively beat Trump, and after a bloody riot inside the Capitol itself, made it all the more urgent and terrifying. This is the first time in America’s history that a losing incumbent President has refused to accept the outcome of an election. Let us pray that it is the last. A deeply divided Congress has now rebuffed the President and ratified the Electoral College’s results, but only after the Capitol was invaded by the rioters he called forth. The predawn vote to reaffirm Trump’s defeat will not erase the shame of Wednesday’s violence. The blame for this disaster—an insurrection incited and cheered on by an American President—rained down, swiftly and properly, on Trump himself. But it was not just about him. Congress had been defiled by a mob that was of his making—but also of theirs.
For four years, Trump has made war on the constitutional order, on the institutions of American democracy, and on anyone who stood in his way. Almost all of the Republicans on Capitol Hill let him do it. They aided and abetted him. They voted to acquit him of impeachment charges. They endorsed him for reëlection and even acceded to his request not to bother with a Republican Party platform. The Party’s ideology, henceforth, would be whatever Trump wanted it to be. When Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, bragged about Trump’s successful “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party, he was, in a toxically untruthful Administration, for once telling the truth.
Even after Trump decisively lost the election, Republicans across Washington went along with him as he spread lies and conspiracy theories, filed baseless lawsuits, and raged when judges threw them out, as they did again and again. When Trump called for a final reckless coup against the constitutional order, many were willing to follow him even to this legal, political, and moral dead end—cynical opportunists like Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), in the Senate, and a majority of House Republicans, including their leader, Kevin McCarthy, of California. But now not all. Trump had finally found the red line beyond which at least some in his party would not pass. “The Republican Party has been put in a state of civil war,” the GOP strategist Karl Rove said, on Fox. Politico called it “the day that Trump broke the GOP.”
Republicans had accepted the “perfect” phone call with Ukraine, the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, the “love” letters with Kim Jong Un, the monetizing of the Presidency for Trump’s personal gain, the unseemly firings and policy diktats by tweet, the politicization of the Justice Department, and the menacing war against the journalistic “enemies of the people.” But now Trump had demanded that they actually overturn the will of the voters, something that Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell could not and would not do.
“My oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted,” Pence said in a statement, shortly before 1 PM on Wednesday, when he took the chair to preside over the special joint session at which the Electoral College’s votes would be received and counted by Congress.
Soon after, McConnell gave a speech that was, although four years late in coming, clear and piercing in its painful truth about the danger that he only now, belatedly, acknowledged. “I will not pretend such a vote will be a harmless protest gesture while relying on others to do the right thing,” he said, chiding his Republican colleagues who chose to go along with Trump’s unconstitutional assault on the legitimacy of America’s election. And then all hell broke loose.
It’s hard to remember how Wednesday began, now that it is over amid piles of broken glass and shattered reputations. In Georgia, the final votes were being counted in two Senate runoff elections, and it was increasingly clear that Democrats—aided by Trump’s campaign to undermine faith in the election—were going to win both of them. The Senate, as a result, would be split fifty-fifty for only the fourth time in history, giving Democrats a fragile majority based on the tie-breaking vote of the incoming Vice-President, Kamala Harris. Both Pence and McConnell were on the verge of finally breaking with Trump over the election to certify the Electoral College results and, with them, Trump’s defeat. “The reckoning is finally arriving,” one of the biggest Never Trump Republicans messaged me. It seemed like a good morning.
Down on the Mall, Trump’s protest mob seemed pathetic and not all that numerous as his supporters waited for their leader and listened to ranting, incoherent speeches from the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle. When Trump began speaking, just before noon, he rambled on about missing ballots and his border wall and lots of other things. “We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede.” He vented fury at Pence’s forthcoming betrayal and urged the crowd to march on the Capitol. It did.
The next few hours were a violent blur for the history books. Four [current count: 5] people died. Tear gas wafted through Statuary Hall, along with rioters swathed in Trump regalia. Both the House and the Senate chambers were breached. A man paraded a Confederate flag through the congressional corridors. “Insurrection in Washington,” the CNN chyron said. And later: “Trump silent as pro-Trump mob storms Capitol.” “This is what the President has caused today, this insurrection,” Mitt Romney, the lone Republican senator to consistently stand up to Trump, told a Times reporter, with fury in his voice. At one point, Liz Cheney, the only senior House Republican leader who refused in advance to go along with Trump’s coup, phoned in to Fox News. “There is no question that the President formed the mob. The President incited the mob. The President addressed the mob. He lit the flames. This is what America is not,” she said.
It was an unforgettable day that many, for various reasons, may try to forget. But I will remember Trump shouting into the cold wind as the clock hit the appointed hour of 1 PM, urging his supporters to march on the Capitol, egging them on, inciting them with his hatred and grievance. I will remember the Trump flag, not the American flag, hanging off the Capitol balcony, and the fact that the rioters wore Trump’s name on their shirts and hats. And I will remember his video, as those rioters rampaged through the halls of Congress. “We love you,” Trump told them. This actually happened.
As night fell and law enforcement finally regained control of the Capitol, the man who had spent months campaigning on “LAW & ORDER” said and did nothing. Washington wondered whether this was, finally, belatedly, an ending of sorts for the President: Would the Republicans who had signed up for Trump’s coup abandon their unconstitutional objections to the Electoral College? Would Pence, having finally broken with Trump and said that he would do his duty to certify Trump’s electoral defeat, join with other members of the Cabinet to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment and remove Trump from office?
Some Democratic House members started to demand a second impeachment, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad. The count was up to more than three dozen by late in the evening, according to Politico. Could Trump become the first President to be impeached twice? Would he? And, if he was, would there finally be twenty Republican senators willing to end this madness by convicting him in a trial? There are still two weeks to go until Biden’s Inauguration. There is a sense that anything could happen.
The longest of days did not end with answers to many of those questions, but at least it ended with Congress back at work, doing the job that the Constitution demands of it. Pence reconvened the Senate soon after 8 PM. He lectured the rioters. “You did not win. Violence never wins,” he said. “Let’s get back to work.” There was applause. “Our job is to convene, to open the ballots, and to count them. That’s it,” Mike Lee, of Utah, a staunch Trump supporter, said. And, of course, he was right. Everyone knew it—not least the cynical Republican senators who were determined to pretend otherwise and triggered this exercise in the first place. Support for their coup in the Senate collapsed quickly. Cruz and Hawley began the day with perhaps thirteen votes. But there were only six left, including Cruz’s own, by the time the votes were actually counted on Cruz’s objection to Arizona’s electoral certificate. Ninety-three senators voted it down, and it is very hard to get ninety-three senators to agree on anything anymore.
Even Lindsey Graham, the South Carolinian whose reinvention from Trump-basher to Trump-lover has been one of Trump-era Washington’s minor dramas, finally broke with the President. Sounding oddly jovial, or, perhaps, liberated, Graham said, “Count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful.” Graham mocked the hollow pretensions of his colleagues, who claimed to be making a principled objection that would somehow grant Pence the power to unilaterally “disenfranchise a hundred and fifty million people.” And then Graham concluded with the words that might have mattered, that might have actually helped to avoid this mess, had he uttered them two months ago, when he should have: “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are lawfully elected and will become the President and the Vice-President of the United States on January the 20th.”
But it was all too late. Although Graham and Pence and McConnell abandoned Trump, many others did not. Nearly a hundred and forty House Republicans supported the objections to the lawfully certified results from Pennsylvania. Five Republican senators joined Cruz and Hawley, even after the Capitol was taken by force for the first time since the British invaded in 1814. On his way out, Trump is leaving destruction—literal, not metaphorical—in his wake. What wreckage will tomorrow bring? ###
[Susan B. Glasser is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, where she writes a twice-monthly column on life in Trump’s Washington. She is Politico’s chief international-affairs columnist and the host of its weekly podcast, “The Global Politico.” Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications; most recently, she founded the award-winning Politico magazine and went on to become the editor of Politico throughout the 2016 election cycle. She previously served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of "Outlook" and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin and the End of Revolution (2005), which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker. Glasser received a BA cum laude (government) from Harvard University (MA).]
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