This lovely video was on the latest Jimmy Kimmel show (h/t: Merilee). Smokey the Bear does a mean twerk!

Here’s the bad news to start off with, presaging no early end to the polarization of America (h/t: Matthew)

Just awful.

A new CNN poll finds that 75% of Republicans, and 85% of those who approve of Trump, believe Biden didn't legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency:https://t.co/qatpn19z2f

The extent of the Big Lie's hold on Republicans is becoming depressingly clear: https://t.co/reCFweaEK6

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 17, 2021

As of Wednesday, Donald Trump will no longer be President, and I for one am looking forward to a time of relative calm and rebuilding, if not “healing”. But I’m also curious as to what will happen to the Republican party, and a bit fearful of what the gun-hugging loons are going to do on Wednesday, or when the Democratic Congress starts undoing all of Trump’s changes. Washington D.C. is now closed to those who want to watch the Inauguration live; we’ll have to resort to television and and President behind bulletproof glass.

In the meantime, while the days of Trumpism dwindle down to an unprecious few, we have two final cris de coeur giving a final assessment of the Trump presidency.  Nick Cohen ponders whether it’s correct to call Trump a fascist, while Andrew Sullivan is taken aback by Trump’s participation in the Capitol insurrection.

Cohen first, as what he says seems more thoughtful. Click on the screenshot (h/t Jez)

For Cohen, the word “fascist” is not to be used lightly; as he says:

The use of “fascism” in political debate is both a call to arms and a declaration of war. For once you say you are fighting fascism there can be no retreat. By talking of “pre-fascism” or “neo-fascism”, you acknowledge that the F-word is not a bomb you should detonate lightly; you also acknowledge the gravity of the times.

But he then disposes of two alternative adjectives: Trump’s not a “conservative” because his views and actions don’t comport with what people have usually meant by the term. Nor is Trump a “populist” because, says Cohen, he’s not supporting the people against elites: Cohen avers that it’s itself elitist to “[deny] the result of the people’s vote with the big lie, the Joseph Goebbels lie, that Trump won the election he lost and then [to incite] brainwashed followers to storm democratic institutions”.  Well that sounds like populism to me, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition:

POPULISM. The policies or principles of any of various political parties which seek to represent the interests of ordinary people, spec. of the Populists of the U.S. or Russia. Also: support for or representation of ordinary people or their views; speech, action, writing, etc., intended to have general appeal.

Some have compromised by calling trump a “proto-fascist” or “pre-fascist”, but Cohen dismisses those terms as well, and for three reasons you can read about in his piece. For Cohen, the term “fascist” winds up perfectly appropriate for Trump because of his incitement to overthrow a democratic election. In particular, Cohen dismisses the argument that Trump shouldn’t be called a fascist because he hasn’t yet “transformed his society into a totalitarian war machine”:

The example of the stages of cancer, so beloved by believers in Trump derangement syndrome, explains the stupidity. Imagine you are a doctor looking at pre-cancerous cells or an early-stage cancer that has not grown deeply into tissue. The door bursts open and a chorus of Fox News presenters and Cambridge dons cry that “real experts in the field” agree that on no account should you call it cancer until it has metastasised and spread through the whole body. A competent doctor would insist on calling a fatal disease by its real name and not leave treatment until it was too late to stop it. So should you.

Well, no, it’s not a fatal disease until it’s become terminal, so the metaphor is weak. In truth, this does seem to be a quibble about labels, informed though it is by Cohen’s knowledge of history. We know what Trump is, and does it really make a difference if, technically, he’s a fascist or not? Our drive to ensure that he never again holds the reins of leadership doesn’t depend on a label, but on his past behaviors.

At the Weekly Dish, Sullivan calls for Trump’s impeachment and conviction, pretty much also on the grounds that he is a fascist, de-legitimizing a democratic election whose results were audited and found correct (click on the screenshot):

A quote:

This is why Trump should be impeached and convicted in the Senate. Not because he directly incited a riot against members of Congress and his own vice-president — and chose not to intervene while it continued. It’s that Trump has repeatedly, insistently and emphatically attacked the legitimacy of the entire democracy he is in charge of. This is not just a Big Lie, as others have noted. It’s the Biggest Lie Imaginable. It’s arsenic to a functioning democracy, and Trump has long injected it directly into the veins of the American system.

. . . Trump is leveraging the authority of his office — the highest in the land — to destroy the legitimacy of our entire system, and of the next president: “By the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that.” Did he want an inquiry? Nah. He was quite clear what his immediate purpose was: “All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to re-certify, and we become president.”

But before that, Sullivan emphasizes America’s increased polarization, due largely to the recalcitrance of the GOP:

You can see the difference between 2016 and 2020 in this stat: “In 2016, 52% of Democrats said Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump was ‘legitimate and accurate,’” — pretty disconcerting for any democracy. But this year, only “26% of Republicans said they thought Trump’s loss was similarly legitimate.” In 2016, right after the election, 84 percent of adults believed the election was legitimate, with 15 percent opposed. In 2020, only 57 percent of Americans believed that Joe Biden was legitimately elected president, compared with 43 percent who didn’t. Among men, it’s 51 to 49 percent. Among those earning between $50K and $100K, it’s a 50-50 split. Among white men without a college degree, a clear majority, 62 percent, believe the election was outright stolen. That’s a huge torpedo hit below the waterline for our democracy.

Trump has already been impeached, though I doubt the upcoming trial will convict him since 17 Republican Senators have to vote for that result. Regardless, the system is now working as it should, though I think, in the interests of harmony (if that’s possible), Democrats should resist gloating. (Neither Cohen nor Sullivan are guilty of this.) As Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.”

Although I wasn’t that impressed with Sullivan’s piece, largely a regurgitation of previously-published views and statistics, his reason for impeaching Trump is at least interesting. Sadly, though, the one count of the indictment is not “repeatedly, insistently, and emphatically [attacking] the legitimacy of the democracy he is in charge of.” The insurrection is merely one aspect of those attacks, but the Senate has to vote on the charges, and one can make a superficially plausible case that Trump wasn’t inciting immediate and predictable violence. I don’t agree with that defense, but Sullivan’s own charge is irrelevant for the forthcoming trial.

It looks pretty certain now that the House of Representatives will vote today to impeach Donald Trump for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, namely fomenting insurrection. You can watch the impeachment proceedings live at the site below, which are underway:

The charges are laid out in the following five-page document (click on screenshot below). The heart of the charges is this:

Further, section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits any person who has ‘‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion against’’ the United States from ‘‘hold[ing] any office . . . under the United States’’.  In his conduct while President of the United States—and in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed—Donald John Trump engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States. . . .

 

The House will certainly vote for impeachment, and at least five Republicans will join what will certainly be nearly all House Democrats, ensuring a majority vote—all that’s needed to send charges to the Senate.

As VP Pence has rejected the House’s demand that he use the 25th Amendment to expel Trump from office, impeachment would be the only way to get him out before Biden’s inauguration. A Senate hearing could in principle be held and dump him before January 20th, though that seems unlikely since there would be just one day to have that hearing. A Senate impeachment trial could of course proceed after Trump’s out of office.

There’s also the possibility of Congress censuring Trump in a resolution, but that isn’t in the offing yet.

Now four House Democrats didn’t endorse the impeachment resolution (one voted “present” and another is likely to become a Republican), but the other two oppose impeachment, at least one because it’s “divisive.”

The question at issue is not whether the House should vote to impeach Trump, as that’s a fait accompli. The question is whether the Senate should try him for insurrection. I think that they are required to have a trial if sent the bill of charges approved by the House, but I’m just laying out the pros and cons.

Here are the arguments I see both in favor of and against trying Trump in the Senate:

IN FAVOR:

A.) It is a punishment of the man for all the bad deeds he did, culminating in his reprehensible and unconstitutional behavior last week. He would be the only President to have been impeached twice, and it’s a black mark on his record.

B.) He can be prevented from running for future office even if he’s not convicted. As Reuters notes:

Impeachment could be used to remove Trump from office and to disqualify him from holding political office in the future.

Two historical precedents, both involving federal judges, make clear that the Senate could also vote to disqualify the president from holding office in the future, with only a simple majority needed.

Paul Campos, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Colorado, said that even if the Senate does not convict the president, senators could hold a second, separate vote to prevent him from future office.

That would mean Democrats, who will take control of the Senate later in January, could bar Trump from running for president in 2024 even without the support of Republican senators.

C.) As Mitch McConnell thinks, kicking Trump out of office (or convicting him after he’s gone) would rid the Republican Party of Trump, whose actions are fracturing the party.

 

AGAINST:

A.)  He will not be convicted, as that requires 17 Republicans to join with all the Democrats in the Senate to get the necessary 2/3 majority. Convicting him is, at this time, a futile hope.

B.)  It will be a symbolic vote since he’d be out of office even if he were convicted.

C.) It smacks of retribution, of Democrats getting back at him, and not just for his reprehensible actions last week. This occurs at a time when Biden is calling for “reaching across the aisle.”

D.) It makes Trump even more of a martyr to those of his minions who see him as persecuted. It’s thus divisive.

E.) It takes up time that the Senate needs to enact new legislation under Biden.

The most powerful argument for trying him, at least in terms of doing something concrete, is B above: he might be barred from running for office again, and that requires a simple majority vote which would surely occur in the Senate. The symbolic shaming will do little, I think, to stop his reprehensible behavior, which is hard-wired in his neurons and not subject to change. The fact that an impeachment vote will surely fail in the Senate does, however, tell the world that we will not tolerate a fascist, and at a time when the world’s opinion of America has fallen quite low.

Though there are arguments on both sides, I tend to approve of both the House impeaching Trump and the Senate trying him, even though they won’t secure a conviction. The symbolic act is a powerful one, which, though it may be divisive, will only divide those who support America’s democratic values from those who support fascism. Congress needs to make a statement, and impeachment, even without conviction, is a statement.

And, of course, if the Senate can secure that majority vote, it may be able to bar Trump from holding any federal office, which is a good thing. HOWEVER, even that might not work. As Reuters adds:

Trump could, however, try to challenge such a determination [the “can’t run for office” vote] in court, Campos said. The Supreme Court in 1992 said it would not second-guess the Senate’s decisions about how to handle impeachment proceedings.

“The Senate has great latitude in deciding how it wants to conduct a trial,” Campos said.

Other legal experts, however, said the Senate could only prevent Trump from holding office if it first votes to convict him in the impeachment trial.

So even a majority vote might not be enough to keep Trump from running again.

In the end, though, we can expect Trump, even if he doesn’t hold office, to remain a major figure in the Republican party, a “senior statesman”—horrible as that sounds—who will continue to make pronouncements and foment hatred. There’s nothing that anybody can do about that now.

But we can be heartened by realizing that Trump will now likely face state charges for tax evasion and other issues, and he cannot pardon himself for those. For the rest of his life he’ll be embroiled in legal and political fighting. Maybe he’d like that, as it feeds his narcissism, but I sure wouldn’t want to spend my dotage fighting the law—and perhaps sitting in jail.

Weigh in below, of course.

Snopes leans largely to the Left, so if it gives a mixed rating to the question below (half true/half false), you can be pretty sure that it would not stand up in a court of law, much less the Senate. I didn’t follow exactly what the Orange Man said before the horrific events of three days ago (five people are now dead, including a Capitol police officer who died after being bashed in the head with a fire extinguisher), but I’m pretty sure that Josh Hawley’s fist-pump to the demonstrators does not constitute incitement to imminent violence. Hawley could have been giving an “I’m with you” sign—odious enough, but not unambiguous enough to prove, much less buttress, the calls of people who want him tried for treason.

Trump may be impeached, and I support the House going forward with that, but what was his role, if any, in inciting people to storm the Capitol? Well, Snopes gives the question a “mixture” response (click on screenshot).

It turns out that Trump may have had this violence in mind, but he was very, very canny about what he said, and since we can’t show that he knowingly incited violence, that can’t be proven. Here’s what Snopes says:

There’s more stuff, but author Jessica Lee concludes this:

In short, the president called on supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” march or walk to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to urge members of the senate to defy the Electoral College vote in a constitutionally mandated procedure to affirm Biden’s win, without using the words “storm” or “breach” or “break into” the federal building.

Put another way, the president encouraged supporters to descend on the Capitol grounds and “cheer” on senators who would break laws governing U.S. elections, but he did not explicitly tell people to commit crimes themselves.

Furthermore, it was a subjective call on whether the phrases “you have to show strength” and “demand that Congress do the right thing” were actually messages condoning crimes and violence among extremists, without outright encouraging it. Such a rhetorical strategy is known to scholars of white nationalist and extremist groups, including the Proud Boys.

In sum, while Trump did not say the words “storm” or “break into” the White House, Trump indeed told supporters to gather at the U.S. Capitol and try to convince members of Congress to delay the constitutional process that would affirm Biden’s presidency. For those reasons, and the ones outlined above, we rate this claim a “Mixture.”

In other words, if Trump had that in mind (and who knows?), he was very clever. Demented, maybe, but perhaps clever. He may be impeached, but if this is the main charge, I predict that he won’t be convicted in an impeachment trial. Why, then, do I favor impeachment? Well, there’s the slight possibility that some Republicans may vote with the Democrats, for there were many reasons to remove Trump from office besides the charge of incitement, but mainly I think it will be another black mark on his record: the first President to be impeached twice.