As the old saying goes, Donald Trump wanted to remain president in the worst possible way. And Rudy Giuliani lost what was left of his reputation helping Trump peddle lies about voter fraud right up to the courthouse door, but then he and other lawyers on Trump’s legal team were forced to admit to judges that they didn’t have any evidence that the election was stolen.
We should be thankful that Democrats turned out nearly 80 million votes to swamp the Trump cult, flipping five states that Trump carried in 2016 — not only Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the so-called “Blue Wall” that Hillary Clinton lost, but also Arizona and Georgia. That might have put the election out of range of Republicans who thought they might steal it for the Great Misleader.
Since the voters gave Biden 306 credits in the Electoral College — 36 more than the number needed to win the presidency — Trump and his toadies needed to convince Republican legislatures in at least three states to repudiate the will of their respective voters. If it had been a matter of one or two states, Trump’s Republican enablers might have been tempted, and we would have seen Republican leaders joining in a chorus rationalizing the legitimacy of overriding the popular vote.
Two weeks after it became apparent that Biden would win Pennsylvania, putting him past the 270 electoral credits needed to win the presidency, Trump was refusing to concede and he wouldn’t let federal agencies cooperate with Biden’s transition team. Instead, Trump’s attorneys tried to delay the certification of Biden’s victories in the five contested states, with bogus charges of large-scale fraudulent voting, loudly claimed in tweets and press conferences. But Trump’s lawyers were unable to produce actual evidence at court hearings, and the lawsuits fell like a row of dominoes. Finally, Nov. 23, Emily Murphy, administrator of the US General Services Administration, notified Biden she was authorizing the transition process to begin, which may be as close as Trump gets to conceding the election.
We may have been saved this year by the incompetence of Trump and his lawyers, but we can’t count on that happening again. Smarter fascists are waiting in the wings of the Republican caucus and “GOP” leaders are no more committed to the principles of democracy in the United States than they were committed in 2016 to the principle that no Supreme Court justice should be seated during an election year.
While Trump’s lawyers were delaying the inevitable, his agency heads were laying booby traps that Biden’s appointees will have to find and defuse when they take over in January.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, shortly after Trump was inaugurated promised an unending battle for “deconstruction of the administrative state,” to transform Washington and upend the world order.
As part of that process, the Trump administration drove many career civil servants from their jobs and replaced them with Trump loyalists who will try to stall or undermine Biden’s agenda. The new president may be able to replace many political appointees when he moves into the White House, but more Trumpers will be protected by civil service laws that stipulate they can be removed only “for cause.” The Biden administration must document those causes.
Getting rid of Trump is a major victory, but it won’t solve the problem with the Republican Party, which has been going fascist over 40 years. Republicans have controlled the message ever since the Reagan administration did away with the Fairness Doctrine, which required the holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance and do so in a manner that was fair and balanced. The new policy allowed conservatives to consolidate radio and TV networks and replace liberal voices on talk radio with right wing talkers who stick to the message that Democrats only care about gays, radical feminists, Blacks and Latinos, and don’t care about white people — particularly white men. Conservatives have expanded in the last decade to Spanish-language stations as well, which may have swung Florida to Trump by convincing Latinos that Joe Biden was intent on bringing Venezuela-style socialism to the US — even though Biden doesn’t even support Medicare for All.
Democratic funders in 2004 built Air America Radio to bring progressive talk to the radio, and it helped Barack Obama win election in 2008, but two years later, progressive radio talker Thom Hartmann recently noted, the “Democratic funders declared victory and abandoned the network; it died in 2010. Now, only conservative talk radio is heard in 90% of the country.”
You can still listen to progressive talkers, such as Hartmann, Stephanie Miller, and Randi Rhodes over the Internet on apps such as TuneIn or Progressive Voices, as well as SiriusXM’s Progressive Channel, but progressive talk should be broadcast from radio stations across the country instead of leaving the interior of the US to Rush Limbaugh, who is carried on 600 stations, and others of his ilk spread over 1,500 conservative talk radio stations, compared with fewer than 100 stations featuring progressive talk.
“If Democrats don’t get their media and intellectual infrastructure act together, the hard-right narrative being promoted by America’s most toxic media will continue to swing elections across the country,” Hartmann wrote.
With an estimated $14 billion spent on the 2020 election, and nearly two thirds of that spending by Democrats or left-leaning PACs, some of that money might better have been spent buying radio stations that could fill in the information gap in red states (many of whom used to elect Democrats). There is a liberal audience there.
The FCC should reinstate the Fairness Doctrine; restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations; and provide greater local accountability over radio licensing. In the meantime, Democratic funders should make another run at buying radio stations that would help get equity in talk radio voices.
Also, while Biden has been expressing his hope to unify the nation, that should not preclude the establishment of a commission or special prosecutor to identify crimes committed by Trump and members of his campaigns and his administration. Trump certainly should be prosecuted for his role in ordering his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to violate federal campaign finance laws in making payments to keep two women quiet about their sexual relations with Trump before he ran for president. In a court filing December 2018, a US attorney noted, “[A]s Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” a.k.a. Donald Trump.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison and fined $50,000 after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations. He served a little more than a year before his release from prison in May, due to concerns about the coronavirus, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. If Cohen deserved to go to prison (and Trump let him take the fall), so should the Grifter in Chief.
Hey, maybe Robert Mueller will get to finish writing his report when Trump is no longer immune from prosecution. And maybe Mueller can add a third volume on Bill Barr’s obstructions. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2020
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