World Press on Ugly Truth about America, American Carnage and Trump in Wolf’s Clothing: New Age Islam's Selection, 8 January 2021
By
New Age Islam Edit Desk
8 January
2021
•
We’ve Seen the Ugly Truth about America
By
Roxane Gay
•
This American Carnage
By
Imrul Islam
•
Trump Has Always Been a Wolf In Wolf’s Clothing
By
Ezra Klein
•
Delete All of Trump’s Accounts
By
Greg Bensinger
•
‘Yes, We Are Safe,’ I Texted From The Capitol
By
Kirsten Gillibrand
•
This Is When The Fever Breaks
By
David Brooks
• The
25th Amendment Can Remove Trump, But We Shouldn’t Stop There
By
David Landau And Rosalind Dixon
• Did
The Capitol Attack Break The President’s Spell?
By Michelle
Goldberg
•
What Happened In Washington DC Is Happening Around The World
By
Cas Mudde
-----
We’ve
Seen the Ugly Truth About America
By
Roxane Gay
Jan. 7,
2021
An explosion caused by a police munition is seen while Trump supporters
gather in front of the US Capitol building. (Image: Reuters/Leah Millis)
------
There are
two images. In one, National Guard troops, most with no identifying information
on their uniforms, stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in anticipation
of violence from people peacefully protesting the killing of George Floyd. In
the second image, thousands of protesters — domestic terrorists, really — swarm
the Capitol. They wear red MAGA hats and carry Trump flags and show their faces
because they want to be seen. They don’t seem to fear the consequences of being
identified. More images — a man sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s office, his feet on a
desk, a smirk on his face. A man carrying a stolen lectern, smiling at the
camera. A man in the Senate chamber doing parkour.
On
Wednesday, Jan. 6, Congress was set to conduct a largely ceremonial count of
the electoral votes. There were rumblings that a few ambitious, craven
politicians planned to object to the votes in several states. The president
openly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to thwart the vote ratification —
something not in Mr. Pence’s power to do.
But I don’t
think any of us expected to see radical, nearly all white protesters storming
the Capitol as if it were the Bastille. I don’t think we expected to see
Capitol Police basically ushering these terrorists into the building and
letting them have the run on the place for a ridiculous amount of time while
the world watched in shock and disgust. I don’t think we expected to see some
of those police officers taking selfies with the intruders. I don’t think we
expected that the violent protesters would be there by the explicit invitation
of the president, who told a raucous gathering of his supporters to head over
to the Capitol. “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he
said.
On
Wednesday, the world bore witness to white supremacy unchecked. I nearly choked
on the bitter pill of what white people who no doubt condemned Black Lives
Matter protesters as “thugs” felt so entitled to do.
After the
Capitol was cleared of protesters, Congress returned to work. Politicians
peacocked and pontificated in condescending ways about the Constitution and
flawed state voting procedures that, in fact, worked perfectly. Senator Ben
Sasse smarmed about being neighborly and shoveling snow. He took a bizarre,
jovial tone as if all the moment called for was a bit of charm. Senator Mitt
Romney tried to take the role of elder statesman, expressing the level of
outrage he should have shown over the past four years. It was all pageantry — too
little, too late.
Barack
Obama famously spoke of a more perfect union. After this week, I don’t know
that such an ambition is possible. I don’t know that it ever was. I don’t know
that this union could or should be perfected.
Politicians
and pundits have promised that the guardrails of democracy will protect the
republic. They’ve said we need to trust in checks and balances and the peaceful
transition of power that the United States claims is a hallmark of our country.
And many of us have, however tentatively, allowed ourselves to believe that the
laws this country was built on, however flawed, were strong enough to withstand
authoritarian encroachments by President Trump and Republicans. What the days
and weeks since the 2020 election have shown us is that the guardrails have
been destroyed. Or maybe they were never there. Maybe they were never anything
more than an illusion we created to believe this country was stronger than it
was.
As
Americans began to process the Trump-endorsed insurrection, the blatant
sedition, public figures shared the same platitudes about America that they
always do when something in this country goes gravely wrong. Jamie Dimon, the
chief executive of JPMorgan Chase; Joe Biden; Maria Shriver; Republican
senators; and others declared that this is not America, that we are better than
this, with “this” being the coup attempt, or Trump’s histrionics, or the
politicians who, with a desperate thirst for power, allowed Trump’s lies about
the election to flourish, unchallenged.
This is
America. This has always been America. If this were not America, this coup
attempt would not have happened. It’s time we face this ugly truth, let it sink
into the marrow of our bones, let it move us to action.
With
everything that took place in Washington on Wednesday, it was easy to forget
that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their Senate races in Georgia. Their
victories were gratifying and cathartic, the result of solid campaigns and the
hard work of organizers on the ground in the state, from Stacey Abrams’s Fair
Fight to Mijente and many others. Years of activism against the state’s
dedication to voter suppression made these victories possible. The easy
narrative will be that Black women and Black people saved this country. And
they did. And they should be celebrated. But the more challenging narrative is
that we now have to honor our salvation by doing something with it.
For the
first time in many years, Democrats will control the House, the Senate, and the
presidency. Real change is not as elusive as it seemed before the Georgia
runoffs because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s administration is well positioned
to enact many of their policies. If the Democrats dare to use the power they
have amassed, a brave new world might be possible.
In the
coming weeks, we’ll undoubtedly hear the argument that now is the time for
centrism and compromise and bipartisan efforts. That argument is wrong. There
is no compromise with politicians who amass power, hoard it, and refuse to
relinquish it when the democratic process does not work in their favor. There
is no compromise with politicians who create a set of conditions that allow a
coup attempt to take place, resulting in four deaths, countless injuries, and
irreparable damage to the country both domestically and internationally. These
people do not care about working with their colleagues on the other side of the
proverbial aisle. They have an agenda, and whenever they are in power, they
execute that agenda with precision and discipline. And they do so
unapologetically.
It’s time
for Democrats to use their power in the same way and legislate without worrying
about how Republican voters or politicians will respond. Cancel student loan
debt. Pass another voting rights act that enfranchises as many Americans as
possible. Create a true path to citizenship for undocumented Americans.
Implement a $15 minimum hourly wage. Enact “Medicare for all.” Realistically,
only so much is possible with a slender majority in the Senate, but the
opportunity to make the most of the next two years is there.
With the
power they hold, Democrats can try to make this country a more equitable and
generous place rather than one where the interests of the very wealthy and
powerful are the priority. If they don’t, they are no better than their
Republican counterparts, and in fact, they are worse because they will have
squandered a real opportunity to do the work for which they were elected. Over
the past four years, we have endured many battles for the soul of the country,
but the war for the soul of this country rages on. I hope the Biden-Harris
administration and the 117th Congress can end that war, once and for all.
-----
Roxane
Gay (@rgay) is a contributing Opinion writer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/capitol-riot-trump-america.html?
----
This
American Carnage
By
Imrul Islam
January 08,
2021
Supporters of outgoing US President Donald Trump climbing the US Capitol
building to resist transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden. (Photo: AP)
-----
Four years
after newly elected President Donald Trump vowed to stop "an American
carnage," insurrectionists rallied by his lies stormed the US Capitol in
an attempt to overthrow the results of the November 3, 2020 presidential
elections. On Wednesday, January 6, while Congress prepared its largely
ceremonial certification of President-elect Joe Biden's victory, Trump urged
his supporters—many of them flying hate flags—to march up to the Capitol in
order to "give our Republicans the kind of pride and boldness that they
need to take back our country."
And so they
did. On the day Raphael Warnock—pastor of Dr. King's church—was elected as
Georgia's first Black senator, a white mob stormed the US Capitol intent on
taking back power. They did so at the call of a president who has repeatedly
lied about election results, and stirred a slurry of paranoia, white supremacy,
and populism since his first campaign speech.
But we
would be wrong to blame just Trump for what happened on Wednesday. Over the
past four years, a dangerous and deeply narcissistic president has been enabled
by a rotating cast of far-right ideologues. Together, this cabal of conmen have
taken a sledgehammer to the US immigration system, packed the courts with
presidential appointees, passed draconian legislation targeting racial and
religious minorities, and sought to restrict reproductive and LGBTQ rights of
Americans. Overwhelmingly, the president has been allowed to act with sustained
indifference toward inclusive governance and a dictatorial disregard for
opposing viewpoints.
As
lawmakers were escorted to safety after pro-Trump rioters invaded the Capitol,
some Republicans called into TV channels to condemn the violence. And yet, for
the last four years, these were the same people who stood guard in defence of
the indefensible. On FOX, through Twitter, across airwaves dominated by
alt-right mouthpieces, Trump's yes-men echoed the president's message—telling
white America that they were under attack. When the president fraudulently
claimed victory on election night, Republican lawmakers largely remained mum.
When Trump continued to lie brazenly, and his legal team suffered ignominy
after ignominy, the likes of Ted Cruz continued to stand behind him. The
result? When polled, almost 62 percent of Republicans said they did not believe
Joe Biden won the elections.
Let us not
mistake necessity for courage. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
attempting to put the genie back in the bottle does not negate his
mollycoddling of autocracy. At best, this is a Republican party that has
located the remnants of a backbone it lost a long time ago.
There are
some who are comparing the events in Washington, D.C. to conflicts in the
Middle East, or political upheavals in the Global South. They are wrong. Unlike
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Venezuela (the list is endless), there are no
foreign forces instigating violence in Washington, D.C. This is all our doing.
This—this terror marinated in that great national tradition of structural racism—is
as American as it gets.
For proof,
we need only look at how insurrectionists were treated. There are videos of law
enforcement officials taking selfies with rioters. There is footage of them
escorting crowds into the building. Where were these niceties during the
anti-racist protests this summer?
And if we
must look for individual perpetrators, we need not look far. The main
instigator of this senseless, completely unnecessary chain of events, during
which four people died, has a verified Twitter account. He lives on 1600
Pennsylvania Ave. He thinks the mob that has overrun the Capitol is "very
special."
In D.C., as
night set in, a curfew was imposed. There were still rioters out, but the crowd
seemed to be dispersing. Lawmakers stuck inside the Capitol Building expressed
their wish to return to certify results once the building was cleared (and they
did). The National Guard has been mobilised. When the dust settles, Democrats
will control the House, the Senate?, and barring a power grab, the Presidency.
But for
now, all is uncertain. Across the District, there is an eerie sense that the
Pandora's box is open. In the US, democracy is now a negotiation with chance.
-----
Imrul
Islam works for the Bridge Initiative, a research project on Islamophobia in
Washington, D.C.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/american-carnage-2024033
----
Trump
Has Always Been a Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing
By
Ezra Klein
Jan. 7,
2021
For years,
there has been a mantra that Republicans have recited to comfort themselves
about President Trump — both about the things he says and the support they
offer him. Trump, they’d say, should be taken seriously, not literally. The
coinage comes from a 2016 article in The Atlantic by Salena Zito, in which she
complained that the press took Trump “literally, but not seriously; his
supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
For
Republican elites, this was a helpful two-step. If Trump’s words were
understood as layered in folksy exaggeration and schtick — designed to trigger
media pedants, but perfectly legible to his salt-of-the-earth supporters — then
much that would be too grotesque or false to embrace literally could be
carefully endorsed at best and ignored as poor comedy at worst. And Republican
elites could walk the line between eviscerating their reputations and enraging
their party’s leader, all while blaming the media for caricaturing Trumpism by
reporting Trump’s words accurately.
On Nov. 5,
2020, just days after the election, Vice President Mike Pence offered a classic
of the genre. As Trump declared the election stolen, in terms as clear as a
fist to the face, Pence tried to take him seriously, not literally; to signal
solidarity with Trump’s fury while backing away from the actual claims. “I
stand with President @RealDonaldTrump,” he tweeted. “We must count every LEGAL
vote.”
But Trump
did not want every legal vote counted. He wanted legally counted votes to be
erased; he wanted new votes discovered in his favor. He wanted to win, not
lose; whatever the cost, whatever the means. And every day since, he has turned
up the pressure, leading to the bizarre theory that took hold of Trumpists in
recent weeks that the vice president was empowered to accept or reject the
results of the election on Jan. 6; that Pence could, single-handedly, right
this wrong. And so, after years of loyal service, of daily debasements and
constant humiliations, Trump came for Pence, too, declaring him just one more
enemy of the people.
“Mike Pence
didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country
and our Constitution,” Trump raged, torching whatever rapport Pence had built
with his base.
On
Wednesday, at the Capitol, those who took Trump seriously and those who took
Trump literally collided in spectacular fashion. Inside the building, a rump of
Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, were leading a feckless
challenge to the Electoral College results. They had no pathway to overturning
the results and they knew it. They had no evidence that the results should be
overturned and they knew it. And they did not act or speak like they truly
believed the election had been stolen. They were there to take Trump’s concerns
seriously, not literally, in the hopes that his supporters might become their
supporters in 2024.
But at the
same time, Trump was telling his supporters that the election had actually been
stolen, and that it was up to them to resist. And they took him literally. They
did not experience this as performative grievance; they experienced it as a
profound assault. They stormed the Capitol, attacked police officers, shattered
doors and barriers, looted congressional offices. One woman was shot in the
mayhem and died.
If their
actions looked like lunacy to you, imagine it from their perspective, from
within the epistemic structure in which they live. The president of the United
States told them the election had been stolen by the Democratic Party, that
they were being denied power and representation they had rightfully won. “I
know your pain,” he said, in his video from the White house lawn later on
Wednesday. “I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It
was a landslide election, and everyone knows it.” More than a dozen Republican
senators, more than 100 Republican House members, and countless conservative
media figures had backed Trump’s claims.
If the
self-styled revolutionaries were lawless, that was because their leaders told
them that the law had already been broken, and in the most profound,
irreversible way. If their response was extreme, so too was the crime. If
landslide victories can fall to Democratic chicanery, then politics collapses
into meaninglessness. How could the thieves be allowed to escape into the night,
with full control of the federal government as their prize? A majority of
Republicans now believe the election was stolen, and a plurality endorse
insurrection as a response. A snap YouGov poll found that 45 percent of
Republicans approved of the storming of the Capitol; 43 percent opposed it.
Trump’s
great virtue, as a public figure, is his literalism. His statements may be
littered with lies, but he is honest about who he is and what he intends. When
he lost the Iowa caucus to Cruz in 2016, he declared that “Ted Cruz didn’t win
Iowa, he stole it.” When it seemed likely he would lose the presidential
election to Hillary Clinton, he began calling the election rigged. When he
wanted the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden,
he made the demand directly, on a taped call. When he was asked, during the
presidential debates in 2020, if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of
power in the event of a loss, he refused. There was no subterfuge from Trump
leading up to the terrible events of Jan. 6. He called this shot, over and over
again, and then he took it.
The
Republican Party that has aided and abetted Trump is all the more contemptible
because it fills the press with quotes making certain that we know that it
knows better. In a line that will come to define this sordid era (and sordid
party), a senior Republican told The Washington Post, “What is the downside for
humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results
will change.” What happened on Wednesday in Washington is the downside.
Millions of Americans will take you literally. They will not know you are
“humoring” the most powerful man in the world. They will feel betrayed and
desperate. Some of them will be armed.
The Trump
era has often come wrapped in a cloak of self-protective irony. We have been
asked to separate the man from his tweets, to believe that Trump doesn’t mean
what he says, that he doesn’t intend to act on his beliefs, that he isn’t what
he obviously is. Any divergence between word and reality has been enlisted into
this cause. That Trump has failed to achieve much of what he promised because
of his incompetence and distractibility has been recast as a sign of a more
cautious core. The constraints placed upon him by other institutions or
bureaucratic actors have been reframed as evidence that he never intended to
follow through on his wilder pronouncements. This was a convenient fiction for
the Republican Party, but it was a disastrous fantasy for the country. And now
it has collapsed.
When the
literalists rushed the chamber, Pence, Cruz and Hawley were among those who had
to be evacuated, for their own safety. Some of their compatriots, like Senator
Kelly Loeffler, rescinded their objections to the election, seemingly shaken by
the beast they had unleashed. But there is no real refuge from the movement
they fed. Trump’s legions are still out there, and now they are mourning a
death and feeling yet more deceived by many of their supposed allies in
Washington, who turned on them as soon as they did what they thought they had
been asked to do.
The problem
isn’t those who took Trump at his word from the start. It’s the many, many
elected Republicans who took him neither seriously nor literally, but
cynically. They have brought this upon themselves — and us.
-----
Ezra
Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief
and then editor-at-large of Vox; the host of the podcast, “The Ezra Klein
Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist
and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog
vertical.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-capitol-protests.html?
-----
Delete
All of Trump’s Accounts
By
Greg Bensinger
Jan. 7,
2021
It took a
riotous mob storming the Capitol building for Facebook to finally take
significant action against the president.
After four
years of race-baiting, lies and hatred spewed from President Trump’s social
media accounts, Facebook took the commendable step on Thursday of blocking his
account indefinitely. His access won’t be reinstated until at least after Joe
Biden is inaugurated, the company said.
“The
current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform
to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government,”
wrote Facebook’s founder and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg. “We believe the risks of
allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are
simply too great.”
Even as
violent Trump supporters overtook the Capitol building on Wednesday, the social
media companies’ initial instincts were to leave the president’s posts up —
posts in which Mr. Trump expressed sympathy with members of the Capitol mob and
continued to lie about the outcome of the November election. Millions of people
read and shared them.
It’s time
for a fundamental rewiring of those instincts. Twitter, shamefully, has yet to
take harsher action against Mr. Trump than a 12-hour suspension. It must also
act to indefinitely block Mr. Trump’s account. What Mr. Trump has exposed is
the companies’ willingness to look the other way so long as it leads to more
clicks, more time spent on their platforms, more shares. He won’t be the last
to exploit those tendencies.
Let’s not
forget that Facebook let stand Mr. Trump’s apparent threat to protesters after
the killing of George Floyd: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Mr. Trump has used the platforms to downplay the risk of the coronavirus,
advance conspiracy theories about his enemies, threaten world leaders and
undermine the results of the election. Letting posts like that stay up on the
social media platforms sets a dangerous precedent for future politicians and
others who would seek to stir up the masses.
Average
users who repeatedly violate the companies’ policies, particularly by inciting
violence, are blocked or deleted immediately. Yet the president was given a
pass, again and again.
Unfortunately,
the companies are likely to continue to allow posts to stay up from other
leaders spewing rancor and misinformation when such posts are deemed to have
news value. That means personalities who have a large audience of people who
look up to and believe them have a lower bar to clear than the general public
for spouting conspiracy theories and lies. That’s the opposite of how things
should be.
“We believe
that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political
speech, even controversial speech,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on Thursday. But
that’s a red herring. Facebook’s lawyers know that it is well within the
company’s rights to remove or block content. The president, of all people, has
many other ways to reach the electorate.
Social
media sites are where people go to find compatriots and plan attacks like the
thwarted attempt last year to kidnap Michigan’s governor. YouTube’s algorithm
has radicalized countless youth. And this week’s rioters used right-leaning
social media sites like Parler to pass around directions to the Capitol that
would help them avoid police detection.
So we have
to ask Facebook and Twitter: Is this who you really want to be? A safe space
for riot-inciting, lying public officials, who nonetheless bring in lots of
online engagement?
Mr.
Zuckerberg said on Wednesday in an internal note that the company would
increase its moderation of the president’s account because of the “emergency”
of the day’s mob violence. That’s a telling admission that Facebook hadn’t
already been devoting enough resources to moderating Mr. Trump’s dangerous
account.
Jan. 6,
2021, ought to be social media’s day of reckoning. There is a greater calling
than profits, and Mr. Zuckerberg and Twitter’s C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, must play a
fundamental role in restoring truth and decency to our democracy and
democracies around the world.
That can
involve more direct, human moderation of high-profile accounts; more prominent
warning labels; software that can delay posts so that they can be reviewed
before going out to the masses, especially during moments of high tension; and
a far greater willingness to suspend or even completely block dangerous
accounts like Mr. Trump’s.
“The
companies can exclude whatever content they wish,” said Richard Hasen, a
professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine,
who studies online misinformation. “There is nothing in the law that says they
have an obligation to give him a loudspeaker with no mediation.”
Their
obligations shouldn’t stop at the president. Accounts like that of the former
Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who called in a video posted to Facebook for the
beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci and F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, deserve
similar treatment. (Mr. Zuckerberg said at the time that Mr. Bannon hadn’t
violated the rules enough times to be banned.)
There are
risks, of course, to more aggressively policing the social media sites.
Shareholders may balk at the prospect of a ding to ad sales, even if these
corporations would most likely remain among the most profitable in the world.
Lawmakers may retaliate against companies that block users. They’ve hauled the
companies’ executives before Congress repeatedly and threatened to bully the
platforms through more stringent rules, particularly through fully revoking the
legal shield that allows them to host most of the content users generate.
When Joe Biden
takes office, he should be held to the same standard as regular Joes. If he
starts tweeting or posting lies or inciting violence, the companies can and
should quickly suspend and remove him.
Facebook
deserves credit for making this decision, but America cannot risk a repeat of
the events in the Capitol. If the companies once again wait until violence
breaks out to act, it will be too late.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-facebook-twitter-block.html?
------
‘Yes, We
Are Safe,’ I Texted From the Capitol
By
Kirsten Gillibrand
Jan. 7,
2021
On
Wednesday afternoon, I gathered with members of both chambers of Congress
inside the Capitol to certify the electoral votes, a ceremonial and routine
step in our nation’s process for a peaceful transition of power. As we sat in
the Senate chamber listening to our colleagues, the Senate staff started to get
up and move very quickly across the chamber. Vice President Mike Pence was
abruptly removed from the presiding chair by his security detail, and Senator
Chuck Grassley was shuttled across the floor into that seat. Moments later, a
Capitol Police representative informed us the Capitol had been breached and
that we were sheltering in place.
I looked at
my phone; my mother was calling. I told her I was safe and that they were
locking down the chamber. Over the next hour, I answered the same text, “Are
you safe?” over and over. The Capitol Police led us out the chamber’s back
doors, through the corridors, down the stairs, into the tunnels under the Capitol
to a secure location in a nearby office building. As we descended the stairs, I
held Senator Mazie Hirono’s hand.
In the
secure room, I called home and reassured my husband that I was OK. He was
angry, worried and had a lot of questions about how this could happen. The room
was filled with the sounds of my colleagues having the same conversations with
their families. Meanwhile, the rioters raced through the Capitol, ransacking
offices and desecrating public spaces. Their chants of “stop the steal” echoed
in the halls.
We waited
for hours. Anxiety faded to frustration and impatience. We wanted to vote, to
do our jobs. It is our job as senators to represent the will of the American
people. That meant making it clear that while this riot was a temporary disruption
of the democratic process, it was not a disruption of our democracy. So, after
the violence came to an end, we set out to fulfill our constitutional duty.
We were
escorted back to the Senate chamber, swept free of broken glass, and resumed
our certification of the electoral votes. We held fast to the oath we swore to
support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,
foreign and domestic. State by state, we certified the results that have been
checked, rechecked and certified by Democratic and Republican state officials
alike. That is how elections are conducted in this country — not by mob rule.
Unlike the
peaceful protesters who gathered in Lafayette Square or across New York City
last year for Black Lives Matter protests, the rioters at the Capitol were not
met with overwhelming police and military force. They were not stopped from
storming onto the Senate floor, taking a podium or defacing the speaker’s
office. We should all consider what that says about our country, how we see
public safety and racial biases in our law enforcement.
These
rioters must be held responsible for their criminal actions. So should the
president who incited them. Every option available, from invoking the 25th
Amendment to impeachment and removal to criminal prosecution, should be on the
table. These options will require the vice president, cabinet members and
Republican members of the Senate to hold the president accountable in a way
they never have before. When they fail to take decisive action, history will
judge them as complicit.
Congress
and the Department of Justice must undertake a thorough investigation of how
this happened, and why the planning for this protest and response to these
white supremacist groups was so inadequate, putting lawmakers and the people
who work in and maintain our Capitol building at risk. More broadly, we must
assess the role of the ultra conservative media, which purports to be news but
only offers misinformation and division, as well as the power of unchecked
social media to divide our nation.
I’m a person
of Christian faith, and my faith teaches me to love one another as ourselves.
That’s a pretty tall order given where we are. But, we can start by identifying
the sources of the hate and division and addressing them through investigation,
accountability and justice.
-----
Kirsten
Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) is a Democratic senator representing New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/gillibrand-capitol-riot.html?
-----
This Is
When the Fever Breaks
By
David Brooks
Jan. 7,
2021
Awe and
reverence. I remember the first time I entered the U.S. Capitol. I was 14 or
so. I came down from Pennsylvania by train, and I was overwhelmed by the glory
of the place. This was where Lincoln and Henry Clay had worked. This was where
the 13th Amendment was passed, the Land Grant College Act, the New Deal, the
Civil Rights Act. It was such a beautiful building, I was stunned.
I got
inside, found the tunnels and explored the complex. I figured if I walked
really fast, people would think I belonged there, so I trucked along as fast as
my little legs would carry me — heart racing and imagination aflame.
It’s
decades later. I live a few blocks from the building now and have been inside
thousands of times. The awe and reverence have never diminished an iota.
The people
who work there have their human frailties, but at moments of great crisis, like
9/11 or Wednesday’s mob rampage, most of them show a devotion to our common
enterprise that makes me cry with admiration.
Senator
Sherrod Brown of Ohio once took me on the Senate floor and showed me how
generations of senators had carved their names in the drawers of the desks —
ancient hands with their penknives scratching away in the wood, a
centuries-long parade of lives dedicated in their imperfect ways to our
country.
That is why
the Capitol, not the White House, is the altar of our democracy, the sacred
gathering spot of those who served, strove and died building this nation.
One day in
2013 a freshman senator named Ted Cruz shut down the government. He was months
into his first term, a time when his eyes should have been wide with wonder and
his heart full of humility. Instead, he co-opted the Senate, with no realistic
prospect of serving any cause, but simply for the purpose of making Ted Cruz
famous. He gave a 21-hour filibuster speech on the Senate floor that riveted
right-wing media for a news cycle.
I was in
the Senate Dining Room shortly afterward when he walked in. The emotional
temperature plummeted. Everybody, of both parties, despised Cruz for putting
himself above the Senate, for his own arrogance and narcissism.
But it
worked. Cruz became a prominent G.O.P. figure, a fund-raising machine. The
model of being a Republican lawmaker changed. It was no longer somebody who
passes legislation; it was someone who pulls a publicity stunt that owns the
libs. Millions of Americans felt scorned by a cultural and media elite. They
were willing to follow anybody who could make himself despised by the people
they felt despised them.
Donald
Trump came in the wake of that. And then, this week, Josh Hawley. As of
Wednesday morning, Hawley was the model of what a Republican senator was going
to look like in the post-Trump era. He cannily understood what the party
faithful wanted. Publicity stunts. Owning the libs.
But there
are dark specters running through our nation — beasts with shaggy manes and
feral teeth. They have the stench of Know-Nothingism, the hot blood of the
lynchers, and they ride the winds of nihilistic fury.
Read the
history books. They have always been lurking in the shadows of our nation’s
greatness. Hawley didn’t just own the libs, he gave permission to dark forces
he is too childish, privileged and self-absorbed to understand. Hawley sold his
soul to all that is ugly for the sake of his own personal celebrity.
Human
beings exist at moral dimensions both too lofty and more savage than the
contemporary American mind normally considers. The mob that invaded that
building Wednesday exposed the abyss. This week wasn’t just an atrocity, it was
a glimpse into an atavistic nativism that always threatens to grip the American
soul. And it wasn’t just the mob that exposed this. The rampage reminded us
that if Black people had done this, the hallways would be red with their blood.
We are a
flawed and humiliated nation, but when well led, we can be more
self-sacrificial than we have any right to expect. I despised the sight of the
Confederate flags being paraded through Capitol halls, but I loved everything
Mitt Romney said and did on Wednesday. Romney showed what moral leadership
looks like, and how just a few voices can shift a herd.
Leadership
matters. Character matters. The thousands of people who work in the Capitol
complex were chased from their chambers or barricaded in their offices by the
furies that are ravaging this nation. The shock of this atrocity is bound to
have a sobering effect.
I’m among
those who think this is an inflection point, a step back from madness. We’re a
divided nation, but we don’t need to be a nation engulfed in lies, lawlessness
and demagogic incitement.
We look to
you, our 535 representatives, to simply do the people’s business, to cut deals
so people can stock their pantries and school their kids, and so that a
14-year-old, or a 59-year-old, can enter your building with eyes of wonder, awe
and devotion.
-----
David
Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The
Road to Character” and, most recently, “The Second Mountain.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/capitol-riot-republicans.html?
-----
The 25th
Amendment Can Remove Trump, but We Shouldn’t Stop There
By
David Landau and Rosalind Dixon
Jan. 7,
2021
After a mob
incited by President Trump stormed and occupied the Capitol, American democracy
needs protecting now — and not just now but in the coming weeks and years as
well.
There are
reports of preliminary discussions within the administration about invoking the
25th Amendment, a provision in the Constitution that provides a process to
declare a sitting president no longer capable of fulfilling his duties. Another
call is coming from a surprising source: The National Association of
Manufacturers, not normally an organization known for this kind of political
activism, said that Vice President Mike Pence “should seriously consider
working with the cabinet” to invoke the amendment to remove President Trump and
“preserve democracy.” People are invoking the 25th Amendment on the grounds
that Mr. Trump is not fit to hold office and incited the chaos that unfolded on
Capitol Hill — and may unfold again.
There are
also calls from a number of Democratic representatives to impeach and remove
the president for his actions around the illegal and violent takeover of one of
the most hallowed traditions in American democracy.
The
magnitude of the current crisis calls for both of these measures. The threat
the president poses to our democracy is not short-lived and must be cut off
urgently and decisively — before it leads to even greater degradation to
American democratic processes and traditions. It will need to happen quickly,
even with other demands pressing on our country’s leadership like certifying
the election results, rolling out the coronavirus vaccine and calming a nation
in crisis.
To do this,
the cabinet and Congress must deploy the 25th Amendment and impeachment in
sequence.
First, Vice
President Pence and a majority of the cabinet should invoke Section 4 of the
25th Amendment in order to make a declaration that Mr. Trump is “unable to
discharge the powers and duties of his office.” This would immediately suspend,
but not remove, Mr. Trump from the exercise of his presidential duties and
appoint Mr. Pence as acting president. The 25th Amendment would not and should
not be used as a lasting solution in a case of this kind, but rather as a
temporary measure to sideline a demonstrably unfit and dangerous actor who is
fueling anti-democratic action.
Second, the
House should quickly draw up and pass articles of impeachment. And then the
Senate should hold a fair — but immediate and efficient — trial both to remove
President Trump from office and, as important, to disqualify him from serving
in public office in the future. Precedent suggests that the Senate would likely
need to hold two separate votes on removal and disqualification, although the
disqualification vote may require only a simple majority to be approved, as
opposed to the two-thirds vote necessary for removal from office.
Disqualification
is necessary given Mr. Trump’s anti-democratic response to the 2020 election
and the continuing danger that he will pose to constitutional norms if allowed
to flirt with a return to power in 2024. Indeed, the importance of
disqualification in this case is such that the Congress should proceed with
impeachment even if Mr. Trump’s term in office has already concluded.
A public
vote and rapid trial in the Senate would give much-needed legitimacy to actions
to remove Mr. Trump from office. By forcing Republicans to stand up for
democracy and against the president’s actions, it would also reaffirm
bipartisan support for the fundamental principles of American democracy.
Further, while the 25th Amendment is intended mainly for illness or other
objective incapacities, impeachment offers an appropriate moral response to the
president’s conduct, including incitement to violence and attacks on basic
democratic norms.
Why do this
with only about two weeks left in President Trump’s term? Because we must
defend our democracy for all Americans, now. And we must preserve our democracy
for future Americans. We must ensure a field of potential Republican
presidential hopefuls in 2024 who have integrity. And we must reassure the
world, and especially would-be authoritarian regimes, about what United States
policy will be on questions of freedom and self-rule now and in the future.
The Constitution
does not protect against every threat currently facing our democracy. But it
contains a range of useful safeguards. And it is high time to deploy them —
with urgency.
----
David
Landau is a professor and associate dean for international programs at Florida
State University College of Law. Rosalind Dixon is professor of law at the
Gilbert and Tobin Center of Public Law at UNSW Sydney, Australia, and was
recently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-25th-amendment-impeachment.html?
-----
Did the
Capitol Attack Break the President’s Spell?
By
Michelle Goldberg
Jan. 7,
2021
It was
probably always going to come to this. Donald Trump has been telling us for
years that he would not accept an electoral defeat. He has cheered violence and
threatened insurrection. On Tuesday he tweeted that Democrats and Republicans
who weren’t cooperating in his coup attempt should look “at the thousands of
people pouring into D.C. They won’t stand for a landslide election victory to
be stolen.” He urged his supporters to mass on the capital, tweeting, “Be
there, will be wild!” They took him seriously and literally.
The day
after Georgia elected its first Black senator — the pastor, no less, of Martin
Luther King Jr.’s church — and its first
Jewish senator, an insurgent marched through the halls of Congress with a
Confederate banner. Someone set up a noose outside. Someone brought zip-tie
handcuffs. Lest there be any doubt about their intentions, a few of the
marauders wore T-shirts that said “MAGA Civil War, Jan. 6, 2021.”
If you saw
Wednesday’s scenes in any other country — vandals scaling walls and breaking
windows, parading around the legislature with enemy flags and making themselves
at home in quickly abandoned governmental offices — it would be obvious enough
that some sort of putsch was underway.
Yet we
won’t know for some time what the attack on the Capitol means for this country.
Either it marked the beginning of the end of Trumpism, or another stage in the
unraveling of American liberal democracy.
There is at
least some cause for a curdled sort of optimism. More than any other episode of
Trump’s political career — more than the “Access Hollywood” tape or
Charlottesville — the day’s desecration and mayhem threw the president’s
malignancy into high relief. For years, many of us have waited for the “Have
you no sense of decency?” moment when Trump’s demagogic powers would deflate
like those of Senator Joseph McCarthy before him. The storming of Congress by a
human 8chan thread in thrall to Trump’s delusions may have been it.
Since it
happened, there have been once-unthinkable repudiations of the president. The
National Association of Manufacturers, a major business group, called on Vice
President Mike Pence to consider invoking the 25th Amendment. Trump’s former
attorney general Bill Barr, who’d been one of Trump’s most craven defenders,
accused the president of betraying his office by “orchestrating a mob.”
Several
administration officials resigned, including Trump’s former chief of staff,
Mick Mulvaney, who’d been serving as special envoy to Northern Ireland. In an
interview with CNBC, Mulvaney was astonishingly self-pitying, complaining that
people who “spent time away from our families, put our careers on the line to
go work for Donald Trump,” will now forever be remembered for serving “the guy
who tried to overtake the government.”
Mulvaney’s
insistence that the president is “not the same as he was eight months ago” is
transparent nonsense. But his weaselly effort to distance himself is still
heartening, a sign that some Republicans suddenly realize that association with
Trump has stained them. When the rats start jumping, you know the ship is
sinking.
So Trump’s
authority is ebbing before our eyes. Having helped deliver the Senate to
Democrats, he’s no longer much use to Republicans like Mitch McConnell. With
two weeks left in the president’s term, social media has invoked its own
version of the 25th Amendment. Twitter, after years of having let Trump spread
conspiracy theories and incite brutality on its platform, suddenly had enough:
It deleted three of his tweets, locked his account and threatened “permanent
suspension.” Facebook and Instagram blocked the president for at least the
remainder of his term. He may still be able to launch a nuclear strike in the
next two weeks, but he can’t post.
Yet the
forces Trump has unleashed can’t simply be stuffed back in the bottle. Most of
the Republican House caucus still voted to challenge the legitimacy of Joe
Biden’s election. And the MAGA movement’s terrorist fringe may be emboldened by
Wednesday’s incursion into the heart of American government.
“The
extremist violent faction views today as a huge win,” Elizabeth Neumann, a
former Trump counterterrorism official who has accused the president of
encouraging white nationalists, told me on Wednesday. She pointed out that “The
Turner Diaries,” the seminal white nationalist novel, features a mortar attack
on the Capitol. “This is like a right-wing extremist fantasy that has been
fulfilled,” she said.
Neumann
believes that if Trump immediately left office — either via impeachment, the
25th Amendment or resignation — it would temporarily inflame right-wing
extremists, but ultimately marginalize them. “Having such a unified, bipartisan
approach, that he is dangerous, that he has to be removed,” would, she said,
send “such a strong message to the country that I hope that it wakes up a
number of people of good will that have just been deceived.”
In a
Twitter thread on Thursday, Kathleen Belew, a scholar of the white power
movement, wrote about how, in “The Turner Diaries,” the point of the assault on
Congress wasn’t causing mass casualties. It was “showing people that even the
Capitol can be attacked.”
Trump’s mob
has now demonstrated to the world that the institutions of American democracy
are softer targets than most of us imagined. What happens to Trump next will
tell us all whether this ailing country still has the will to protect them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-capitol-attack.html?
-----
What
Happened In Washington DC Is Happening Around The World
By Cas
Mudde
7 Jan 2021
Just one
day after black women, once again, protected US democracy in Georgia, white men
were attacking the very symbol of that democracy in Washington DC. The first
attack was actually mounted from inside, by a group of Republican
congressmembers, who challenged Joe Biden’s election victory. The second attack
started outside, as a pro-Trump and “Stop the Steal” rally, and ended inside,
with a mob of far-right protesters breaking through the remarkably weak police
cordon and illegally entering the US Capitol.
I have been
studying the international far right for almost 30 years now and have never
seen them as emboldened as in the last years. To be clear, this is not just
about Donald Trump or the US. Just last year mostly far-right anti-vaccine
protesters tried to storm the Reichstag, the German parliament, also facing
remarkably weak police resistance. And in the Netherlands, angry farmers, often
led by the far-right Farmers Defence Force, have been destroying government
offices and threatening politicians since 2019. Even further back, in 2006,
far-right mobs stormed the Hungarian parliament and battled the police for
weeks in the streets of Budapest – in many ways the start of the radicalization
and return to power of current prime minister Viktor Orbán.
How and why
did we get here? First and foremost, through a long process of cowardice,
failures, and shortsighted opportunism of the mainstream right. Already in
2012, in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin,
by a longtime prominent neo-Nazi, I wrote, “the extremist rhetoric that comes
from so-called law-abiding patriots should be taken more seriously”. I advised
Republican leaders to “be more careful in choosing their company and
insinuations”. What happened, however, was the opposite: far-right ideas and
people were mainstreamed rather than ostracized.
As in so
many other things, Donald Trump has been a major catalyst of this process, but
not its initiator. The radicalization of the US right wing predates Trump by
decades. It even predates the Tea Party, which mostly helped to bring the far
right into the heart of the Republican party. Obviously, racism and racist
dog-whistling have been key to the party since they launched their infamous
“southern strategy” in the 1970s, which brought white southerners to the
Republican party, but this goes far beyond that. The radicalization is not just
ideological, it is anti-systemic.
In the past
decades rightwing politicians and pundits have opportunistically pandered to
the far-right electorate by defining them as “the real people” and declaring
this loud minority to be an allegedly victimized silent majority. While this is
again a much broader process, it has played out very strongly in the US, where
it was amplified by a booming “conservative” media network, from talk radio to
Fox News, as well as the still formidable infrastructure of the religious
right. It was so successful that, already before Trump won the presidency, a
majority of white evangelicals believed that “discrimination against whites is
now as critical as discrimination against non-whites”. A year later, a poll
found that a majority of white evangelicals believed they are more
discriminated than Muslims in the US.
The
discourse of “white victimhood” is no longer a purely rightwing phenomenon,
however. Whenever far-right successes take mainstream media and politics by
surprise, they overcompensate, and go from denouncing or ignoring “the racists”
to defending or even exalting them. For years now, journalists and politicians
have been minimizing the importance of racism and pushing the narrative of
“economic anxiety”. Racists became “the left behind” or simply “the people” –
even in countries where the far right barely polled above 10% of the national
vote.
Undoubtedly,
some rightwing politicians and pundits really believe their own propaganda, but
the vast majority knows very well that the far-right electorate constitutes
only a minority of the population and that white people – whether Evangelical
or not – do not face anywhere near as much discrimination as Muslims, or other
non-white and non-Christian groups. And if they don’t believe it, then ask them
this question: do you really think these protesters would have made it into the
Capitol if they had been African American or Muslim?
Most
politicians and pundits probably initially pandered to these groups for
opportunistic reasons, hoping to win far-right support. But as the far right
got more and more emboldened, and violent, the mainstream right became more and
more afraid. Many mainstream politicians and other elites no longer dare to
speak out against the far right, afraid to be personally and politically
threatened by their mob.
The
increasingly bold and open political violence of far-right gangs and mobs
should be a wake-up call to all enablers of, and peddlers to, the far right.
You don’t control them. They control you. And while these gangs don’t represent
the broader part of the population that holds far-right views, or supports
far-right candidates and parties, fundamentally they share a similar worldview.
And in this view there is no space for nuance or compromise. You are either an
ally, on their terms, or an enemy. And there is no mercy for enemies, not even
for former allies. Just ask Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, or Brad Raffensperger,
the secretary of state.
It is
therefore high time that liberal democratic journalists, politicians, and pundits
finally see the far right for what it is: a threat to liberal democracy. A
formidable threat, for sure, but also a threat can only succeed with the tacit
help of the mainstream, either by opportunistic coalitions or by cowardly
non-responses. We are not in the 1930s. Today, the vast majority of Americans
and Europeans support liberal democracy. But they have become the silent
majority, increasingly ignored and unprotected by its representatives.
It is time
to stand up to the far right and for liberal democracy. It is time to call out
the racism and undemocratic discourses and behaviors of the far right. And it
is time to clearly and openly reject the toxic narrative of white victimhood.
Of course, we should acknowledge the struggle of parts of the white population,
notably the farmers and workers, but not at the expense of the non-white
population or of liberal democracy.
-----
This
article was amended on 7 January 2020. A reference to a phrase being shouted by
protesters was removed, due to the phrase not being entirely clear in the
relevant footage.
Cas
Mudde is a Guardian US columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/07/what-happened-in-washington-dc-is-happening-around-the-world
-----
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