REPUBLICANS DONALD TRUMP SIGNAL:NOISE

Trump Is Guilty of Sedition and

Must Be Brought to Justice
He’s violating his oath to protect the Constitution, and every day
that he’s allowed to remain in power, the threat to our democracy
grows.
By Sasha Abramsky

DECEMBER 22, 2020

Supreme Court Justice John Roberts administers the oath of office to

Donald Trump in Washington as Trump’s wife, Melania, holds the Bible and
son Barron looks on, January 20, 2017. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

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 T he Signal: Trump is
now talking the
sedition talk on a daily
basis, and, one has to
assume, actively
planning ways to walk
the sedition walk over
the next month. He is
meeting regularly with
Sidney Powell, Steve
Bannon and other
plotters, and daily he is being fed a diet of ever more
extreme scenarios for overturning the election results. This
is no idle chatter, and even if we had once been inclined to
dismiss it with words to the effect of “Oh, it’s only the crazy
old guy blowing off steam,” we no longer have that luxury. In
increasingly specific language, Trump and his band of
traitors are advocating some combination of martial law,
national emergency, and paramilitarism as a way to cling to
power.

Witness: On Friday, Trump reportedly argued, to the dismay

of many of his top officials, that he should appoint Sidney
Powell (of “Hugo Chávez stole the US election” fame) as a
special counsel to investigate election fraud. That was,
apparently, too nuts an idea even for Rudy Giuliani to
stomach; it was also a distraction from Giuliani’s own
unfathomably outlandish plan to have the Department of
Homeland Security step in and seize voting machines from
the states, in a giant fishing expedition searching for fraud.

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Meanwhile, Giuliani’s plan, despite being denounced as
unconstitutional or unhinged or some combination of both
by everyone from White House counsel Pat Cipollone to ex–
national security adviser John Bolton, was apparently too
moderate for another ex–national security adviser, Michael
Flynn. Flynn was also at the Friday White House meeting,
arguing in favor of declaring some form of martial law,
which would involve sending the military into swing states
Trump lost, forcing new elections, and, presumably, not
resting until those new elections generated the “correct”
result, one that ended up with Trump the winner.

And if anyone was tempted to give Trump the benefit of the

doubt here—to argue that Trump himself wasn’t advocating
martial law but was just giving an 11th-hour platform to an
eccentric old friend—the president himself put that line of
reasoning to rest on Saturday. Egged on by his trade adviser,
Peter Navarro, who published a lengthy report on alleged
fraud in the November 3 election, No. 45 went full-on
paramilitarist. In a tweet that seemed half-fascist, half–
teenager having just discovered a secret new house party, he
informed his followers that “Peter Navarro releases 36-page
report alleging election fraud ‘more than sufficient’ to swing
victory to Trump. A great report by Peter. Statistically
impossible to have lost the 2020 Election.” Trump
continued, inviting his followers to descend on the nation’s
capital to interrupt Congress’s certification of the Electoral
College vote early in the new year. “Big protest in D.C. on
January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

“Wild!” indeed. A sitting president encouraging his violence-

prone followers, including groups like the Proud Boys and
conspiracists such as Alex Jones, who have pledged to keep
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Trump in office by whatever means necessary, to rise up
against the constitutional process and the peaceful transfer
of power.

At the same time, despite the Supreme Court’s latest

decision on the election, and the fact that the Electoral
College has already met and confirmed Biden’s win, the
Trump campaign is, once again, appealing lower-court
decisions on the election back up to the Supreme Court. On
Sunday, the Trumpists filed yet another appeal, this time
attempting to get Pennsylvania’s results overturned.

If I were a lawyer, I’d say that Trump is building a pretty

good sedition case against himself, urging war against the
institutions of American democracy and substituting loyalty
to the person of Trump for loyalty to the country, the
Constitution, and the institutions that he, and all of his
government colleagues, have sworn an oath to protect.

But I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll just call it as I see it. Having lost
the popular vote by 7 million, having lost the Electoral
College vote too, and having failed at every level of the court
system to get judges to intervene to squeeze a victory out of
the bitter lemons of defeat, Trump is now grasping not only
at one frivolous lawsuit after the other but at the straws of
violence: specifically, military and paramilitary violence.

The people he is looking to for support in this attempted

coup are, not surprisingly, the sewage of humanity—Powell,
Flynn, Giuliani, the Proud Boys, Alex Jones. These are
shameless con artists and thugs; people who lack any sense
of morality or humility in the face of the popular will. They

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are, temperamentally, fascists, and like all fascists, they are
entirely comfortable embracing the notion that the ends
justify the means.

It is tempting to write them all off as a clown show, people

too clumsy to even tie the laces of their jackboots correctly.
And it’s true, there is more than an element of the comical to
them. But even while we mock them and laugh, it is also
important to keep in mind just how immensely dangerous
these plotters are.

The United States is adrift. Its government has been reduced

to puffery and fantasy to sustain the unstable ego of Donald
J. Trump. There is no coordinated response to the massive
computer hack of official agencies that was revealed last
week. There is no sense of empathy from the administration
for the thousands of people dying of Covid-19 on a daily
basis.

That, this week of all weeks, the president’s inner circle was
so distracted by Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of a
national election that it didn’t have the intellectual firepower
left over to work on these problems says all that needs to be
said about this administration’s priorities.

Remember the old saying: If it waddles like a duck and

quacks like a duck, it’s almost certainly a duck. In this case,
Trump is walking and talking like a fascist, and doing so
while the country slides ever further into crisis. He’s gone
beyond being a clear and present danger to the Constitution,
and every day he’s allowed to remain in power, that danger
grows.

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There are constitutional provisions to remove such a person
from power: He could be re-impeached by the House for his
efforts to subvert the Constitution and immediately
convicted by Mitch McConnell’s Senate; or he could be
removed via the 25th Amendment. Both scenarios would be
extraordinary with only four weeks to go until the
inauguration; but as the Trump drumbeat to not abide by
the peaceful transfer of power gets louder, so too does the
need become ever more immediate to find ways to neuter
Trump politically before he can do even worse, even more
irreparable damage to American democracy.

Since McConnell and the rest of the GOP Senate leadership

have finally admitted that Biden is the president-elect, it’s
unconscionable that they are, at the same time, still standing
silently by while Trump and his henchmen plot to unleash
violence and mayhem against fellow Americans in their
increasingly frantic efforts to keep The Donald in power.

Sasha Abramsky TSasha Abramsky, who writes regularly for The Nation, is
the author of several books, including Inside Obama’s Brain, The American Way
of Poverty, The House of 20,000 Books, Jumping at Shadows, and, most recently,
Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports
Superstar. Subscribe to The Abramsky Report, a weekly, subscription-based
political column, here.

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