More than three years have elapsed since former President Donald Trump nearly got former Vice President Mike Pence killed, if not by executive order (pun intended), then by sheer narcissistic disregard for Pence’s life. Pence had rebuffed the former president’s badgering demands that he violate his oath to honour the U.S. Constitution by decertifying state electors, duly chosen by American voters, during the U.S. Congressional proceeding on January 6 2021 to officially count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. As the law clearly states, ‘the role of the President of the Senate [that is, the Vice President] while presiding over the joint session shall be limited to performing solely ministerial duties.’ The Vice President ‘shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.’

At the Ellipse south of the White House on the morning of January 6, after months of relentless litigation in which he lost 61 of 62 court cases challenging the 2020 presidential election results (with 22 Republican judges and 10 Trump-appointed judges presiding, and the sole victory not altering the election results), Trump misled the crowd into believing that Pence could ensure a Trump re-election by ‘doing the right thing’, knowing full well that he could not. Moreover, as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump said of his audience: ‘I don’t [f—ing] care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me… They can march to the Capitol from here.’ Hours later, of course, after Trump told them to ‘fight like hell’, January 6 rioters marched to the U.S. Capitol and stormed through the doors, many of them chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence!’, as U.S. Congressmen barely escaped with their lives.

What lesson can we assume Trump learned from this? Never mind the constant stream of reports that Trump entertains the prospect of weaponising the U.S. Department of Justice in a vindictive campaign to persecute political opponents—or in Trump’s terms, his enemies—who have tried to hold him and his co-conspirators accountable. We got our answer when he selected Ohio Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has declared that he would not have certified the 2020 election results and that Trump should ignore ‘illegitimate’ Supreme Court rulings. Vance has also embraced the views of an influential far-right blogger who does not believe in democracy and argues that the country requires an absolute monarch, even a tyrant, to purge a purported oligarchy of progressive automatons who populate and rule a ‘cathedral’ of mainstream American institutions where insidious left-wing ideology is ubiquitous. Vance, it can be safely assumed, was chosen as a ‘yes man’ for a presidential nominee who exercises complete control over a Republican party that, in the words of Senator Mitt Romney, ‘really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.’

In the wake of the unforgivable attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, House Speaker Mike Johnson has implored America’s two political parties to tone down the rhetoric, as if the delusions of a lunatic assassin, whose motives remain an enigma, can be traced directly to the overheated rhetoric of a political environment which Trump himself has supercharged with his own long history of apocalyptic demonisation of immigrant ‘invaders’, blistering rants against political opponents, and proto-fascist MAGA harangues.

It was almost a year ago that Trump mocked and joked about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband after an assailant fractured the latter’s skull with a hammer. In 2020, ABC News identified 54 criminal cases of violence, threats, and assaults in which the evidentiary record indicated that Trump had been invoked by an assailant (e.g., ‘This is for Trump’). In 2016, Trump callously mocked a handicapped reporter. In 2015, Trump, who avoided the draft, denied that the late Senator John McCain was a war hero because ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’ The Bulwark’s Cathy Young recently provided a catalogue of instances in which Trump has encouraged or stoked violence. Finally, Trump resurrected the Dark Side of American politics by claiming that Mexico sends drug lords and rapists over the border, conceding only as an afterthought that ‘some, I assume, are good people.’

The January 6 insurrection was perhaps the most dramatic spectacle of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian rhetoric and behaviour. But it was far from being a singular case. Trump has since claimed that he would like to be dictator for a day (wink, wink). He has claimed that presidential immunity for official acts means that his 34-count felony conviction in the recent New York ‘hush money’ case should be overturned, even though he paid money to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels to bury the story of their affair before he was elected president in 2016. This case, by the way, exposed sordid details about his possible rape (on my reading) of Daniels while his wife was at home with their newborn son. In short, Trump is a man accustomed to possessing the kind of invincible and audacious power of men whose complicity in rape culture was epitomised by Trump’s remark that he can ‘grab [women] by the pussy’ without repercussion.

America is in imminent danger of succumbing to a proto-fascist movement reminiscent of the antidemocratic rumblings that shook the world in the interwar period of the first half of the 20^th century. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision granting partial immunity to the former president, in a ruling that defers to lower courts to ascertain whether Trump’s plot to overturn election results in 2020 constituted an ‘official act’, has set a precedent whereby a lame-duck president unhappy with his election defeat can devise a plot to alter the results of the election and thereby disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, all the while taking comfort in the non-negligible probability that he will not be held accountable. (Trump certainly has not been held accountable by his legions of supporters who would not only hold fast in their blind allegiance even if the former president shot someone on Fifth Avenue but also deride any attempts to hold him accountable in a court of law before an independent jury as ‘show trials.’)

As much as President Joe Biden may deserve his historically low job approval ratings, it nevertheless has been a relief that, in the months and years after he was inaugurated, he restored a refreshing normalcy to the executive office after the insurrectionary crimes of former President Trump. In my lifetime, I have watched several former presidents—Clinton, Bush, Obama—face severe rebuke and censure for allegedly abusing the office of the presidency. Not once did it occur to me, however, that any of these presidents ever had even the faintest intention of being crowned an American Caesar. To say that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy is not rhetorical excess. It is an incontrovertible fact.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One, by Brian Victoria

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy appeared first on The Freethinker.

Donald Trump was nearly killed a couple of days ago, and the consequences of this failed assassination attempt will reverberate for a long time, and in ways that nobody can now predict. Have the photos of a bloodied but unbowed Trump defiantly raising his fist as he was ushered off-stage won him the presidential election? Quite possibly. Such iconic images appear only very rarely, and even the staunchest of Trump’s critics (of which I am one) cannot but admire the man’s vigour in this instance.

Plus, Joe Biden’s cognitive state is no longer the centre of attention, which might mean that the pressure among Democrats for him to stand down and allow a more able candidate to contest the election will dissipate. I was sceptical that Biden would step down anyway, but now I think it a certainty that he will face Trump in November. Both these things—the sympathy, outrage, and defiance and the retaining of Biden as the Democratic candidate—mean almost certain victory for Trump.

This would be a disaster. I need not enumerate all the reasons why—or not at length, anyway. That Trump is a fascistic, racist, criminal lunatic; that he is openly antagonistic to democracy and the peaceful transition of power; that he is contemptuous of the American Constitution; that he is the darling of the Christian theocrats; that a Trump win would likely mean defeat for Ukraine and NATO, and perhaps even the liberal democratic world as a whole—all these things are known to everybody. And still, I fear, he will triumph.

Worse, the Supreme Court recently granted him, and all other presidents, some immunity for actions taken in office—so whatever restraints there may once have been are now gone, and Trump, if he wins, will be able to act as ‘a king above the law’, in the words of dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (Contrast this sorry state of affairs with the declaration of Thomas Paine in 1776 that in America, ‘so far as we approve of monarchy…the law is King.’)

Concern over a Trump victory being one of the consequences of the assassination attempt might seem cold. It is not. Political violence in a liberal democracy is to be deplored, no matter the target, and I am glad that Trump is okay. Conspiracy theories from Trump opponents, and the glee evinced by some at the attempt (all the while regretting only that the would-be assassin missed), are foolish and disgusting. I also feel for the man who was killed saving his family and the two people injured by the shooter. The former, Corey Comperatore, was a hero, and I have no compunction about saying that.

But the view of many Trump supporters that the shooting happened as a direct result of the rhetoric about Trump being a threat to democracy is misplaced, if not outright absurd. The only person responsible for the shooting is the shooter, not the words of others. It is possible—and necessary—to name and oppose anti-democratic politicians without calling for violence. Trump really is a threat to American democracy, and shooting him is not the answer. People like Trump are best beaten by arguments and ballots. If the Democrats and other opponents of Trump now shy away from telling the truth about him, they will do their country, and the world, a disservice.

Besides, Trump and other Republicans’ long history of promoting violence and using genuinely extreme rhetoric (which is still, I hasten to add, legitimate free speech) against Democrats shows this claim to be the shameless piece of hypocritical opportunism that it is. Contrast, for example, Trump’s vile public mockery of Nancy and Paul Pelosi after the latter’s skull was nearly caved in by a far-right fantasist in 2022 with Biden’s humane response to the Trump shooting (not to mention the decency of the Pelosis themselves). Accurately describing Trump and the threat he represents to America and the world is free speech, not inciting violence.

On the other hand, January 6 2021 was the climax of a months-long campaign conducted by Trump to cling to power and overturn the result of a free and fair election. The shoddy gunmanship of a lone attacker, whatever his motives, should not obscure the far more dangerous actions of Trump in 2020/21. A sitting president, using all the state, party, and personal resources at hand, attempted to destroy American democracy—and when this failed, he sat by for hours before calling his supporters, busy ravaging the Capitol, to heel. The attempted assassination of Trump was awful. Trump’s anti-democratic campaign and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol was awful. But one was much worse than the other: the two things are simply not comparable. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are the proponents and champions of political violence in America today.

This article is not an editorial, but it strikes me that the ideals of the Freethinker are more important than ever. Reason and argument, not political violence. Democracy, free speech, and secularism, not tyranny. As for those, like Tomi Lahren, who are praising ‘divine intervention’ for the delivery of Donald Trump and who were spouting conspiracy theories within minutes of the shooting, it can never be said enough: they really are irredeemably stupid—and, precisely for that reason, extremely dangerous. And they are the people who will cheer in November as Trump takes the White House. (I am no fan of Biden and the Democrats, either, by the way, but I recognise a genuine threat when I see one.)

I hope the people of the United States, the world’s first secular democratic republic, take these words of warning in the spirit of friendship with which they are offered. And I hope I am being overly pessimistic about Trump’s chances. Only time will tell, and perhaps there is still time for the American experiment to save itself.

The author republished this piece and added some additional reflections on new developments on his Substack on 1 August 2024. See here.

The post Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America appeared first on The Freethinker.