Into the Woods

Until this week, I would have thought that all the events that occurred between election day (Nov. 4, 2020) and the Capitol insurrection (Jan. 6, 2021) were just the random, malignant thrashings of disinformed idiots. But now it appears that there actually was a plan and a conspiracy to overturn the election. The key to that conspiracy was to throw the election to the U.S. House of Representatives. The 12th amendment to the Constitution provides for this if no candidate has an absolute majority of electoral votes. Who becomes president is then decided by the House of Representatives, with the delegation from each state voting en bloc. That is, each state gets only one vote.

Could the plot have succeeded if the House of Representatives had decided the election? The math on that is beyond my ability, but I will point out that, in the 50 states, there are 27 Republican governors and 23 Democratic governors.

Even though, all along, many of the connectable dots were consistent with such a conspiracy, I was skeptical that it could have been a serious attempt at overthrowing the government, simply because it was so hard to imagine that anyone would be so stupid and so evil as to attempt such a thing. The odds of success were poor, the consequences of getting caught would be severe, and the damage to American democracy and rule of law would have been fatal. In fact would have amounted to the cold-blooded murder of the U.S. democracy and rule of law.

Now there is a smoking gun. On Friday, the Justice Department provided Congress with notes on a call that Trump made to the acting attorney general and his deputy on Dec. 27. Trump threatened to fire them. He demanded that the Justice Department declare the election corrupt. They told Trump that they couldn’t do that and that there was no evidence that the election was corrupt. “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen,” Trump told them.

Ten days later, a Trumpist mob stormed the U.S. Capitol while Congress was meeting to certify the results of the election. Inside the Capitol, Republicans already were attempting to block certification of the election. The votes of eight Republican senators and 139 Republican members of the House of Representatives are on record. Their names are known. Some of them talked to Trump that day or spoke at the Trump rally outside the Capitol. The notes on Trump’s phone call to the Justice Department show that some of those Republicans were co-conspirators. All of them violated their oaths of office.

We do know, at least, that the Justice Department would not join Trump’s conspiracy. Even the odious Bill Barr had resigned on Dec. 14. A new book by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker says that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top generals were afraid that Trump would attempt a coup. According to the book, Milley said, “This is a Reichstag moment. The gospel of the Führer.”

Those who know their history see the connections.

I am not out on a limb here in smelling treason and conspiracy. Since Friday, several stories have appeared in the media that I believe show that Washington’s elite now realize that there was a plot and a conspiracy to overturn the election and install Trump as Führer. A piece in The Atlantic, I think, is particularly credible, because the Atlantic is so closely aligned with Washington’s political and media elite. The piece is “The Insurrection Was Just Part of the Plot: The full contours of Trump’s effort to overturn the election are coming into view.”

I am confident that congressional investigations and the U.S. Justice Department will bring everything to light. Everyone who was part of the conspiracy must be brought to justice. Even more important, I think, is that history must have the full story. As for the Republican Party, having proven itself willing to set fire to the U.S. democracy to preserve its own power, I am not confident that it will ever truly get what it deserves, simply because so many Americans are so gullible and so stupid, and because I don’t expect oligarchs to cease their attacks on democracy until they are taxed out of existence.