Please read the following excerpts from the outstanding The Atlantic December 6, 2021, article about what many media observers are asserting: that the Republican Party is conducting a slow-moving coup to establish permanent one-party, Republican Party autocratic rule. The two letters that I wrote this December focused precisely on that subject matter.
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For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.
Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.
As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.
Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.
…
Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.
…
Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.
…
… the Trump team achieved something crucial and enduring by convincing tens of millions of angry supporters, including a catastrophic 68 percent of all Republicans in a November PRRI poll, that the election had been stolen from Trump. Nothing close to this loss of faith in democracy has happened here before. Even Confederates recognized Abraham Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because they knew they had lost. Delegitimating Biden’s victory was a strategic win for Trump—then and now—because the Big Lie became the driving passion of the voters who controlled the fate of Republican legislators, and Trump’s fate was in the legislators’ hands.
…
… Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. …
In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement.
Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, 52, who left the Fulton County, Georgia, election board in June, told me she had been bombarded with menacing emails from Trump supporters. One email, she recalled, said, “You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view.” Another, a copy of which she provided me, said, “Tick, Tick, Tick” in the subject line and “Not long now” as the message. Nuriddin said she knows colleagues on at least four county election boards who resigned in 2021 or chose not to renew their positions.
…
The coming midterm elections, meanwhile, could tip the balance further. Among the 36 states that will choose new governors in 2022, three are presidential battlegrounds—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—where Democratic governors until now have thwarted attempts by Republican legislatures to cancel Biden’s victory and rewrite election rules. Republican challengers in those states have pledged allegiance to the Big Lie, and the contests look to be competitive. In at least seven states, Big Lie Republicans have been vying for Trump’s endorsement for secretary of state, the office that will oversee the 2024 election. Trump has already endorsed three of them, in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan.
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There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.
Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves.
…
Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters ... are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.
Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this [what he has been doing, and not doing].
The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.
Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.
Work cited:
Gellman, Barton. “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” The Atlantic, December 6, 2021. Net. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/
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I sent this letter off to the editor of the Siuslaw News December 1. She did not print it.
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What are this newspaper’s right-wing letter writers being silent about?
We’ve been reading recently this kind of stuff.
Tony Cavarno (Nov. 24): the rise of white nationalism is not true, Democratic assertions are “liberal socialistic crap,” Trump’s (ballyhooed) economic achievements are fabulous (not according to Snopes.com and other fact-check organizations). Note: Trump ranks 41 of our past 45 presidents, according to CSPAN’s latest (June 2021) change-of-administration survey of historians, professors, and other knowledgeable professionals. He was judged dead last in the categories “moral authority” and “administrative skills.”
Marshall Denton (Nov. 27): a lengthy list of Democrat-defaming word frames that included “mandates,” business closures,” “open borders,” “CRT,” and “the propagation of division and racism.”
None of Florence’s right-wingers have addressed Trump’s “Big Lie”!
For decades the GOP has asserted Democratic Party-generated large-scale voter fraud in national and state elections to justify Republican Party passage of onerous voter suppression laws. Those minority, college-age, and octogenarian voters sure do get around and cheat! Honest investigations have repeatedly reported that voter fraud has been in the past and was in the 2020 election minuscule.
So now red state legislatures – already masters of gerrymandering – are passing laws to grant themselves the power to declare election fraud whenever they wish (a la Trump) and reverse Democratic Party victories!
So, you right-wing letter writers, like so many of your Republican office holders, are you okay with this – the destruction of our nation’s democracy and the inevitable establishment of one-party autocratic rule – if your party is doing it? I hope not.
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While I waited in vain for the Siuslaw News to print my letter, I felt the need to really let loose. I was in a deep funk. I sent this letter to The World newspaper in Coos Bay.
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We do not determine the time and place of our birth or our parents. We are not “created equal.” Not one of us is guaranteed “equal opportunity.” All of us will witness -- if not experience directly – exploitation, persecution, cruelty. Why? Human beings are egregiously fallible. Evil – not compassion, good works – prevails. Selfish beings trample upon the vulnerable to amass power, wealth. Liars, cheaters triumph.
I have lived 87 years. I once believed that here in American good people could keep at bay indefinitely that which the worst of us collectively fabricate. I have learned that we Americans are no better morally than the inhabitants of almost any nation or culture.
We have among us
the timid, managed by authoritarian fear-mongers;
the mediocre “every man” so protective of his Caucasian privilege that he embraces anything disseminated hatefully about minorities;
the voluntarily and not voluntarily uneducated so ignorant of fact that their emotions choose whom to trust.
We have, controlling the susceptible, a plethora of opinion-shapers devoid wholly of honesty and conscience.
Our country is months away from becoming an autocracy. Fox News, hate-talk radio, conspiracy-disseminating web sites, TV-hungry Republican Party fabricators, and fascist-minded legislators are accomplishing their coordinated objective.
60% of registered Republicans believe the humongous lie that Biden stole the 2020 election. Never mind the minuscule evidence of such. Or that their party continues to gerrymander, purge voter registration lists, employ aggressive voter suppression tactics.
The GOP knows it can no longer win honest Presidential elections. Its red state legislatures and governors are passing laws that grant them the power to reverse future Democratic Party victories. Federal legislation could stop this coup. Absent its passage, Democracy dies.
Printed December 23, 2021, in The World
January 5, 2022, in the Siuslaw News
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Joe Mack-McCarthy sent me this message Dec. 24 via Facebook Messenger:
Harold... I'm from Coquille originally, lived in Portland for 45 years. I read your letter to the editor in the World. You are much appreciated for speaking out and making your feelings public. I have to thank you, sir.
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I decided to send the letter printed Dec. 23 in The World to the Siuslaw News to see if the editor would print it just before the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the federal Capitol building. She did, January 5, changing nothing.
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No follow-up from Republican loyalist letter writers as of January 16.
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