Remember Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his legacy of dishonor, treason, and fascist tyranny; his jests did distract us from his subversion of democracy until too late. Idiot madman of monstrous perversions that he is, we must give the devil his due; Trump is the greatest foreign agent to ever attack America, and he has brought our democracy down into fascist tyranny, white supremacist terror, and theocratic Patriarchal sexual terror.
Remember the Clown, and his absurd empire of lies and depravities, his subversions of democracy and violations of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, his kleptocracy of looting the public wealth, his Wall of Hate, his syndicate of Epstein sexual terror and human trafficking, his orchestration of white supremacist terror and treason, his use of racists in disrupting the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, vandalism and looting to discredit the mass action for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities and the founding of a fascist tyranny, and the pathetic puppet show of Traitor Trump and his master Putin.
Remember him and all his Deplorables as his second capture of the state begins, for we enter a new era of fascism as the collapse of values becomes the Fall of America, for the enemies of democracy never rest, and neither must we.
And now we have the Jack Smith report made public and part of the historical memory and character of America; a witness and chronicle of how America, democracy, and our first pan-human civilization fell.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
And remember, you can always discover someone’s secret Republican name whereby they recognize each other; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
We live now within a Labyrinth of nested puzzle boxes, each a possible future and universe. The choices our nation made in our election this November has opened gates and let angels through, or devils, and deliver us to heavens or hells. We may never know which we have chosen, but this one true thing I can tell you with absolute certainty; America and humankind will never be the same, for in this Defining Moment we will be forever changed.
Who do we want to become, we humans? Masters and slaves divided against each other in an Age of Tyrants and wars our species cannot long survive, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each others universal human rights in solidarity? May we each of us choose wisely.
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump would have been convicted over 2020 election, says special counsel: Report by Jack Smith says evidence ‘was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction’ had Trump not won re-election in 2024; “Donald Trump would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020 but for his victory in last year’s US presidential election, according to the special counsel who investigated him.
Jack Smith’s report detailing his team’s findings about Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday.
After the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, Smith was appointed as special counsel to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His investigation culminated in a detailed report submitted to the attorney general, Merrick Garland.
In it, Smith asserts that he believes the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.
“The department’s view that the constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Smith writes.
“Indeed, but for Mr Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”
Trump was impeached for his role in spurring the January 6 riot, accused by a congressional panel of taking part in a “multi-part conspiracy” and ultimately indicted by justice department on four counts, including “conspiracy to defraud” the US.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.
After the release, Trump, in a post on his Truth Social site, called Smith a “lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the election”.
He has depicted the cases as politically motivated attempts to damage his campaign and political movement. He also calculated correctly that he could outrun the law by staging a spectacular political comeback and regaining the White House.
Volume one of Smith’s report meticulously outlines Trump’s alleged actions, including his efforts to pressure state officials, assemble alternate electors and encourage supporters to protest against the election results.
Smith writes: “Significantly, he made election claims only to state legislators and executives who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states that he had lost.”
The report underscores Trump’s persistent spreading of “demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false” claims about the 2020 election. These served as the basis for his pressure campaign and contributed to the January 6 attack.
Much of the evidence cited in the report has been made public previously. But it includes some new details, such as that prosecutors considered charging Trump with inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol under a US law known as the Insurrection Act.
Prosecutors ultimately concluded that such a charge posed legal risks and there was insufficient evidence that Trump intended for the “full scope” of violence during the riot, a failed attempt by a mob of his supporters to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election.
The indictment charged Trump with conspiring to obstruct the election certification, defraud the US of accurate election results and deprive US voters of their voting rights.
Smith’s office determined that charges may have been justified against some co-conspirators accused of helping Trump carry out the plan, but the report said prosecutors reached no final conclusions. Several of Trump’s former lawyers had previously been identified as co-conspirators referenced in the indictment.
Trump and his legal team have characterised the report as a “political hit job” aimed at disrupting the presidential transition and waged a protracted legal battle to prevent its release.
Smith, who left the justice department last week, directly addresses accusations from Trump and his allies that the investigation was politically motivated. He asserts that his team operated solely on the basis of facts and law.
Smith writes: “My office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less. To all who know me well, the claim from Mr Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable.”
Smith acknowledges the justice department’s policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president, a factor that ultimately led to the dropping of charges against Trump after his 2024 victory. The report also references a supreme court ruling expanding presidential immunity, which complicated the case.
But Smith wrote in a letter to Garland attached to the report: “While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.”
A second section of the report details Smith’s case accusing Trump of illegally retaining sensitive national security documents after leaving the White House in 2021. The justice department has committed not to make that portion public while legal proceedings continue against two Trump associates charged in the case.
Trump, who will be inaugurated as the 47th president on Monday, was last week sentenced to an unconditional discharge for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment during the 2016 election.”
As written by Chris Stein in The Guardian, in an article entitled Five key takeaways from Jack Smith’s report on alleged Trump election crimes; “ A special counsel report detailing Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday and concluded that the president-elect would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020.
However, Trump’s victory in November’s US presidential election scuppered the investigation.
Jack Smith was appointed as special counsel and his report was published after a fierce legal battle by Trump’s team to keep it under wraps. In it, Smith asserts that he believes the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible to continue the prosecution into his attempts to stay in the Oval Office despite his electoral loss to Joe Biden in 2020.
Here are some key findings:
1. Trump did not cooperate fully
Smith laid out the challenges he faced during the investigation, including Trump’s assertion of executive privilege to try to block witnesses from providing evidence, which forced prosecutors into sealed court battles before the case was charged.
Another “significant challenge” was Trump’s “ability and willingness to use his influence and following on social media to target witnesses, courts, prosecutors”, which led prosecutors to seek a gag order to protect potential witnesses from harassment, Smith wrote.
2. Smith calls allegations of political interference ‘laughable’
Smith hit back at claims by the president-elect that he pursued the charges for political reasons.
“While I relied greatly on the counsel, judgment, and advice of our team, I want it to be clear that the ultimate decision to bring charges against Mr Trump was mine. It is a decision I stand behind fully,” wrote Smith, who resigned from the justice department on 10 January.
He added that “nobody within the Department of Justice ever sought to interfere with, or improperly influence, my prosecutorial decision making.
“And to all who know me well, the claim from Mr Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable,” Smith wrote.
3. Trump knew his allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false
Smith wrote that Trump knew his allegations of fraud in the 2020 election were false – but he continued to make them anyway.
“Mr Trump’s false claims included dozens of specific claims regarding certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for Mr Trump to votes against him. These claims were demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false,” Smith said.
4. Smith believed Trump should be charged despite supreme court immunity ruling
Despite a supreme court ruling on presidential immunity, Smith wrote that he believed the charges he filed against Trump still held water.
He notes that his team was able to secure a superseding indictment from a grand jury after the top court handed down its ruling, which gave Trump immunity for official acts taken as president.
“The Supreme Court’s decision required the office to reanalyze the evidence it had collected. The original indictment alleged that Mr Trump, as the incumbent president, used all available tools and powers, both private and official, to overturn the legitimate results of the election despite notice, including from official advisors, that his fraud claims were false and he had lost the election.
“Given the supreme court’s ruling, the office reevaluated the evidence and assessed whether Mr Trump’s non-immune conduct – either his private conduct as a candidate or official conduct for which the office could rebut the presumption of immunity – violated federal 33 laws. The office concluded that it did. After doing so, the office sought, and a new grand jury issued, a superseding indictment with identical charges but based only on conduct that was not immune because it was either unofficial or any presumptive immunity could be rebutted.”
5. Trump is furious
In a typically incoherent social media post put online in the early hours of Tuesday, Trump’s rage at the release of the report was clear.
Trump, who returns to the presidency on 20 January, wrote: “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were. Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”
As I wrote in my post of August 2 2024, Anniversary of the Trump Indictment For Insurrection, Treason, Subversion of Democracy, and Conspiracy To Overturn the 2020 Election; We remember this first anniversary of the trial of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump indicted on four counts of attempts to overturn the 2020 election and seize control of the state as a tyrant of the Fourth Reich’s white supremacist terror and theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror.
This anniversary is shadowed by Trump’s performance of his signature Theatre of Cruelty in an interview with Black journalists, where his contempt for women and nonwhite people and for the ideals, values, and institutions of democracy was on full display, along with his vacuous idiocy, arrogance, trivial bluster, entitlement and delusions of grandeur; but by now I believe we can stipulate the psychopathy of Trump the rapist who would be king.
But if there is darkness which seethes among us like an annihilating leprous swarm of Christian Identity fascism, there is also light and hope for the Restoration of America; Biden and Harris have brought home our journalists imprisoned in Russia by Trump’s puppetmaster, and the sanctity of journalism as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth has been re-established.
There can be no greater and more clear and immediate image of the choices we now face in our election and in choosing a vision of a future America; of liberty and tyranny, loyalty and treason, good and evil, Democrat or Republican versions of ourselves.
Let us act in Solidarity as guarantors of each others freedoms and universal human rights, to forge a free society of equals which upholds our uniqueness in a diverse and inclusive civilization, and elect Kamala Harris as our next President. Let us choose not masters and tyrants to subjugate us, but champions to liberate us.
As I wrote in my post of August 2 2023, Strike Three For Trump and the Party of Treason; We remain a chiaroscuro of darkness and light; we Americans, we human beings. Such boundaries define us, written in blood; I hope that one day these may also become interfaces.
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
As I wrote in my post of June 13 2023, The Monster Brought to Judgement; Rejoice with me in the spectacle of the monster brought to judgement, his numberless crimes and perversions and those of his treasonous and dishonorable minions and collaborators in a loathsome regime of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror as theocratic fascism and tyranny, designed and perpetrated for the purposes of infiltration and subversion of democracy and capture of the state, are displayed before the stage of history and the world as defining limits of the human and branded into the soul of America.
Like the thief’s brand of Milady de Winter in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, may the actions of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, forever remind us who the enemies of Liberty truly are, regardless of the masks they wear and the web of lies in which they seek to trap us as the raw material of their power.
Saboteurs of our justice system and agents of the Fourth Reich have conspired to deny us a public viewing of the trial, a trial whose functions are not limited to the espionage of one Russian agent and ex President, but include the restoration of the legitimacy of the justice system, of America as both state and idea, and of democracy globally.
We must see the monster disempowered to harm us, exposed and cast out, if we are to find catharsis in this morality play, for Trump is a figure of the diseased heart of America as a Sin Eater for all of his followers and those who voted for him and his policies of division and theft of the soul. We must purge our destroyers from among us; most especially those who once believed his lies and enabled him as voters and co-conspirators including the whole of the Republican Party must now be granted the chance to disavow him and free themselves of their subjugation to theocratic fascism, or be judged with him by history.
This process of catharsis and the Restoration of America is by now two and a half years along since the January 6 Insurrection marked the high tide and collapse of fascism in America, progress we can measure by the few supporters who came to the trial in response to Trump’s dogwhistled orders to storm the court as a demonstration of power, as compared to the masses who perpetrated the storming of Congress in the Insurrection. Trump is still proclaiming madness and issuing terroristic commands, but almost no one is listening anymore.
The tide of fascist tyranny and terror in America has turned, and now is the time to bring a Reckoning for its evils.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of March 30 2023, Victory For America and Democracy: the Indictment of Traitor Trump; Jubilation and dancing in the streets erupts across America as the most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack our nation in the capture of the state with the Stolen Election of 2016 is indicted for illegal hush money payoffs to a prostitute; not yet for his trafficking of the stolen migrant children, the political assassination of our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl, the abduction and torture of Black Lives Matter protestors by Homeland Security’s army of occupation, his six coup attempts ending with the January 6 Insurrection, or treason in the subversion of democracy, but such a Reckoning will come.
This is the first step of Trump’s descent into hell, where he will join his buddy Epstein and his idol Hitler.
I will remember always the moment when I realized Trump is actually an enemy agent and not merely a vile buffoon; watching as he took his Oath of Office swearing to uphold the Constitution and defend America from all enemies foreign and domestic, while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria. This too I shall avenge.
Of Trump’s regime and the Fourth Reich we may say as Mark Twain did of the French Revolution and the epochal system of unequal power as monarchy which it overthrew; “THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
How shall future histories of the American Fourth Reich and the tyranny and terror of Traitor Trump’s Russian puppet regime remember and characterize him as its figurehead?
As I wrote in my post of June 29 2020, Traitor Trump, Bad Monkey William Barr, and the Subversion of the Rule of Law; Bad Monkey Barr gibbers and champs in his cage, rattling the bars and hurling scoops of his poo at the visitors. Trump the Incorrigible Brat makes faces and taunts him, spurring him on to displays of vicious foulness and depravity, alike in their embrace of the power to hurt others and thereby elevate themselves in vainglorious drooling dominance through fear.
Trump the Clown of Terror and his pet beast of pain and despair William Barr; carnival sideshow freaks of like nature, Trump upon his golden toilet of self-aggrandizement and Barr scampering at his feet and uttering perversions for treats.
Stay well back from the cage, children; the President grabs. His every action is calculated to generate helplessness from his victims, his strategies of politics an elaborate ritual of personal superiority through the submission of others which he offers to the demons which possess him, whispering their incantations of violation and depravity in the hollow rottenness beneath his orange painted husk of illusions and lies.
Such is the true purpose and intention of Trump’s psychopathic game of power as the figurehead of a fascist tyranny of white supremacist terror, misogynistic patriarchy and theocratic Gideonite fundamentalism, and plutocratic disaster capitalism, of authoritarian force and control and the subversion of democracy, in his monstrous acts of treason against our values and institutions of freedom, equality, truth, and justice; the destruction of America and of liberty and the universal human rights we are heir to throughout the world and from the future possibilities of becoming human.
Trump and his fascist conspirators and enablers want nothing less than to devour our souls and enslave us, beginning with the capture of America as a Theatre of Cruelty and the abandonment of our historic role as a guarantor of democracy and the Rights of Man.
In the darkness of his warrens beneath the White House, Trump howls and lashes out in rage through his proxies like William Barr, who with somersaults of avarice joins him in a delirium of madness and evil. From his lair and cabal of intimates Trump’s Sith-like influence ripples out through networks of master-disciple relationships to engulf our nation and our world in a vast web of deceit, and this network of secret power must be fought on its own terms with exposure and mass action.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2023, We Celebrate the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets; How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Take a moment to savour with me the indictment of Trump for the crime of espionage. Ahhh, the bliss.
A commentator on MSN’s Eleventh Hour this night pronounced the magic words which I hope will awaken our nation from the long nightmare of capture by the Fourth Reich; “I think Trump is done.”
It has been a fairytale from which we may learn many kinds of morals, a story which begins in the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement as a fundamentalist theocracy and the Presidency of its figurehead Ronald Reagan and the Mayan Genocide they unleashed together, and found its true form in the Presidency of a pedophile rapist and Russian agent who for years slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Here in the trial of Traitor Trump is a morality play which is also a Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, for it is more than a legal last stand of the rule of law and the idea of democracy in America against a rigged electoral process which offers capture of the state to its enemies, but also a trial of democracy in America and of our infiltrated and subverted justice system whose court of ultimate appeal is a Supreme Court which is become a whorehouse.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020. Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2022, The Greatest Show on Earth: Presenting the January 6 Committee; Tonight our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate flag to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism. What terrors did he conceal behind the beauty pageant and modeling syndicate he once controlled?
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As written by Nick Visser in Huffpost, in an article entitled 7 Key Takeaways From Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 Indictment; “Former President Donald Trump has been indicted over his attempt to remain in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election, yet another moment of reckoning amid a torrent of criminal charges.
Trump faces four felony charges as part of a sweeping, 45-page indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team of investigators accused the former president of multiple conspiracies to defraud the United States, to obstruct an official proceeding and to deprive people of their right to vote and have that vote counted under the Constitution.
1. Trump knew his claims were false but spread them anyway to create an “intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger.”
Prosecutors note that Trump, like every American, had the right to speak publicly about the election “and even to claim, falsely,” that there had been “outcome-determinative fraud.”
But his efforts became unlawful when he moved to defraud the United States and attempt to subvert the process of collecting, counting and certifying the election results. That plan, the indictment says, included a multi-prong approach to spread lies, install slates of fake electors in swing states and convince election officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the will of the people.
“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment says.
2. The indictment identifies six co-conspirators.
Trump was aided in his effort to overturn the 2020 election by six unnamed co-conspirators, the indictment says.
Five of them are identifiable through details and information provided in the filing documents:
1. Rudy Giuliani is listed as “an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not.”
2. John Eastman is listed as “an attorney who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election.”
3. Sidney Powell is listed as “an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded ‘crazy.’”
4. Jeffrey Clark is identified as “a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and who, with the Defendant, attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
5. Kenneth Chesebro is listed as “an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”
6. The sixth co-conspirator is so far unknown but is identified as “a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”
3. People in Trump’s orbit repeatedly told him there was no evidence of voter fraud.
The indictment alleges Trump and his co-conspirators made repeated, “prolific” claims of election fraud despite knowing they were false. Prosecutors say that Trump was repeatedly told by his inner circle his claims were untrue but that he “deliberately disregarded the truth.”
Smith’s team pointed to conversations Trump had with Vice President Mike Pence, senior leaders at the Justice Department, the director of national intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and many aides, White House attorneys and campaign staffers, all of whom said his claims were unsubstantiated.
4. Trump acknowledged claims about election fraud and voting machines pushed by a co-conspirator sounded “crazy.”
The indictment notes that even as Trump’s legal advisers were working to undercut election results in Georgia, he knew the claims were unfounded and even described Co-Conspirator 3’s plan as “crazy.”
That sentiment spread through Trump’s close advisers as the effort to install slates of fake electors in swing states began in force in an effort to obstruct a true count of the Electoral College votes.
“Here’s the thing the way this has morphed it’s a crazy play so I don’t know who wants to put their name on it,” Trump’s deputy campaign manager at the time texted to other aides. No one agreed to put their name on the plan as they couldn’t “stand by it.”
5. Trump pressured the Justice Department to support him and threatened to remove those who refused to go along with his plan.
Trump repeatedly tried to get the Department of Justice to support his false claims of election fraud, “thus giving the Defendant’s lies the backing of the federal government.” But the acting attorney general and acting deputy attorney general both refused, saying the agency would not and could not change the outcome of the election.
“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump replied, the indictment says.
The former president then attempted to install Co-Conspirator 4 as acting attorney general to help further the plot. Trump backed down after many in the White House threatened a mass resignation.
6. Pence’s notes helped the special counsel craft his case.
Trump heavily pressured Pence to support his effort to remain in power and reject the ceremonial certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the election.
Prosecutors pieced together details of Trump’s conversations and thinking around the time using Pence’s “contemporaneous notes” in the days leading up to Jan. 6.
The vice president rejected Trump’s attempts, telling him to his face that he didn’t believe he had the authority to do what Trump asked.
Trump later told Pence that he would have to publicly criticize him, the indictment says, which prompted his chief of staff to inform the Secret Service about fears for Pence’s safety.
7. Trump waited and watched on TV as his supporters stormed the Capitol.
The indictment claims Trump exploited the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and resisted pleas from his aides and supporters to speak out as the insurrection grew.
“When advisors urged the Defendant to issue a calming message aimed at the rioters, the Defendant refused, instead repeatedly remarking that the people at the Capitol were angry because the election had been stolen,” the document says.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter of August 2; “There have been more developments today surrounding yesterday’s indictment of former president Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding as he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in office over the wishes of the American people.
Observers today called out the part of the indictment that describes how Trump and Co-Conspirator 4, who appears to be Jeffrey Clark, the man Trump wanted to make attorney general, intended to use the military to quell any protests against Trump’s overturning of the election results. When warned that staying in power would lead to “riots in every major city in the United States,” Co-Conspirator 4 replied, “Well…that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
The Insurrection Act of 1807 permits the president to use the military to enforce domestic laws, invoking martial law. Trump’s allies urged him to do just that to stay in power. Fears that Trump might do such a thing were strong enough that on January 3, 2021, all 10 living former defense secretaries signed a Washington Post op-ed warning that “[e]fforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”
They put their colleagues on notice: “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo recalled today that military leaders told Congress they were reluctant to respond to the violence at the Capitol out of concern about how Trump might use the military under the Insurrection Act.
Political pollster Tom Bonier wrote: “I understand Trump fatigue, but it feels like the president and his advisors preparing to use the military to quash protests against his planned coup should be bigger news. Especially when that same guy is in the midst of a somewhat credible comeback effort.”
On The Beat tonight, Ari Melber connected Trump Co-Conspirator John Eastman to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Just before midnight on January 6, 2021, after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Eastman wrote to Pence’s lawyer to beg him to get Pence to adjourn Congress “for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here.” On the floor of the Senate at about the same time, Cruz, who voted against certification, used very similar language when he called for “a ten-day emergency audit.”
An email sent by Co-Conspirator 6, the political consultant, matches one sent from Boris Epshteyn to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, suggesting that Epshteyn is Co-Conspirator 6. The Russian-born Epshteyn has been with Trump’s political organization since 2016 and was involved in organizing the slates of false electors in 2020. Along with political consultant Steve Bannon, Epshteyn created a cryptocurrency called “$FJB, which officially stands for “Freedom. Jobs. Business.” but which they marketed to Trump loyalists as “F*ck Joe Biden.” By February 2023, Nikki McCann Ramirez reported in Rolling Stone that the currency had lost 95% of its value.
Since the indictment became public, Trump loyalists have insisted that the Department of Justice is attacking Trump’s First Amendment rights to free speech. Indeed, if Giuliani’s unhinged appearance on Newsmax last night is any indication, it appears that has been their strategy all along. Aside from the obvious limit that the First Amendment does not cover criminal behavior, the grand jury sidestepped this issue by acknowledging that Trump had a right to lie about his election loss. It indicted him for unlawfully trying to obstruct an official proceeding and to disenfranchise voters.
Today, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr dismissed the idea that the indictment is an attack on Trump’s First Amendment rights. Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “As the indictment says, they’re not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants. He can even lie. He can even tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy. All conspiracies involve speech. And all fraud involves speech. Free speech doesn’t give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy.”
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, in an article entitled The 45 pages that skewer Trump’s bid to destroy American democracy; “More than 1,000 people charged over the US Capitol riot, millions of pages of evidence compiled by the House January 6 committee, hundreds of hours of depositions of key players – all this has finally been boiled down to a 45-page indictment that accuses Donald Trump of attempting to destroy American democracy.
“Why didn’t they do this 2.5 years ago?” the former president asked peevishly on Tuesday, shortly before the indictment came down. The answer lies in the document itself: in its painstaking command of detail and in the cool, crisp legal language deployed by special counsel Jack Smith to make his case.
This is the third time that Trump has been criminally indicted, and to some extent the shock value has worn off. Much of the content of the grand jury indictment filed in a federal court in Washington DC is familiar.
But no one can doubt the significance of its contents. For the first time in US history, legal charges have been brought against a president for attempting to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power that until 6 January 2021 had stood as a pillar of American values since a defeated John Adams quietly snuck out of the capital on 4 March 1801.
It’s taken two and a half years, sure, but Smith wastes no time in getting to the point. The second sentence of the indictment reads: “The defendant lost the 2020 presidential election”, taking us straight to that place where Trump so consequentially refused to go – the acceptance that he was a loser.
By the fourth sentence, it is clear that Smith has no intention of mincing his words. He rolls out the L-word – “lies” – with an ease which belies the months of angst that the editors of American newspapers went through before they felt comfortable enough to attach it to Trump.
Later, he accuses the former president of “fraud”, a charged word given the sequence of events. It was precisely that word that Trump used as the foundation stone of his bid to overturn the election – his lie that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud –and now it was being directed back at him.
Smith portrays the former president as a man who was prepared to tear down everything to stay in office. “Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.”
The Trump who emerges from the 45 pages is a frustrated man who, together with his unnamed and as yet uncharged co-conspirators, unleashed a concerted, relentless and fully conscious plan to subvert the 2020 election. Smith dates the plot to 14 November 2020, the day after Trump’s campaign lawyers had conceded defeat in court in Arizona, signalling that he had lost the presidential election.
That day, Trump turned to “Co-Conspirator 1” – a clear description of his lawyer Rudy Giuliani who is referenced at least 40 times – and who “executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct and defeat the federal government function”.
“Knowing deceit” is critical, as it speaks to Trump’s state of mind that is likely to be a key legal battleground if and when the case goes to trial. Smith devotes pages to the subject, repeatedly underlining the allegation that Trump made “knowingly false claims” of fraud in the casting and counting of votes.
“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the document reads. It goes on to list the many people and institutions that directly informed Trump that there was no evidence of fraud, from Vice-President Mike Pence down.
Familiar though they are, some of the details remain just too delicious for Smith – and by extension the Guardian – not to recount. He recalls that during the notorious call between Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which the president asked him to “find” 11,780 votes, the defendant also claimed that 5,000 dead people had voted.
“The actual number were two,” Raffensperger replied. “Two. Two people that were dead that voted.”
The indictment largely follows the roadmap set out by the January 6 committee in its relatively elephantine 845-page final report. It traces the story of the fake electors who were convened in key battleground states lost by Trump in an effort to send illegal false electoral certificates to Congress.
Smith emphasises the extraordinary lengths to which Trump and his co-conspirators went, filing a petition to the US supreme court from Arizona on 11 December 2020 “as a pretext to claim that litigation was pending in the state”. Giuliani was concerned, the indictment alleges using his “Co-Conspirator 1” moniker, that it “could appear treasonous for the AZ electors to vote if there is no pending court proceeding”.
Sure enough, all 16 fake electors in Michigan have now been charged by the state attorney general, and further criminal counts are expected soon against some of the fake electors in Georgia.
The lengths to which the conspirators would go is another searing theme running through the indictment. In a previously untold tableau, we see Co-Conspirator 4, clearly identifiable as the former justice department official and Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark, confronting a White House lawyer who warned him that if Trump refused to leave the presidency there would be “riots in every major city”.
“That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark is alleged to have replied, alluding to the 1807 provision that empowers the US president to deploy the military to suppress civil disorder.
There are other surprises in the document. In the passage on the pressure applied on Pence in the run-up to his ceremonial counting of the electoral college votes on January 6, Smith nonchalantly drops in a mention that prosecutors have obtained the former vice-president’s contemporaneous notes.
That’s a revelation that should send a shiver down the spines of Trump’s defence team.
We learn, too, that on the day of the US Capitol riot, Trump and Giuliani continued to exploit the violence by calling lawmakers to implore them to delay certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Giuliani was badgering US senators even as late as 7.18pm.
The one argument that is absent here, significantly perhaps, is any suggestion that Trump personally orchestrated the uprising on January 6. It’s a striking omission, given some of the evidence that was heard by the House committee, including the sensational claim that Trump had tried to grab the wheel of his security vehicle and drive towards the Capitol building as the uprising was under way.
Its absence, though, points to the careful, cautious tone of the indictment, and to its purpose. Unlike the January 6 committee report, the job of this document is not to lay down a record for history.
Its task is to make a watertight legal case that Trump committed criminal acts that cut to the quick of the American experiment. There’s a lot riding on it: next year’s presidential election, the future of American democracy and that other consideration – a maximum sentence of 55 years in federal prison.”
As written in The Guardian’s editorial, entitled The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s new indictment: America needs this trial: A healthy body politic cannot allow its core values and principles to be trashed with impunity; “he indictment served on Donald Trump on Monday marks the beginning of a legal reckoning that is desperately required, if American democracy is to properly free itself from his malign, insidious influence. Mr Trump already faces multiple criminal charges relating to the retention of classified national security documents and the payment of hush money to a porn star. But the gravity of the four counts outlined by the special counsel, Jack Smith, is of a different order of magnitude.
Mr Trump stands accused of conspiring, in office, to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Following Joe Biden’s victory, the indictment states, Mr Trump “knowingly” used false claims of electoral fraud in an attempt “to subvert the legitimate election results”. A bipartisan congressional committee report last year came to similar conclusions and provides much of the basis for the charges. But this represents the first major legal attempt to hold Mr Trump accountable for events leading up to and including the storming of the Capitol by a violent mob on 6 January 2021.
The stakes could hardly be set higher. Democratic elections and the peaceful transfer of power are the cornerstones of the American republic. The testimony given to Congress indicates that Mr Trump used his authority to try to bully federal and state officials into supporting his claims that the election had been “stolen” from him. Repeatedly told that his assertions were baseless, he then mobilised a hostile crowd on 6 January to intimidate lawmakers charged with ratifying Mr Biden’s victory.
It is inconceivable that Mr Trump should not be made to answer for actions that imperilled the constitutional and democratic functioning of the United States. The prosecutors’ case will hinge on their ability to prove that he knew his claims of a stolen election were bogus. But beyond the trial itself, it would be foolish to underestimate Mr Trump’s ability to turn even this situation to his own political advantage.
The legal fronts on which Mr Trump is now engaged will drain his financial resources. But a narrative of victimhood and persecution has become, and will remain, the galvanising theme of his campaign. Two previous criminal indictments saw his poll ratings lift, helping him to establish a huge lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, a sizable proportion of American voters will continue to back Mr Trump’s self-serving version of reality.
One of the most dangerously polarising elections in US history thus looms as, over the next 15 months, Mr Trump uses political cunning to evade the legal net that is closing around him. Through his lawyers, he will do all he can to delay matters, hoping eventually to dictate the course of events from the White House. For his part, Mr Smith said on Monday that the justice department will seek “a speedy trial”.
It is in the interests of American democracy, to which Mr Trump represents a clear and present danger, that the justice department gets its wish. A healthy body politic cannot allow its founding values and core principles to be trashed with apparent impunity. Prosecutors will need to proceed with care and be alert to the complex political dynamics. But this climactic reckoning in court needs to take place before Mr Trump gets the chance to besmirch the country’s highest office all over again.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s indictment proves he might not be bright, but he is dangerous: Donald Trump’s frantic, cynical and preposterous attempts to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election were a dark moment in US history; “In the 1976 political drama All the President’s Men, Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward meets the secretive FBI source, Deep Throat, in a parking garage to ask him what he knows about the Watergate break-in. Deep Throat – in real life, the FBI deputy director Mark Felt – is ominous and taciturn, refusing to say all that he knows. “I have to do this my way,” he tells Redford. “You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm.” But he offers a blunt assessment of the inner workings of the Nixon administration. “Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House,” Deep Throat tells Woodward. “The truth is these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
Few moments in history, including the Watergate scandal, have done so much to puncture the dignified mystique of American government as Donald Trump’s frantic, cynical and preposterous attempts to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election. The indictment against him related that effort, unsealed on Tuesday by the office of special counsel Jack Smith, charges Trump with engaging in three conspiracies: to defraud the United States in seeking to overturn the election, to obstruct the government in seeking to derail the January 6 proceedings, and perhaps most meaningfully, to deprive American voters of their right to have their votes counted. The charges are serious; the violence was deadly. But every one of the indictment’s 45 pages evokes Deep Throat’s words: these are not very bright guys.
The document unsealed on Tuesday charges only Trump. But it also implicates six co-conspirators. These include a justice department official, probably the then assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, along with an unidentified political consultant. Also implicated are four Republican lawyers, seemingly including Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani; the law professor John Eastman, who concocted the false theory that the vice-president had the authority to intervene in the electoral vote counting ceremony; Ken Chesebro, an author of the fake electors scheme; and the quack pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell.
It was with these accomplices that the special counsel alleges that Donald Trump embarked on a series of frauds, fabrications and cockamamie schemes to reverse the election outcome between November 2020 and early January 2021. That project had multiple successive fronts, with the conspirators moving on to new strategies as the previous ones failed. They tried to use the justice department to pursue frivolous and fraudulent allegations of election malfeasance; then they tried to conscript state officials into advancing false claims of election fraud; then they tried to send fake electors to congress; finally, they tried to stop congress from certifying the election results on January 6.
All the while, they flooded the media with what the indictment calls “knowingly false” claims that the election was stolen, in the hope of creating public distrust in the election outcome and pressure on the officials who they believed could reverse it. None of these schemes were especially well-thought-out, and none would have been plausible without both a willingness by many Republican officials to lie on Trump’s behalf, and a willingness by many Trump supporters to commit violence. But those, sadly, are not in short supply.
That Trump and his co-conspirators failed in their effort to subvert the election was largely a matter of luck; that they are now being charged in this most significant of Trump’s crimes was not at all guaranteed.
Much of what is recounted in the indictment is not new. The facts presented by the special counsel hew closely to those laid out by the House January 6 committee in a series of televised hearings last year, and Smith, like that committee, spends a great deal of time eradicating any doubt about Trump’s state of mind or his certainty that his own statements about the election were false. But the indictment does contain new tidbits of information gleaned from the special counsel’s investigation, ones that make both the incompetence and the malice of the conspiracy plain. Copious testimony and contemporaneous notes provided by Mike Pence, for example, make it clear the extent to which Trump’s former vice-president, against whom he incited a murderous mob, is cooperating with the special counsel. Emails obtained by the investigation also add texture to the story of the election subversion effort. One campaign adviser, tasked with encouraging false claims of election fraud in Georgia, wrote in an email that the allegations being advanced by the Trump camp were “conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership”. Not exactly the words of a man convinced of the righteousness of his own cause.
More disturbingly, the indictment reveals the extent to which Trump and his co-conspirators were conscious of the possibility that their actions might lead to violence, and that violence might be required to achieve their goals. This does not seem to have disturbed them, or even to have prompted much hesitation.
Pence’s lawyers allegedly told John Eastman that if the vice-president usurped the January 6 certification ceremony as Eastman wanted him to, the result would lead to a “disastrous situation” in which the election would “have to be decided in the streets”. On 3 January, just days before the riot, a member of the White House counsel’s office told Jeff Clark that if the president tried to remain in office as planned, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States”. To which Clark allegedly replied: “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” Clark was referring to a law that empowers the sitting president to deploy the military to suppress unrest.
It has long been clear that far-right extremist militia groups, such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, planned for violence at the Capitol on January 6; it has been less clear the extent to which the Trump camp communicated with these groups, if at all, about the event and that possibility. It was a connection that has long been speculated about, but which the House committee on January 6 did not firmly make, and the special counsel’s indictment doesn’t, either.
In December 2020, just weeks before Clark’s conversation, the leader of the Oath Keepers had called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. This rhyming thinking doesn’t indicate coordination, but it does suggest a sympathy of mind, and of tactics, between the extremist groups and the Trump camp. It is an affinity that will only become clearer if Trump becomes the Republican nominee again, as he is all but certain to. These are not very bright guys, but they’re still quite dangerous ones.”
What happens next, as Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, fundraises off his indictment and uses it to centralize power in his domination of the Republican Party for his campaign to recapture the state in our next election, and move us nearer to a civil war?
As written by Robert Reich in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump is gearing up for his ‘final battle’. So should we; “Not once has Donald Trump veered from his core campaign theme.
Recall the first rally of his 2024 election campaign on 25 March in Waco, Texas – exactly 30 years after a deadly siege between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians resulted in the deaths of more than 80 members of that religious cult and four federal agents.
He opened with a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection singing “Justice for All”, intercut with the national anthem and with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with his hand on his heart. Behind, on big screens, was footage from the Capitol riot.
Trump then repeated his bogus claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. He praised the rioters of January 6.
He raged against the prosecutors overseeing multiple investigations into his conduct as “absolute human scum”. He told the crowd that “the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”
He then declared:
“Our enemies are desperate to stop us and our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But they failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”
Since then, as indictments have piled up against him and his poll numbers among Republicans have risen, Trump’s “final battle” comes into ever sharper focus: it is a battle against the rule of law and democracy.
The mega indictment we have all been waiting for – the indictment against Trump for his attempted coup against the United States – will be announced very soon.
Trump is prepared to use it in his final battle.
Tuesday, on an Iowa radio show, he warned it would be “very dangerous” if Special Counsel Jack Smith put him in jail, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020”.
Unfortunately for the nation, the Republican party is uniting behind Trump’s side of this battle line.
If not defending the January 6 rioters outright, Republican lawmakers are attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith, the justice department, the Manhattan district attorney, and other current and prospective prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable.
A Trump indictment for attempting the overthrow of the constitutional order and the verdict of the electorate will guarantee that 2024 will be more of a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden, as was the 2020 election.
It will make it harder for Republican candidates across the nation to focus on their fake nemeses – “woke” teachers and corporations, trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and “socialism” – and force them instead to defend Trump’s side in the final battle.
Trump and the Republicans will lose this battle. Even if they win Republican primaries, they will lose the general election.
Recall that last November, virtually every 2020-election-denying Republican who sought office in a truly contested election went down to defeat.
Those who care about democracy and the rule of law should welcome the battle, and not just because it will help Biden and the Democrats.
It will also help clarify what’s at stake for the nation in 2024 and beyond.
It will show how eager Trump and the Republican party are to abandon democracy and the rule of law in order to gain power. It will show that the vast majority of Americans reject their position.
Americans hold different views about many things, but most of us oppose authoritarianism. We reject fascism.
We value the constitution and the Bill of Rights. We are committed to democracy, even with its many flaws. We support the rule of law.
We want to live in a nation where no one is above the law. We want to be able to sleep at night without worrying that a president might unleash armed lackeys to drag us out of our homes because he considers us to be his enemy.
The pustule of Trump has been growing since 2016, and the authoritarian impulses underlying this infection have been allowed to fester for decades.
Folks, it is finally time to lance this boil. It is time to decidedly rescue democracy and the rule of law. It is time to defeat Trump and his enablers who are determined to defy the core values of America.
Let the battle begin.”
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2022, Act Three of the Greatest Show on Earth: Where Do We Go From Here?; Where do we go from here?
Democracy in America survived its most terrible moment of peril from internal threat in the January 6 Insurrection, yet here we are, witness to the public exposure of the plot and its treasonous conspirators on television as Congress brings a Reckoning to the Fourth Reich.
Like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 on which it was modeled, it failed; but in doing so also achieved all of its strategic goals, moving our great enemy nearer to victory by staging a Lost Cause which established the fascist counternarrative as iconography that Trump remains our legitimate President. Next time, and there will always be a next time, we may not be so lucky.
Not only do the forces of fascism remain an active threat, through open allegiance to the Lost Cause which echoes horrifically with that of the Confederacy and the KKK whose adherents are among the networks of deniable assets now among us as they were at the Capitol on that fateful day, but the vast resources of wealth and power at their command after seventy years of infiltration of global elites and governments remain undiminished.
But none of this is relevant to the true threat which fascism poses to us all today; for America has been divided against itself, and as we are warned by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 in his House Divided speech in reference to the synoptic Gospels of Luke 11:17, Mark 3:25, and Matthew 12:25; “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a fallen nation. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6 episode 7- Once More, with Feeling – Where Do We Go From Here?
Trump would have been convicted over 2020 election, says special counsel
Five key takeaways from Jack Smith’s report on alleged Trump election crimes
Jack Smith’s final letter on Trump case offers little consolation and less justice,
Robert Tait
Read Jack Smith’s final report on Trump’s Jan. 6 case
Complete 174 page report
2024 Notes and References
‘It’s not a theoretical proposition’: the ‘war game’ imagining a coup in the US
Trump 2020 election interference case resumes after immunity decision
7 Key Takeaways From Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 Indictment
The 45 pages that skewer Trump’s bid to destroy American democracy
The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s new indictment: America needs this trial | Editorial
Trump’s indictment proves he might not be bright, but he is dangerous
Trump is gearing up for his ‘final battle’. So should we
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/24/donald-trump-2024-election-final-battle
Jack Smith Says Trump’s ‘Lies’ Fueled Attack On The Capito
Mike Pence Says Trump Indictment Shows ‘Our Country Is More Important Than One Man
Letters From An American
Finally, 30 months after leaving office in disgrace, Trump must face the music
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/01/trump-republican-support-primaries
America dances with our addiction to power;
Liberty and Fascist Tyranny, Hope and Fear,
The terror of freedom and the ecstasy of submission
Hozier – Take Me to Church, Art-project Inspiration. Choreography and directed by Helga Geller
Torch of Liberty 
