It Seems Bad That the Guy the President Just Pardoned Is Calling for Him to Execute a Military Coup
Former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has checked in with a fresh dose of patriotism.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a348468...nl22139593
By Jack Holmes
Dec 2, 2020
Many of the high clergy in the Church of the Savvy have been calmly explaining for weeks that although Donald Trump's brazen and pathetic post-election behavior is corrosive to democracy, it does not technically count as a coup attempt.
The president's myriad lawsuits attempting to throw out the results of democratic elections have not worked, these folks explain, therefore they were never going to work (Logic), and concern about them working—on the basis that no Law or Norm has much mattered for four years—was hysteria.
This is too stupid to be a coup! It's just a grift, because these things are mutually exclusive. And besides, a coup involves using the military or the security apparatus to seize power. He's just getting laughed out of court.
Welp, now his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, a man the president pardoned just last week for "any and all possible offenses" related to the Mueller probe, has endorsed a call for the president to "temporarily suspend the Constitution," "declare limited martial law," have "the military oversee a national re-vote," and "silence the destructive media."
Wow!
Sounds a bit like a coup. Maybe the best part is the idea that you can have "limited" martial law, or that suspending the Constitution would just be "temporary," or that the only organization that could oversee a legitimate election—read: one where Donald Trump wins—is the military.
The military is not some repository of Real American sentiment—Donald Trump enjoys broad disapproval in the armed forces, including at the officer level, so it's not likely the army or navy will participate in the president's plot to overturn the election.
But this stuff is metastasizing on the right. It's a natural extension of the Republican Party's growing belief that any democratic process that ends with a Democratic candidate getting elected is by-definition illegitimate.
This is what was beneath the push from numerous Republican-led state legislatures in the last couple of cycles to strip their governors' offices of their powers in the lame-duck period before a Democrat could take office and wield them.
Never mind that a majority of citizens had voted to give it to them. This is what's lurking under the voter-suppression tactics, and the post-election push to throw out the votes in predominantly Black cities. These Americans are not considered full citizens, in that they should not have the right to determine who the president is. Their participation in the polity is fraudulent.
Meanwhile, those preaching calm over the last few weeks have not merely ignored the guiding principles of the Trump era: never assume there is a bottom to the shameless depravity, and never bet against that shamelessness being rewarded. (This is a guy who has never faced consequences for a single thing he's done, and who continually gets things he does not deserve. Why would that stop now?)
These Savvy Observers suffer from a failure of imagination. The increasingly deranged conspiracies propping up Trump's tantrum have had the desired effect: millions of the Republican rank-and-file do not believe Biden's (fairly decisive) win was legitimate.
Very few Republican officeholders have openly acknowledged Biden's win—even if, as we were reminded by Senator Ron Johnson today, they very well know the truth and just regard speaking it as "political suicide"—and that number does not include anyone in congressional leadership. The official position of the Republican Party is that the outcome is in doubt and in need of investigation.
And more than all that, the military is not the only segment of our society with guns that might theoretically attempt to achieve a desired political outcome with force rather than through the democratic process.
Election officials in states targeted by Trump and his allies are already facing a deluge of death threats, and we all seem to have memory-holed the attackers—from the mail bomber to El Paso to the Pittsburgh synagogue—who engaged or attempted to engage in mass violence while spouting off right-wing rhetoric over the last few years.
If members of the armed forces do not take things into their own hands, which they almost certainly will not, we can only hope no one else will attempt to do so. Because, again: millions of people believe this stuff. The vast, vast majority—almost every single person—would never turn to violence in response. But it only takes one.
And all the while, the president is starting to fire up the Pardon Machine, both for those who do crime on his behalf and, possibly, for himself. Because he faces such huge legal jeopardy when he leaves office.
Which is something he wants to avoid at all costs. It is also straight out of the strongman playbook to put a number of hare-brained schemes in motion, hoping that at least one will play out in such a way that you can profit off the chaos.
But yeah, everybody simmer down. The important thing when witnessing the wild behavior of an authoritarian leader, cornered and desperate, is to be the most Calm and Savvy observer. Don't you know about The Laws?
Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.
Former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has checked in with a fresh dose of patriotism.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a348468...nl22139593
By Jack Holmes
Dec 2, 2020
Many of the high clergy in the Church of the Savvy have been calmly explaining for weeks that although Donald Trump's brazen and pathetic post-election behavior is corrosive to democracy, it does not technically count as a coup attempt.
The president's myriad lawsuits attempting to throw out the results of democratic elections have not worked, these folks explain, therefore they were never going to work (Logic), and concern about them working—on the basis that no Law or Norm has much mattered for four years—was hysteria.
This is too stupid to be a coup! It's just a grift, because these things are mutually exclusive. And besides, a coup involves using the military or the security apparatus to seize power. He's just getting laughed out of court.
Welp, now his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, a man the president pardoned just last week for "any and all possible offenses" related to the Mueller probe, has endorsed a call for the president to "temporarily suspend the Constitution," "declare limited martial law," have "the military oversee a national re-vote," and "silence the destructive media."
Wow!
Sounds a bit like a coup. Maybe the best part is the idea that you can have "limited" martial law, or that suspending the Constitution would just be "temporary," or that the only organization that could oversee a legitimate election—read: one where Donald Trump wins—is the military.
The military is not some repository of Real American sentiment—Donald Trump enjoys broad disapproval in the armed forces, including at the officer level, so it's not likely the army or navy will participate in the president's plot to overturn the election.
But this stuff is metastasizing on the right. It's a natural extension of the Republican Party's growing belief that any democratic process that ends with a Democratic candidate getting elected is by-definition illegitimate.
This is what was beneath the push from numerous Republican-led state legislatures in the last couple of cycles to strip their governors' offices of their powers in the lame-duck period before a Democrat could take office and wield them.
Never mind that a majority of citizens had voted to give it to them. This is what's lurking under the voter-suppression tactics, and the post-election push to throw out the votes in predominantly Black cities. These Americans are not considered full citizens, in that they should not have the right to determine who the president is. Their participation in the polity is fraudulent.
Meanwhile, those preaching calm over the last few weeks have not merely ignored the guiding principles of the Trump era: never assume there is a bottom to the shameless depravity, and never bet against that shamelessness being rewarded. (This is a guy who has never faced consequences for a single thing he's done, and who continually gets things he does not deserve. Why would that stop now?)
These Savvy Observers suffer from a failure of imagination. The increasingly deranged conspiracies propping up Trump's tantrum have had the desired effect: millions of the Republican rank-and-file do not believe Biden's (fairly decisive) win was legitimate.
Very few Republican officeholders have openly acknowledged Biden's win—even if, as we were reminded by Senator Ron Johnson today, they very well know the truth and just regard speaking it as "political suicide"—and that number does not include anyone in congressional leadership. The official position of the Republican Party is that the outcome is in doubt and in need of investigation.
And more than all that, the military is not the only segment of our society with guns that might theoretically attempt to achieve a desired political outcome with force rather than through the democratic process.
Election officials in states targeted by Trump and his allies are already facing a deluge of death threats, and we all seem to have memory-holed the attackers—from the mail bomber to El Paso to the Pittsburgh synagogue—who engaged or attempted to engage in mass violence while spouting off right-wing rhetoric over the last few years.
If members of the armed forces do not take things into their own hands, which they almost certainly will not, we can only hope no one else will attempt to do so. Because, again: millions of people believe this stuff. The vast, vast majority—almost every single person—would never turn to violence in response. But it only takes one.
And all the while, the president is starting to fire up the Pardon Machine, both for those who do crime on his behalf and, possibly, for himself. Because he faces such huge legal jeopardy when he leaves office.
Which is something he wants to avoid at all costs. It is also straight out of the strongman playbook to put a number of hare-brained schemes in motion, hoping that at least one will play out in such a way that you can profit off the chaos.
But yeah, everybody simmer down. The important thing when witnessing the wild behavior of an authoritarian leader, cornered and desperate, is to be the most Calm and Savvy observer. Don't you know about The Laws?
Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.
