Umair Haque has some strong words. Written before the mob assault launched by Trump on the Capitol, they are prophetic.
You Don’t Heal a Nation By Forgetting About Fascism. You Heal a Nation by Punishing Fascism Swiftly and Severely.
Trump is assaulting American democracy right down to his final hours in office because he can. Now, that’s not an answer I like to give. It’s a very American answer. Often, an easy, superficial one. But in this case, it is the most accurate one. What does it mean?
Why don’t heads of state in functioning societies abuse their powers the way that Trump has done? Because they have been stopped, usually, long before this point.
In functioning societies, an authoritarian’s pattern of escalating abuses of power, transgressions of norms, violations of codes, breaking of actual laws, is met with just the response it deserves. Not just contempt and fury — but action.
Haque wrote this in response to Trump’s infamous call to Georgia seeking to force them to throw out the votes and hand the state to him.
By now, you’ve heard the details of Trump’s infamous phone call. The one where he asks Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,780 votes, exactly the number needed to win the State. The one where Trump not so subtly hints at jail time if he doesn’t. What the?
Come on, my friend. The only people left in America who can pretend to be oh so shocked at this turn of events are maybe Ezra Klein, Jake Tapper, Chris Hayes, and the rest of the white-boy pundit-fraternity. Anyone else, on the other hand, who’s been living on planet earth for the last, oh, four years, should and could have seen this coming miles away.
One can only imagine Haque’s reaction to the events of January 6, 2021. He has personal experience with what Trump represents that the “white-boy pundit-fraternity he derides cannot imagine, not having grown up in an authoritarian state. As he wrote 9/20/2020:
I received my first death threat when I was at the ripe old age of 14 years. It wasn’t like you think — some chubby basement-dwelling dork with fists about as dangerous as pillows says he’ll kill you on Twitter. This one came from seriously violent men in organised groups, wings calling themselves militias, carrying machine`guns, whose only real job it was to kill people who had crossed the line. I was still just a kid — but I’d crossed a line, and now the fascists wanted me dead. I was on their list of people to murder now — and people on that list tended to die gruesome deaths. Yes, really.
The people who stormed the Capitol yesterday would love to be in militias like that. They are the people who came up with $2 million to keep Kyle Rittenhouse out of jail. The Sedition Caucus is playing for support from them and the rest of the millions who want to keep Trump as their “strong leader”.
This morning, the same media that was horrified by what unfolded yesterday is taking comfort that the sun came up today, the vote was finally carried out, and the country dodged a bullet. They are taking Trump’s latest statement that there will be a peaceful transition as finally admitting he lost — while sliding right past the part where he says “Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out”. They are — God help us — invoking with longing the way the country came together after 911 while forgetting how that unity was abused in the worst way by the worst people, the ones who let 911 happen.
I am watching Savannah Guthrie ask Chuck Todd this morning how we deal with all the lies that are out there coming from “our elected leadership” and he says, “The elected leadership in this country has to start telling the truth and we have to hold them accountable for it.” There appears to be no awareness of what a damning confession that is about their job performance to date, or how framing it as a both sides problem is a reflex so automatic they don’t even blink.
There are calls to invoke the 25th Amendment and a number of Congress members are talking impeachment. But there are also those who are ready to move on. Haque has words for them.
The only language they understand — authoritarians, fascists, theocrats, the mafias and crooks and sycophants who surround them — is the one they speak: power, violence, brutality. Telling them you are ready to forget? It says to them that you’re a sucker, a mark, a weakling. They are right. You are. You have let them do it all over again, and not even stopped them now.
That is why Trump is attacking democracy right down to his last nanosecond in office, with increasing violence, brutality, corruption, flamboyance, in louder and louder ways.
Because he can. Because nobody is going to punish him for it. Because he is going to get away with it.
You know it and I know it. Even the white liberal knows it. What America doesn’t seem to have any grasp of is the opposite it. Letting them get away with isn’t how you stop fascism. It’s how you enable it.
America has a notoriously short attention span. While authoritarian followers thrive on vengeance, punishment, and grievance, the rest of us would just like to get on with our lives and deal with all the other problems facing us. We should take a lesson from those who have used the shock doctrine to push through horrendous policies, and seize on this opportunity while people are still shocked by what happened.
There must be consequences. Not just for Trump, but for all of his enablers, the sedition caucus, the right wing disinformation ecosystem, and the mob who stormed the Capitol. Haque said the following after the phone call — it’s even more compelling now:
Biden and Harris should be saying, openly, “we are coming for you on day one. We are going to send you to jail. That’s not a political attack — it’s a defense of democracy. You are going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law — however tiny the offence is, we are going to find it, and we are going to be relentless in pursuing justice for it.
And not just that. We are going to make sure, to whatever extent we can, that everyone who was part of this terrible, terrible chapter in American history pays a price, too. We are going to try to make sure that they never work in Washington or New York again. Because are disgraced in our eyes. They barely deserve to be called Americans anymore, because they have betrayed our fundamental values so. And we are going to investigate if they have betrayed our country legally, too.”
Read the whole thing. And if you think Haque is overreacting, read this. It can happen here. It is happening here.
What more do we need? When will we learn the lesson? A year ago Trump was impeached for trying to blackmail Ukraine into skewing the election for him by smearing Joe Biden. He escaped because Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP turned the impeachment and trial into a farce. None of them paid a price for that — but the rest of us did.
How many Americans would still be alive if Trump had been removed from office, before the pandemic ran wild? How much less economic pain would we be feeling if Mitch McConnell had feared the wrath of the voters? How much less hate and division would we have had as the police killed more black men last year? How much more help would there have been for the west coast engulfed in wildfires?
Electing Biden and taking back the Senate by the narrowest of margins is a start, but if we do not deal with the people who made the attack on the Capitol inevitable, there will be worse to come. For those who think the price will be more than we can afford, consider the price we have already paid for allowing this to continue without consequences.
The top Democrats in Congress called on Thursday for President Trump’s immediate removal from office for his role in urging on the violent mob that overtook the Capitol a day before, disrupting the ratification of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York called on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, which allows him and the cabinet to wrest the power of the presidency from Mr. Trump.
If Mr. Pence declines to act, they said Democrats were prepared to impeach Mr. Trump for a second time.
“While it’s only 13 days left, any day can be a horror show for America,” Ms. Pelosi said, calling Mr. Trump’s actions on Wednesday a “seditious act.”
In an extraordinary news conference in the reclaimed Capitol, Ms. Pelosi singled out members of the Cabinet by name, asking why they would not intervene.
“Are they ready to say for the next 13 days this dangerous man can assault our democracy?” Ms. Pelosi said of the cabinet.
The ball is in your court, Vice President Pence. This would be a good start.