John Rachal's Blog

“O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; / No more of that.” King Lear

One-hundred-forty House Republicans, thirteen Senate Republicans, and roughly one-third of American voters have declared that their loyalty to Donald Trump and his assault on American democracy exceeds their loyalty to the country they claim to defend. There have been some sixty lawsuits challenging the election results, all of which have been frivolous, lacking a scintilla of evidence, and thus dismissed. What those court challenges have succeeded in, however, is ramping up the outrage and paranoia of the Gullibles and the radical far right. These lawmakers are set to challenge the electoral votes as they are counted on January 6, claiming that as many as six states that Trump lost have participated in or succumbed to electoral fraud by declaring, truthfully, that their voters elected Joe Biden. The objectors’ claims of voter fraud are evidence-free; they want Trump to have won, so therefore he did win. Never mind that some down-ballot Republicans did win in those states; were those wins also thus fraudulent? Never mind that not one single case of alleged fraud was brought before the judiciary in states Trump actually won. Fraud only could have occurred in states he lost.

If these 140 House Republicans, thirteen Senate Republicans, and Trump himself were to have their way, we as a nation would be a banana republic where elections are a charade for totalitarian rulers, a proto-fascist country where democracy is the fig leaf we use to cover our despotism. Mimicking other countries pretending to democracy and submission to majority will, we could call ourselves The Democratic Republic of the United States of America or The People’s Republic of the USA. The mantra of the GOP would be—indeed, may already be—“Power is all that matters; if it can be achieved by honest democratic means, wonderful. If it must be achieved by corrupt and unscrupulous means, then corrupt and unscrupulous means will be used—but always under the cover of ‘democracy.’” 

But those 140, and those 13, the so-called “sedition caucus,” should consider the consequences of their sedition. Will they slink to their dens, or will they be honored among the Trump adorers? What they prove by their very existence is how fragile our democracy is at this moment (even aside from its structural flaws, like the Electoral College, for starters), and possibly for an indeterminate future. At the very best, what can be said of them is that they have a high degree of moral flexibility. At worst, they are fascistic conspiracy fantasy-mongers. Ted Cruz should win two Academy Awards, one for hypocrisy and one for sycophancy. What happened to the Cruz who called Trump a “pathological liar” then, but leads the charge for overturning an American democratic and fair election now? Could even one of these people (who all, no doubt, purport to be good Christians) put a hand on the Bible in the privacy of their own home and say, “I truly believe Trump won”? Is it just their cowardly fear of balking Trump and alienating the trumpaholics, or is it that they’re hoping to emerge as Trump 2.0 themselves? Which ones aspire in 2024 to a strongman grab for power built on national resentment and chaos that they themselves, along with Trump, have inflicted on us? Given these options, let’s hope for mere cowardice.

In the fevered minds of Trump and the forever-Trumpers, his instantly infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is conceived as an Alamo-like stand for electoral integrity and justice. Rational people, however, saw immediately that that way madness lies. The call was the perfect analogue and the domestic equivalent of the Ukraine call—a mobster intimidating someone he regards as an underling. My question, aside from the call’s legal implications, is whether Trump actually now believes his claims of fraud, and thus proves himself beyond any sliver of doubt to be a deluded psychopath who, if we were not days away from the end of his presidency, should be removed under the 25th amendment; or is he simply practicing his lifelong skills of lying and bullying, and thus, if time allowed, should be removed through an impeachment conviction? Or is it both? We know he’s always been a liar and a bully, but neither of those precludes the possibility that he is quite mad. I’ve listened to enough of the tape to conclude that he could actually believe his assertions of fraud. His grandiose claims that he couldn’t possibly have lost Georgia have a ring of delusional self-deception. His unquestionable hubris—or in today’s lingo, his psychopathology—and his possible madness are of such an enormous scale that maybe he believes his own fantasies, and is better suited to join the frantic screamers in yesteryear’s asylum at Bedlam than the convicted inmates of Attica.