Here’s what I believe… America has now taken the first steps down an old and well-travelled road that wends its way toward coups, assassinations, the imposition of authoritarian rule, and civil war. They may yet reverse course, but it’s hard to quell the horror that they could actually have started down this path, as if stumbling drunk towards a buzz saw.
From The Needlefish, Crossing the Rubicon, May 22, 2018
Well, we had our coup attempt, and a couple of attempted assassinations, and now we’re getting the imposition of authoritarian rule. With Trump thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court (we all saw that coming, right?) and Congress sitting on its hands, refusing to claw back its Article 1 powers, I guess that leaves me with one crucial question, upon which, I’m afraid, everything is going to turn, and sooner than most could imagine: when Donald sends troops into the streets to kill their fellow Americans, will they comply? Will they salute smartly and open fire on the citizens they’re supposed to protect?
I’m really starting to think it’s going to come to that. Congress won’t do anything. Donald is telling the courts, SCOTUS included, to go take a long walk off a short pier. The only option left is in the hands of the people: mass civil unrest, general strikes, enormous protests, people refusing to pay their taxes, and huge numbers getting into every other sort of “good trouble”, as the great John Lewis used to say. That, or acquiescence. Fight it en masse, or bid farewell to the Republic.
I see only a couple of longshot chances that Trump can still be dealt with in a purely legal, constitutional manner.
In theory, the Republicans in Congress could finally become so horrified at the utter devastation that even the Bible-thumping Christo-fascist Mike Johnson accepts that they have to act before the mid-terms.
Don’t count on that.
So, let’s suppose then that there are actually going to be mid-terms, and that by then Trump hasn’t declared some sort of emergency, deployed the military under the Insurrection Act (or perhaps another of his unconstitutional Executive Orders), and suspended elections indefinitely. Let’s suppose, too, that Donald hasn’t figured out a way to rig the voting/counting/certification machinery. There’s a chance, then, that all those irredeemable low-information morons who believed the promises about prices and inflation – and didn’t believe Trump would do all the other things he said he was going to do – will finally turn on the the GOP, and the Dems win bigly. So far so good, right? If the Dems retake the House, they can impeach Donald by simple majority vote. Yay. Here’s the rub, though: they then have to convict him in the Senate with 67 votes. It’s highly doubtful that the Dems will ever elect 67 Senators, given the disproportionate weight granted by the ridiculous American constitution to a few million reliably Republican clod-hoppers in virtually empty ruby-red states like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas (the combined population of which is about 1/10 California’s, but sends eight Senators to Washington, vs. 2 for California). The Democrats might, in a landslide, get 55, maybe a couple more (but that’d be a huge landslide), so one way or another they’d have to obtain the votes of a dozen or so Republicans.
Don’t count on that, either.
Remember, too, that to be safe they’d have to impeach the next two intolerable jagoffs in the statutory line of succession to actually kick the Trumpanistas out of power. It might not matter much if we ditch Donald just to get J.D. Vance or Mike Johnson; they might just keep Trump around as some sort of advisor who nevertheless pulls the strings, much as a mob boss can still run his outfit from prison. Third in line is the President pro tem of the Senate, who in our rosy scenario would be a Democrat, so they’d have to work their way straight through to him, via unprecedented multiple simultaneous impeachments. The prospect of a dozen Republicans going for that are vanishingly small. Nil, actually. In extremis, they may agree that Trump has to go, though I doubt it, but even so they definitely won’t agree to give up the White House. Now, I’m not saying that it still couldn’t be a net positive to send Donald packing, even if we do wind up with President Vance, but I’m not sure that Trump’s worst policies on tariffs, dismantling the federal government, abandoning NATO, and all that other Project 2025 noise, will be thrown out along with him. I’m not sure that his ridiculous cabinet picks would all be replaced. I’m doubtful that the shift towards authoritarianism will stop or even slow down.
Anyway, we could get into a long discussion about whether either Vance or Johnson would still be better than Trump, and that may one day be a worthy topic, but right now it feels like a proverbial angels-dancing-on-pinheads sort of question. All indications are that impeachment is a constitutional dead letter. It isn’t happening. Which is sad, really, since it’s the only legal remedy left when the Executive stops heeding the decisions of the Judiciary.
Besides, even if they do impeach and convict Donald, and everybody around him, who says he goes? Who says he doesn’t then declare an emergency, deploy the Army, scream himself hoarse about this or that unfairness and perfidious skullduggery, and simply stay in office?
You think he wouldn’t try?
So it’s starting to look like the people are going to have to take it to the streets. They already have, to no small degree, but the popular outcry is going to have to ratchet up to levels never before seen in America, while still remaining peaceful, so as not to give the military any excuse to respond with force, and then, when Trump orders them to start shooting anyway, well, God help us. I don’t know what happens then. At grunt level, the military is a machine designed to respond without hesitation to the chain of command, no questions asked, and the way Donald has been replacing Generals and Judge Advocates General – those in the chain of command who would balk – makes me even more nervous than I’d otherwise be about the rank and file refusing to obey unlawful orders. There’s still reasonable hope that military officers would refuse to carry out the illegal orders of a deranged Commander-in-Chief, but the only step then is to resign, and Donald will simply grind his way through them until he gets to somebody who’ll do as they’re told. It may thus come down to whether individual soldiers can stomach shooting into crowds of peaceful protestors, or whether at that point they mutiny. It may also spin into nightmare scenarios in which Blue State Governors try to deploy their own National Guard units to protect the citizenry, refusing to accept the President’s authority to take over their command in an emergency. Are American soldiers prepared to start shooting at each other? And what about all those MAGA militias and Proud Boys out there, many of them pardoned for their last insurrection and released from prison by Donald, perhaps anticipating he might need their help? Will they join the fray? Will other groups oppose them? Does it turn into free-for-all as America’s heavily-armed citizenry, none of them much resembling the “well-regulated militia” anticipated by the drafters of their cursed Second Amendment, starts going at it hammer and tongs up and down Main Street, U.S.A.?
At which point, isn’t that civil war?
This could get all kinds of ugly in a hurry. I’m not saying we’re there yet. This is a constitutional crisis, but we haven’t yet passed the final off-ramp. Not yet. But we’re getting there, too damned fast. The American people may well have to ask themselves, and soon: are we going to knuckle under, or fight?
the needlefish 