Part VII: Good Riddance, Mr. President

Part VII: Good riddance, Mr. President.

__________ 

“I don’t think he’s fit for office.” 

Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton

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STEPPING BACK in time, we can see that untruths have always been legal tender in Trump World. In the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, Rejected-President Trump could still depend on smarmy pals to provide cover. Rep. Matt Gaetz and others set to work, selling the lie that XRVision, a company specializing in facial recognition software, had identified swarms of Antifa types storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. 

See! It wasn’t Trump’s dopey followers who believed his dopey lies and almost destroyed democracy… 

Okay, scratch that… 

XRVision quickly announced it had not identified any members of the mob and had no idea what Gaetz was talking about. 

Nevertheless, Rush Limbaugh, and other loud voices on the right, picked up the lie that the real rioters were “Antifa” and “leftist” folk. Soon it spread, like herpes, across the right-wing social media spectrum. 

 

January 8: At a press conference, F.B.I. Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono is asked about claims that Antifa was involved in the attack. “We have no indication of that at this time,” he replies. 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as loyal a lout as ever served an unhinged president, is forced to announce that there will be a peaceful transfer of power to President Biden on January 20. 

Meanwhile, he is forced to respond to foreign criticism, in the wake of the Capitol Hill attack, that the United States has become a “banana republic.” Mike calls that “slander.” Without the slightest hint of irony, he explains that “banana republics” are places where “mob violence determines the exercise of power [emphasis added].”

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Mike doesn’t realize he’s lying; but this response is so clueless, and Mike sounds so blissfully obtuse, that I am adding him to the list of people who help us understand that Trump is a bald-faced liar. 

Call it “editorial license,” on the part of the blogger. 

Violence on January 6.

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, of Canada is not obtuse, and replies, like so many of our allies, with disdain. “What we witnessed,” on January 6, in Washington D.C., he says, “was an assault on democracy by violent rioters, incited by the current president and other politicians.” 

The president’s second National Security Advisor, Gen. H. R. McMaster, says that our country is in its current fix because “the sad reality [is] that President Trump and other officials have repeatedly compromised our principles in pursuit of partisan advantage and personal gain.” 

By this time, Trump’s third National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has written an entire book about what a dangerous liar the president is. “I don’t think he’s fit for office,” Bolton says. 

 

“Trump is a political David Koresh.” 

Billy Piper, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader McConnell, likens the lame duck president to the religious cult leader who died with 75 followers in a fiery cataclysm at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in 1993. “Trump is a political David Koresh,” Piper says.

 

January 9: We already knew that Trump had called top Georgia election officials and pressed them to find 11,780 votes. Now we learn he put in a call to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. We’re not talking the “tip line,” either. What Trump asked the lead investigator in charge of running down rumors of election irregularities, was to “find the fraud.” If she did, Trump promised, she would be “a national hero.”

 

Gen. Colin Powell says he can no longer consider himself a Republican in the wake of the attack on Capitol Hill. 

 

January 12: Secretary of State Pompeo has a trip planned to Europe to talk with allies. Luxembourg announces it no longer wants to meet. Jean Asselborn, Minister of Foreign Affairs, is candid in a way that diplomats rarely are. In a radio interview he calls Trump a a “political pyromaniac.” 

Pompeo still has a meeting scheduled in Brussels, with representatives of the European Union. A diplomatic source tells reporters that EU officials are “embarrassed” to be meeting with the Secretary of State, who has stood by Trump so blindly, for so long. They also cancel the meeting. 

 

January 13: On a vote of 232 to 197, with nine Republicans and one former Republican voting in favor, and four abstaining, Lame Duck Don gets impeached a second time. Rep. Liz Cheney, third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, who voted to impeach, issues a blistering statement. “Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks,” she says, in reference to the Capitol Hill attack,  “but what we know now is enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.” 

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran, also votes to impeach. “There is no doubt in my mind that the President of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this [January 6] insurrection.”  If these actions, “the Article II branch inciting a deadly insurrection against the Article I branch [in the Constitution] – are not worthy of impeachment, then what is an impeachable offense?”

Rep. John Katko of New York is clear: “It cannot be ignored that President Trump encouraged this insurrection.” 

Rep. Pete Meijer, 33, of Michigan, becomes the target of death threats when he is the only freshman in his party to vote to impeach Donald John Trump. He explains to reporters that one fellow Republican told him that he or she wanted to vote to uphold Biden’s electoral win. Concern “about the safety of that individual’s family” dissuaded him or her from taking the risk. “That is where the rhetoric has brought us,” Meijer says. “That is the degree of fear that’s been created.” 

(We won’t learn until November 2023, but Meijer, now intent on running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, says he will back Trump in 2024. Which tells you a great deal about the current state of the GOP.) 

With right-wing groups still threatening violence if the Biden inauguration proceeds, 25,000 U.S. troops are positioned in Washington D.C. to keep the peace. 

Troops in the Capitol, preparing for the Biden inauguration.

 

Not “the American way.” 

During debate on the Articles of Impeachment, Rep. Matt Gaetz rises to insist that the rioters on January 6 were tricked into smashing up the Capitol by leftist plants in the mob. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy shoots down that lie almost as soon as it spills from Gaetz’s lips. He does not support an impeachment charge, he says, but his explanation is in no way a defense of the president. Trump, he says, bears “responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” 

“Some say the riots were caused by antifa. There is absolutely no evidence of that,” McCarthy added. 

“Conservatives should be the first to say so.” 

McCarthy notes that it is not “the American way” to contest a fairly decided election. “Let’s be clear, Joe Biden will be sworn in as president of the United States in one week because he won the election.” 

(McCarthy will later forget that he said any of this.) 

 

And if you might have forgotten, we know that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, visited Trump in the Oval office on December 15, 2020. He was there to urge his God-chosen leader to rise up. He, like General Michael T. Flynn, and the worst of Trump’s other advisors, wanted the president to declare martial law. 

So, let’s be precise. If Lindell had had his way, we’d all be in for a grand surprise on January 20, 2021. Trump would give the order. Those 25,000 troops on guard in D.C., to block a repeat of January 6, would turn their guns on Joe and Kamala and Mike Pence and the rest. 

Martial Law. 

Trump would remain in power.

 

Lindell enters the White House.

Tuberville: Ignoring the Twentieth Amendment might be cool. 

January 15: Newly minted U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn football coach, has a new plan for keeping Trump in office. He suggests we lower the political temperature by delaying Mr. Biden’s inauguration until the COVID-19 crisis abates. “We probably could have had a swearing-in and inauguration later after we got this virus behind us a little bit,” Coach Senator tells baffled reporters.  

Tuberville ignores the fact that the Twentieth Amendment sets January 20 as the day, and noon as the time, for a president to be sworn in. This somehow escapes Coach Senator’s feeble intellectual grasp.

 

FUN FACT: Tuberville is later asked by a reporter to name the three branches of government. He’s a member of one, so you figure he only needs two more. He gives it his best: “Executive, the Post Office, and the Trump family.” 

Ha, ha. I’m joking. But he really does blow it. “You know, the House, the Senate, and the executive,” he guesses. 

(Correct answer: legislative, executive, judicial.) 

 

With Trump’s time in office dwindling to a few final hours, we continue to learn about machinations behind the scenes. In a tense phone call prior to the January 6 certification of the electoral vote, the president chastised Vice President Pence. Two people briefed on the call say that Pence told his boss he had no power to stop the vote, nor any inclination to ignore the Constitution. 

 “You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Trump raged, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.” 

Having been pressed relentlessly for days, Pence asked his lawyers to consult with J. Michael Luttig, “a former appeals court judge revered by conservatives” and other constitutional scholars. Judge Luttig made it clear there was no constitutional path the vice president could follow to void electoral votes. 

Reached for comment later, the judge told reporters it had been “the highest honor of my life” to play a role in preserving the U.S. Constitution. 

 

“We’re very lucky that the vice president isn’t a maniac.” 

Joe Grogan, Trump’s former domestic policy adviser, sums up the situation. “We’re very lucky that the vice president isn’t a maniac.” 

In the land of cacti and triple-digit temperatures, Arizona Republicans begin fighting among themselves. Trump loyalists, like GOP Party Chair Kelli Ward, want to censure the governor, for not overturning the 2020 vote. As Politico reports, reasonable members of the GOP are not amused. “The craziness from the state Republican Party … it’s pretty embarrassing,” says Kirk Adams, a former Republican state House speaker and former chief of staff to [Gov. Doug] Ducey. “We have been fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and stolen election rhetoric and, really, QAnon theories from the state Republican Party since before the election, but certainly after.” 

We won’t know until September 2021, but a last-ditch recount in Maricopa County, ordered by Ward and other diehard Trump fans, and conducted by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist named Doug Logan, wraps up its work. Joe Biden won the state by winning Maricopa by a large margin. So Logan and his “Cyber Ninjas” team count and weigh and fricassee ballots, looking for fraud. Biden gains ninety-nine votes. 

Trump loses 261. 

(If any Trump fan can find a recount that dramatically helped Trump, let me know.) 

Email me at vilejjv@yahoo.com. 

 

Good Republicans – and we should remember there are many – continue to come to grips with what has happened under Trump’s rule. Former GOP Congressman Evan McMullin tweets: 

Rand Paul warns that if Senate Republicans convict Trump, a third of the party will break off. So be it. The GOP faces an inescapable choice between a future of extremism, treachery and losses, or of truth, principle and leadership. Both paths are difficult, but only one is good.

 

Rep. Tom Rice, one of nine House Republicans to vote to impeach the president, releases a statement explaining his vote. 

Under the strict definition of the law, I don’t know if the President’s speech last Wednesday morning amounted to incitement of a riot, but any reasonable person could see the potential for violence.

 

Once the violence began, when the Capitol was under siege, when the Capitol Police were being beaten and killed, and when the Vice President and the Congress were being locked down, the President was watching and tweeted about the Vice President’s lack of courage.

 

…It is only by the grace of God and the blood of the Capitol Police that the death toll was not much, much higher.

 

…I have backed this President through thick and thin for four years. I campaigned for him and voted for him twice. But this utter failure is inexcusable. 

 

January 19: With one day remaining in the presidency of Donald Trump, you might imagine that serious evidence of widespread election fraud would have been uncovered – in Georgia, for sure. 

Nope. Nothing, really. 

Bobby Christine, Acting U.S. District Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, a recent Trump appointee, has announced that his office will not pursue two challenges to election results filed by Trump’s legal team. “I can tell you I closed the two most – I don’t know, I guess you’d call them high profile or the two most pressing election issues this office has,” he explains to staff, some Zooming the meeting, in a recording obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 

“I said I believe, as many of the people around the table believed,” Christine is heard saying, “there’s just nothing to them.” 

We know his former boss, Byung J. “BJay” Pak, also a Trump appointee, was forced to resign just before the Georgia senate runoff election. Pak’s sin? He failed to find election fraud that wasn’t to be found.  

 

January 20, 2021: Good riddance, Donald J. Trump! 

Zero days left. 

At noon Joe Biden takes office as President of the United States. QAnon hearts are breaking, as reality strikes twelve times. 

During the inauguration, reporters for HuffPost follow traffic on social media sites favored by QAnon believers. As the moment for the swearing in of Joseph R. Biden Jr. approaches they know he is going to be stopped! The mysterious “Q” has promised. Excitement grows, with several fervent believers predicting we are about to see “National Popcorn Day,” all over again. 

(The real National Popcorn Day is January 19.)

 

With the final minutes until the swearing in ticking away, one believer comments on social media, “WELCOME TO THE GRAND FINALE!!!” 

“Anyone else wanna puke with excitement?!?!?!” says another. 

“When do the arrests start??” asks a third, quizzically. 

(12:00 noon: Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes the oath of office.)

 

“I can’t stop crying. Fuck. Why?” asks a QAnon disciple. 

“It’s over,” another agrees. 

(You would hope.)            

Mr. Biden takes office.