Just open fire on Fort Sumter and be done with it

This evening NPR’s first story was about the nasty guy on the phone for an hour with Brad Raffensperger, the GOP Secretary of State for Georgia. The Washington Post got a recording of the call. Hunter of Daily Kos has the story in print. Raffensperger has already handled a great deal from the nasty guy – the Georgia presidential election was counted three times. The nasty guy asked Raffensperger to announce he had “recalculated” the election results and found another 11,780 votes for the nasty guy. Over the call the nasty guy pleaded, berated, flattered, begged, and threatened to get those votes. Hunter concluded:

Though Trump's conversation would appear to constitute a criminal act, lawyer Cleta Mitchell and chief of staff Mark Meadows were also on the line; neither voiced objections to Trump’s demands. Asking that an election be fraudulently overturned is unquestionably a violation of Trump's oath of office and an impeachable act. Trump and his top advisers have crossed every line: endorsing fraud, encouraging sedition, and demanding the toppling of government. It is unforgivable, and every Republican who stands with him is betraying this nation.

George Conway of WaPo tweeted:

This tape just shows that he's completely delusional.

Leah McElrath responded:

To the contrary, @gtconway3d. If anything, Trump is remarkably lucid and engaging in tactics of coercion he has likely practiced for decades. He presents his asks clearly (say this:___; find this:___) and covertly and overtly threatens retribution for noncompliance.

In another thread McElrath responded to a few people, and some tweets include sections of the tape.

Now imagine the calls we *don’t* know about. Seriously. Imagine the worst you can. Domestic and foreign. Now know your imagination cannot possibly keep up with the ruthless and unscrupulous nature of his mind and actions. For the record, I do NOT think Trump is delusional here. I think he is providing a narrative he wants the Georgia Secretary of State to adopt—and doing so in a coercive context. “There’s nothing wrong with saying you recalculated...” “The people of Georgia are angry...” (Basically: Here’s what I need you to say. Because, you know, it’s a nice life you have there. It’d be a shame is something happened to it.)

Lisa Simpson replied to McElrath:

Leah nails this IMO. He was by my read breathtakingly lucid in the parts I heard from that call. It's just that most people have never before seen such commitment to the grift. He knew exactly where to draw the line, from decades of experience suborning fraud.

Dan Rather tweeted:

The audio of Trump with the Georgia secretary of state. Wow. It’s like telling the Nixon tapes to “hold my beer.”

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer tweeted:

Charge Trump with felony election tampering. He made a credible threat against a public official to change a result. I'm totally serious.

Erik Wasson, the Congressional reporter for Bloomberg News, tweeted:

TRUMP CALL: @AOC tells us “I absolutely think it's an impeachable offense and if it was up to me, there would be articles on the floor, quite quickly”

Dr. Emptywheel tweeted:

As you talk about The Tape, remember that Raffensperger and a slew of other GA officials are getting death threats on top of this.

Larry Charles tweeted:

And despite the evidence we hear, like this tape and often see with our own eyes there seems to be no legal entity of any political stripe willing to take Trump down. In the future, we will be asking how we enabled a traitor to destroy the country.

Yesterday I wrote about Rep Louie Gohmert’s call to violence during the Electoral College certification on Wednesday. Mark Sumner of Kos also described the incident, beginning with:

At this point, Republicans might as well just open fire on Fort Sumter and be done with it. That’s the only way they could show more evidence of their “patriotism” and love for the Constitution. The only question is: Who’s going to be first? The whole right-of-center portion of the American political spectrum has fallen into a system where the selective pressure is all about being the most outrageous, the most extreme, the most willing to trample all the meaning of the American system into the mud while waving the symbols of that system overhead.

Hunter reported Sen. Ted Cruz has joined the senators planning to object to the EC certification. He was on Fox News, the only people he would explain he reasoning too, but offered no evidence. Hunter said it is another attempt to steal the anti-elections limelight to best portray himself as the one to carry the nasty guy mantle in 2024. Cruz, Gohmert, and Sen. Josh Hawley are each trying to portray his own effort to overturn the election is the right one and the other guys won’t be effective. Hunter concluded:

That may be the best single-line version of how we currently find ourselves in an aspirational coup. A party now without morals or merit scuttles, person-by-person, to be the most trusted ally of a madman, all fighting over who can assist his delusions most ably while brushing aside whatever catastrophic damage results. Trump has now betrayed his nation countless times. He may have a full majority of his party behind him as he attempts to nullify democracy itself.

Meteor Blades, in his night owl column for Kos had a good quote of the day:

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. ~~William E. Vaughan

And tweet of the day, this one from David Freedlander of Politio Magazine:

It’s been a really short trip from “We won’t vote to confirm the other sides judges” to “We won’t vote to confirm the other sides cabinet” to “We won’t vote to confirm the other sides election victory”

One of the quotes I included yesterday was “It has one of this country’s two major political parties firmly in its grasp.” One can easily think the GOP is driving the current mess. So I spent time today thinking about the forces driving the situation. I’ll summarize the highlights for you. America has long had three basic strands of supremacy. The first is racism – slavery came to this land about the time the first white settlers arrived. See the 1619 project. Second is Christian supremacy – though the Puritans left religious persecution in Europe, they established their own here. See the founding of Rhode Island. Third is Capitalist Supremacy – the captains of industry believed they had the right to oppress their workers and the rest of society. See the Robber Barons of the late 19th Century. Under Franklin Roosevelt workers gained rights. They formed unions to protect their interests. In the 1950s and 1960s the civil rights protests ended outright racism, though that racism persisted in more subtle ways. Into the 1950s Christianity was the de facto religion of the government, then secular people and those of other religions resisted, prompting the Supreme Court to ban official prayer in schools. Then the supremacy efforts returned. In the 1960s Richard Nixon used the Southern Strategy to win the presidency. The racism wasn’t blatant, more like dog whistles, but very much still there. Within a few decades the South switched from Democrat to Republican. In 1971 Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum on how corporations could reassert their dominance. It was so highly regarded by the business community that Powell was offered a seat on the Supreme Court. I found the text of the memo online (Greenpeace has it) and scanned it. Many of the things Powell recommended the business community is still doing to great effect (for them) fifty years later. The important thing Powell called for was to build up conservative infrastructure so that business could more effectively lobby Congress and state legislatures. Powell also listed lobbying talking points that are still getting used, such as the stockholder is important too (which has become the stockholder is more important than the worker). They also pushed the idea that a threat to free enterprise is a threat to individual freedom. It’s a great line but I’ve seen what supremacy of the enterprise has done to the freedom of workers. Though workers wages began to stagnate shortly after the Powell Memo came out the Reagan tax cuts in 1981 meant corporate titans had less of a reason to share their profits with workers. In the 1960s the Republican Party had been captured by racists. By 1992 the conservative church had captured them as well. The GOP convention of that year spoke approvingly of an anti-LGBT measure. At that point they lost my vote. By 1994 the corporate world had captured the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich, who took over as Speaker of the House, produced his Contract with America. He changed House committee assignments to be based on party loyalty (based on fundraising) rather than seniority. Both showed who was driving his agenda. By the end of the Bush II era the corporate world had also captured the Supreme Court, which was sealed this past October. It had already opened the floodgates of corporate spending in elections. The GOP has been captured by racists, Christian supremacists, and corporate supremacists. None of these people like democracy. They’ve been patiently building to this moment. They now have racist militias ready to supply the firepower in hopes of taking over for good.