Sedition

President Donald J. Trump speaking at his "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington D.C., January 6, 2021.

On January 6, 2021, Donald J. Trump, the sitting President of the United States, incited a riot that resulted in the storming of the U.S. Capital, and the successful breaching of its defenses by domestic terrorists, led by a “huge contingent of Proud Boys.” This occurred as the Congress, with Vice-President Pence presiding, was counting the 2020 Electoral College votes.

This count was to be a ceremonial function celebrating America’s democratic institution of free and fair elections, as Congress has no power to change the vote of the electors chosen by the 50 states. Joe Biden had amassed 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.

Trump told a crowd of raucous supporters on the Ellipse just south of the White House, “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical Democrats.”

Trump went on to reiterate his evidence-free charges of fraud, made erroneous statements about how elections were run in swing states “by Democrats," and in a rambling aside bragged about his “history-making” achievements, berated the Media’s corruption, asked where Hunter Biden was, berated Georgia Governor Brian Kemp for not overturning the Georgia result, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, and commended Rudy Giuliani as a “real fighter.”

Trump concluded by exhorting his followers, “We will never give up. We will never concede. It will never happen…" Pointing at the crowd with his black-gloved hand he said, "We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And I’ll be with you…because you'll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

And they did as the President asked them. They marched to the Capital, and stormed the Capital, and desecrated the Capital. People died.

Trump did not go with them. He was driven back to the White House where he watched what he had wrought on television.

The U.S. Capital, January 6, 2021

 

Overcoming the Trump Presidency Has Taken an Enormous Toll

 

I wrote a blog post in June of 2016, leading up to the Presidential Election, assessing how Donald J. Trump became the Republican candidate for President. The fact that he was elected was a shock to me -- maybe it shouldn't have been -- and it made me reassess my assumption about the character of the American people. Fundamentally, I concluded that there was no monolithic "American people," no defined American culture [outside of fast food], and no "pledge of allegiance" to equality or democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville be damned.

Trump's term in office has served as an emetic, causing the vomiting up of every despicable element of the American underbelly, including white supremacists -- one side of the "very fine people" in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

These disaffected, under-educated, previously disorganized rabble formed an unholy alliance with the reliable single-issue voters, such as the evangelicals, whose only focus was abortion, and who ignored the homeless, the children in cages, and the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

They joined arms with "freedom-loving" militias from Oregon to Michigan, from “sea to shining sea.” And to the gun-rights fanatics, who failed to see in the blood-soaked schools, dance floors, festivals, football games, and streets of America any reason to limit access to lethal firearms.

Unable to divine connective tissue for their targeted misanthropy, some of the more suggestive elements of Trump’s followers found, buried within the "Deep State," an oracle, Q -- and Qanon was formed. Its conspiracy theories became so influential, and so disruptive, that even Facebook finally imposed restrictions. Still, a Qanon supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, won the Republican primary for Georgia's 14th Congressional District. President Trump congratulated Greene and called her “a real winner.” The FBI has labeled Qanon as a potential domestic terrorism threat.

 

And here we are, awaiting the results of the 2020 Election, in which Donald Trump, after having exhibited all the worst behaviors we had anticipated, and more, has so far amassed some 70 million votes, 7 million more than his 2016 total, and counting. Joe Biden, with over 74 million votes, has already broken Barack Obama's record vote total, and the margin with which Hillary Clinton exceeded Trump's 2016 popular vote, and yet he clings to a razor thin lead in states he needed to win the electoral college.

Trump still had a narrow path to victory, but his demands to stop counting votes [but only in states where he is ahead] are being dismissed, leaving him to fall back on law suits, which are also being dismissed. His hope to have the Supreme Court, which, with Mitch McConnell's help, he has succeeded in moving to a six to three conservative majority, seems Sisyphean.

In the end, Joe Biden won the battle for the American Presidency, but in a sense it is a Pyrrhic victory. The fight to overcome the Trump Presidency has taken an enormous toll on the vision of America as somehow “exceptional,” as somehow worthy to lead the world towards freedom and justice, worthy of emulation — an America, her good “crowned with brotherhood.”

How long will it take us to reclaim that lofty vision?

I Don't Have the Words

My wife and I are both Air Force veterans. We met and married at Bitburg, Germany, while assigned to the 36th TFW. I made the Air Force a career. My wife, an Air Force nurse, helped save my life, then raised our two boys.

I volunteered for Vietnam after my assignment to Bitburg. I did so because I had friends, guys like myself in their early twenties, putting their lives on the line to serve their country. News was coming back to us that some were KIA or MIA. I felt a need to serve, as they had, and to honor them in doing so.

I had one particularly good friend — let’s call him ‘Dan’— who was shot down and spent 6 years in the “Hanoi Hilton.” When the war was over, he transited Hawaii, where I was stationed at PACAF HQ, and spent an evening with us. We had music playing. He asked me to turn it off. He’d been beaten so often and so severely that what we heard as music was just a cacophony of noise to him.

As it turned out, the Air Force had other plans for me, and I didn’t end up going to Vietnam. I was afforded the opportunity to go back to college for an advanced education, and retired from the Air Force twenty years later with a PhD, and without the lining around my heart, which had been stripped during my assignment at Bitburg. I was probably the first Air Force officer cleared for worldwide duty after undergoing such a procedure.

I was lucky. So many of my generation weren’t. They gave the “last full measure of devotion” to their country — those who died, and those who live afterward with the scars of their service forever etched in their psyche.

I haven’t the words to express my emotions when hearing of Donald Trump’s disdain for our military, now an all-volunteer force. He will never understand, “what was in it for them,” because for him sacrifice is a sucker’s bet, and my friend Dan was a “loser,” because like John McCain, he got shot down.

I simply don’t have the words. 

John McCain, August 29, 1936 – August 25, 2018