How Republicans think about January 6

Donald Trump attempted to subvert the 2020 election to retain power. It was a failed coup d'état.

Republicans see it differently. They don't think they are supporting a modern-day Benedict Arnold. They think Trump is being picked on for nothing.

This week Special Counsel Jack Smith outlined Trump's crimes in his revised indictment. Trump arranged for fake electors to sign false affidavits of election. He pressured Pence to use those ballots to justify discarding legitimate votes for Biden. He summoned a crowd to the Capitol. He watched a demonstration turn violent against members of Congress. He watched the violence on Fox News and did nothing. Told that Pence was in danger from the rioters, Trump told the aide, "So what?"

So how do Republicans of good character continue to support Trump? These are people who earnestly say the Pledge of Allegiance. These are generally law-abiding people. So how is what Trump did acceptable?

They don't think Trump did anything wrong. They think he was just asking questions. They think he didn't do anything different from what Democrats did in questioning the 2000 vote in Florida or the 2004 vote in Ohio. He just filed and lost some 60 lawsuits, but the court results mean nothing. The courts didn't prove the election was fair, only that the Trump campaign did not provide evidence of fraud. Lack of evidence doesn't prove the election was legitimate. 

What about the calls to Georgia's Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp and Arizona's Doug Ducey, urging them to reverse the vote in those states. Were those okay? Yes. He was just asking questions. Besides, these Republicans were in on the steal.

What about Trump's election security chief, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs? He said the election was correctly run. Shouldn't Trump have paid some attention to him? No. He turned out to be just another anti-Trump RINO.

What about Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr, who told Trump that Biden won the election? Same thing; he's a backstabber.

What about the people he summoned to the January 6 rally and then sent to the Capitol to intimidate Pence? Was that okay? Yes. Trump was just exercising his right to freedom of speech. The people who rioted were on their own. Trump used the word "peacefully" once in telling them to go to the Capitol, which absolves him of liability. 

Should Trump have tried to stop rioters during the hours they were attacking the Capitol? He had no obligation to do that. Trump realized those patriots felt strongly about the election. Besides, Democratic politicians in Seattle and Portland didn't stop violence in George Floyd protests, so it is a double standard to say Trump should have done more. 

What about Trump's plan to substitute fake electors and void the election? The electors thought they maybe won their states, or should have won them, so they signed that they were "duly elected" with a clear conscience. They were just giving Pence an option. 

Bottom line: Trump did nothing wrong. If it had really been a coup d'état, it would have worked. Rioters would have been armed.The Secret Service would have succeeded in getting Pence in the car and away from the Capitol so that the elderly Senator Charles Grassley (R -IA, who would preside over the Senate at that point instead of Pence) could have thrown the election to Trump. As JD Vance said in the VP debate, on January 20 Biden took office, so what's all the fuss? 

Republicans think the prosecution of Trump is a slap in the face of those who believe Trump should have won the election, and maybe did. "Illegals" may have voted. Black-majority counties in swing states -- Detroit's Wayne County and Atlanta's Fulton County -- may have had shenanigans. That happens in places like that. Maybe there is no proof, but there is no way in heck that a feeble old man like Biden could have legitimately received seven million more votes than a great president like Trump. 

Trump did nothing wrong. 

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Heads up to Democrats: If Harris loses, here is why.

Kamala Harris was composed, professional, and fully presidential when she appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes.

Journalist Bill Whitaker asked the right questions.

The problem for Harris is that the questions he asked are the ones on a lot of people's minds.

Here is the two-minute exchange, time well spent to watch Harris explain, correctly, that Trump tried the sabotage addressing the border problem. But Whitaker got to the real problem: Why did you let the problem fester for three years?

Click Here

Here is some of the transcript:

Bill Whitaker: But I've been covering the border for-- for years. And so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration.

Vice President Kamala Harris: Correct. Correct.

Bill Whitaker: But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?

Vice President Kamala Harris: It's a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions. 

Bill Whitaker: What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?

Vice President Kamala Harris: I think-- the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, okay? But the--

Bill Whitaker: But the numbers did quadruple under your-

Vice President Kamala Harris: And the numbers today--

Bill Whitaker: --under your watch--

Vice President Kamala Harris: --because of what we have done-- we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half. We have cut the-- 

Bill Whitaker: But should you have done that--

Vice President Kamala Harris: --flow of fentanyl--

Bill Whitaker: --should you have done that. . .?

Good Harris "vibes" and Democrats' relief that a too-old Biden passed the torch does not make a significant policy problem go away. Biden let an immigration problem fester. Whitaker wouldn't let the subject drop because it exhausted not only the patience of a great many Americans, but his own. The Biden administration did not take visible action on the southern border until Florida and Texas governors weaponized the problem by busing migrants to blue-state cities. Republicans have a false, cynical, but effective explanations for the Biden policy failure. They claim that those "illegals" are somehow allowed to vote, and this is a way Democrats to rig elections. Or it was on-purpose preference for dark-skinned immigrants over the interests of White people who have to try to manage crowds of poor, homeless immigrants. Or it is another iteration of the "woke" double standard, in which illegal disorder by people in the Democratic tribe, be it in BLM protests or immigrants gaming the asylum system, is OK, but disorder by Whites, at January 6 for example, is prosecuted.

Meanwhile, Trump and Vance toss up racist tropes: criminals, rapists, murderers, pet-eaters, and as of yesterday, "bad genes." It is the good us against the bad them.

Democrats handled the immigration issue poorly. Harris is scrambling to get in front of the problem, but she is late to the game and Whitaker called her on it. Democrats wonder with dismay and amazement that so many voters seem to be willing to accept Trump-style crudeness, illegality, violence, and authoritarian language and policies. Trump sounds like a fascist, Democrats tell me, and yet voters accept that. Incredible! How can that possibly be?

David Frum warned about this problem in The Atlantic back in 2019 and explained it in one sentence:

"If liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will."

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My next car won't be a Tesla

Elon Musk ruined the Tesla brand for me. 

Two years ago Teslas were cool. Now they aren't.

Bumper strips available to put on a Tesla: 

Teslas used to be a mix of luxury, innovation, super-high performance, safety, environmental sensibility, and leading-edge technology. I knew that they were selling like hotcakes in Silicon Valley. I heard about Teslas from enthusiastic friends who told me they nearly drove themselves and that the company kept sending improvements to the navigation in free downloads. There was buzz. I test-drove one and loved it. 

I would have bought one, but I liked my current car, a Toyota Avalon hybrid too much. I was waiting for something -- anything -- to give me an excuse to sell it and trade up.  I considered a Tesla moving "up."

An added bonus was that Republicans were badmouthing electric vehicles. People like Ted Cruz were saying that gas-guzzling polluting cars were the All-American way and that electric vehicles were just another California affectation, like hot yoga, vegan diets, and zero-emission goals. If Cruz hated them, they must be good. Trump promised to end the green energy subsidies for EVs inside Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Trump was the drill, baby, drill candidate, the one who said wind turbines cause cancer and smashed birds. Trump's blanket condemnation of EVs was another plus for me.

Then things started to go wrong in the brand ideas that surrounded Tesla.

First Elon Musk bought Twitter. It was always a raw slugfest site, but after Musk Twitter got worse. It moved politically right and it wasn't subtle. Somehow the algorithms that shape my feed makes it so about 60 percent of what I get fed is anti-immigrant, MAGA tweets and re-tweets. It became Fox or Newsmax. 

California, as always for Oregon, is the leading indicator of West Coast trends. New car registrations for Teslas in California fell for three consecutive quarters, and the drop-off is accelerating, falling another 24 percent between April and June 2024. Tesla's share of the market is dropping; Rivian's is up.

The New York Times

Elon Musk, the face of the Tesla brand, isn't being subtle. He doesn't give Tesla-ready buyers like me a way to avert our eyes. He was literally jumping up and down on the stage with Trump Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk said that "Trump must win to preserve the Constitution." If Democrats win, he said, "this will be the last election." This morning my X home button brought me directly to an Elon Musk post offering me $47 for each person in a swing state that I refer to him and who signs a petition he sponsors.

Trump has trained Republicans to dislike EVs generally. Musk is training Democrats to avoid Teslas, the brand. It is lose-lose.

The vehicles themselves -- stripped of their brand associations, if such a thing is possible for an automobile -- may sell themselves. Friends who own them say they are great cars--and then they grimace about the Elon Musk taint, as they assure me they bought before Musk went all-MAGA. Independent voters -- frequently a proxy for people who are simply less engaged -- may be happy to drive Teslas. 

But cars are now, and have always been, statements about the owner. There is, in effect, a Trump or MAGA bumper strip attached to every Tesla. It is like a watermark, always there in the background attached to the brand. It isn’t something I could explain away.

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Easy Sunday: Lord of the Flies

     "History teaches us again and again that democracies can fall, they fall to populists, they fall to strongmen, strongmen who beguile their fellow citizens with conspiracy theories and false emergencies."
          Liz Cheney, speaking in Wisconsin this week

I cited these words of Liz Cheney just two days ago, on Friday.

The subject of that post, titled A transformative act of violence, was the appeal of strongman government led by a charismatic leader who promises to get things done without the complications, delays, and "minority rights" impediments of a democracy. Power isn't awarded gently and gracefully unless people consent to that. It can also be seized, because a populist leader demands it and isn't stopped.

Our Constitution was not designed to be efficient. It was designed to allow a rough consensus within a large and complicated nation, through rights assigned to states and national power divided among branches of government. Trump and his supporters spoke last night in Butler, Pennsylvania about Trump's divine anointment. Trump said he "took a bullet" for us, and survived thanks to God's watchful hand. Friday's post observed that Trump was leaning into the necessity of cruel, decisive strongman government. Those people who sought and chased a recalcitrant Mike Pence were patriots, Trump says. He says we need to be "real rough, nasty" to stop crime. He claims the mandate of Heaven and the support of a majority of Americans. It is a fight, he said, between good and evil, and he represents good.

Democracies and constitutional government are fragile. Democracies with the peaceful transition of power are not the equilibrium state of human organization. A book many of us read in high school, Lord of the Flies, explored what happens when a small group of boys are isolated and forced to organize themselves. They did not establish a constitutional democracy. Gerald Murphy taught high school English in California. He describes an assignment he gave his students.  

Gerald Murphy

Guest Post by Gerald Murphy

Lord of the Flies Revisited

The first high school English class I taught had “Lord of the Flies” as required reading. I thought it would be nice for my students to think about how they would behave if they were somehow stranded on an uninhabited island, an island with lots of fruit trees and wild pigs to capture and eat. What would they do for food, shelter, and what sort of a government would they set up?

They came up with a society not unlike Thomas More’s “Utopia,” including communal property and no class distinctions. They thought it would be doable if the work was shared and food distributed equitably.

It could be a little paradise on Earth.

One cynical student, however, brought up the problem of crime. What if someone refused to go along with the majority? What if someone steals, or fights, or destroys the harmony by spreading vicious lies? What’s to be done with them?

The answer came quickly: Build a prison and keep them there until they learned to cooperate.

And if they still won’t obey the majority? Some students suggested torture. Others thought the "bad" people should be exiled to another island. And some proposed execution for the ne’er-do-wells to keep peace and harmony permanent.

In short, it didn’t take my students long to come up with some of the same problems that bedeviled the kids in the novel. You can develop acceptable norms for behavior in any society, but there is always a snake in the tree whispering treacherous thoughts, a jealous Cain willing to knock off his peaceful brother, and a Jack able to convince a sizable group that the way forward requires a strong leader who will eliminate the clumsy and inefficient ways of democratic leaders to give us a shortcut to Utopia. We just need to trust the Dear Leader. And like Jack in the novel, he may not be gentle and kind, but at least he gets things done.

In times like this, we need a man of action to lead us, to protect us. Why not the Dear Leader?

I hear he’s available.

 

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Medford Council approves Fire Station 15

Non-events are news, too.

Simple operations of local government continue. The roads stay paved. Sewer systems work. Fire stations get upgraded.

Thursday night the Medford City Council approved an $8.4 million item to replace Fire Station 15. 

That's it. That's the news.

Fire Station 15 in Medford is past the age of its useful life. It is too small -- about a third the size of the next-smallest station. It has only one bay for fire equipment, and it is too small to handle a ladder truck. That matters because the station services some multi-story apartment houses. The single bay and small living space does not leave room for the EMTs and para-medics who are part of most emergency responses. About 80 percent of emergency calls are medical related or inquiries about something strange and troubling to the caller. The caller dials 911. About 20 percent are reports of smoke and suspected fire.

Medford mayoral candidate Curt Ankerberg wrote a letter to the Medford City Council claiming he could rehabilitate the fire station for $2 million and that the Council members were bumbling idiots, dumbasses, that they lacked talent, took bribes, and were on the take while building "shitty projects." The centerpiece evidence for his claim was that the city made "a NO-BID contract." 

Two problems: The building could not be re-built and it was not a no-bid contract. 

The contract went through the normal public bidding process and generated four bids, from Outlier Construction, Adroit Construction, S + B James Construction, and Vitus Construction. Outlier Construction had the low bid, and city staff concluded they had the personnel and experience to do the project. The contract was approved by the Council, six-zero. 

Claims like Ankerberg's can take wing on social media. "Crooked city government" is sharable, re-tweet-able, and interesting to contemplate. The wild, obscene claims of a conspiracy-minded provocateur draw attention because they are nasty and extreme. Ankerberg is a local version of Trump. Some people want to believe Ankerberg. Some people want to believe Trump's claims about Obama's birthplace, about 2020 election fraud, and about Haitian immigrants eating your dogs and cats. Flamboyant lies circulate faster than the ho-hum operation of government doing what it should be doing. 

Why am I bothering to write such a boring, nothing-burger post? Because it is a caution to people "doing their own research" by listening to provocateurs, and to people who presume that everything that government does is stupid, ineffective, or corrupt. That's not true. 

The stoplights cycle. The toilets flush and the waste disappears. The roads move traffic. And when you dial 911, people show up.

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A transformative act of violence

There is something deeply satisfying about resolving a complicated problem with a simple, quick act.

Often it is an act of violence.

This morning I watched an MSNBC host wonder aloud how a person like Trump -- guilty of sexual crimes, financial fraud, and openly proud of having attempted to thwart the peaceful transfer of power -- could still be a contender for the highest office. One answer is that people like what he says he will accomplish, and they don't care much how he does it. He says he will end crime, stop illegal immigration, end inflation, bring jobs back to America, stop wars in Ukraine and Israel, make health care available and cheap, and make women happy. What's not to like?

He will do it with a mix of violence, intimidation, and executive orders. 

Last night in Wisconsin Liz Cheney warned of "strongman" tyranny:

"Vance has said repeatedly that . . . he would have thrown out the votes of the people of Wisconsin because he didn't like the way you voted. That is tyranny and that is disqualifying. History teaches us again and again that democracies can fall, they fall to populists, they fall to strongmen, strongmen who beguile their fellow citizens with conspiracy theories and false emergencies.

Trump does not hide from strongman government. He doesn't present it as tyranny. He presents it as solving problems. He understands the appeal of transformative acts of violence. The democratic process is slow and full of choke points. Kamala Harris praises "democracy," but the democratic process in America is a mixed blessing. Process isn't fast and it gets compromised. It isn't clear and decisive. It isn't "masculine."

Polls show a dramatic gender gap in the presidential election. Trump wins a solid majority of the votes of men. Men -- indeed male mammals generally -- are typically more aggressive, more prone to violence against other species and against one another. People can attribute it to DNA, to testosterone, to acculturation. People can argue about whether it is inevitable and enduring, or whether it is disappearing as our species becomes more urbanized and domesticated. Then they can argue about whether its disappearance is good or a disaster. 

That debate is going on, as Republican senators grow beards, write books about manliness, and condemn gender transition. Harris is inevitably thrust into that fight. She presents a nuanced position. She says she has a gun and she praised our military for being "lethal." That is masculine. But she is a woman and she advocates for abortion rights. That's feminine. Yet the process she carried out as a District Attorney and Attorney General was prosecuting crimes. That's masculine. Yet, she respects the rights of immigrant asylum-seekers and condemns cruelty. That's feminine again. It's complicated.

Trump is simple and clear. He leans into being cruel, decisive, dominating, strong, and fearless. He is a Viking raider. He is General Sherman. He is Alexander the Great. He leads Christian solders marching as to war. He is masculine. He will smite and defeat the enemy. He will grab women, and they will let him do it.

Donald Trump in Erie, Pennsylvania this week praised transformative violence: 

"What the hell is going on? See, we have to let the police do their job [crowd cheers]. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough [crowd cheers louder]. . . . You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day, one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it'll [shoplifting] end immediately.

Trump is appealing to a mix of biology and culture. Whether it is the Trojan Horse, Hiroshima, the cavalry riding into town, or the Lone Ranger's silver bullet, violence transforms. It ends the war or solves the problem. The situation just needs a strong leader who will get things done. This idea is a time bomb for democracy that waited for the right moment and the right catalyst.

Trump's flagrant disregard for rules and constraints isn't a bug. It's a feature. 

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Make every state a battleground state

     "Isn't it crazy that the future of our country will be decided by 50,000 un-engaged low-information voters in Pennsylvania?"
          A man in a diner in Massachusetts (not a swing state)

No wonder people feel frustrated about politics. 

I favor a system where every vote matters. I favor a popular vote for president.

We all know the battleground states. These were the 2020 states. The same states are battlegrounds in 2024.

A popular election would mean that every vote matters. The current system of election by states -- or in Nebraska and Maine by congressional district -- means that the votes for the losing candidate in that state or district are discarded before the final tally. This system has undesirable consequences.

1. There is no electoral incentive to have policies that are especially popular to people of any one state. There is no value in running up the score because a safe 54 percent victory brings no more electoral votes than does a landslide. In the real world, this diminishes the influence of the farm states, since a Republican victory is assumed, and there is no more value in a big win versus a big-enough win. Similarly in the opposite way for blue California. In either case, the "extra" votes are wasted.

2. The system undervalues small states and their voters. This is opposite the usual presumption that a system that gives almost three times the presidential vote weight to low-population states as a large one. In fact, presidential math means that the small states and their voters can essentially be ignored, and in fact they are. Their influence is capped by the three or four votes they bring to the Electoral College. No use pandering to Idaho potato farmers. A Republican candidate has all the votes he needs to get a majority; no use winning extra votes. 

3. Winner-take-all voting by states, in the close elections that we now experience, puts the attention and tipping point decision-making on a small and unrepresentative group of swing voters in swing states. We lose the "wisdom of crowds" by putting our democracy's future in the hands of about one percent of people in seven states, people who are so unusually uninformed and disengaged that they find themselves in October of an election year barely aware of who is running, but possibly willing to be goaded into voting.

4. The current system leaves nearly every voter cheated. Their votes are not part of the national total, which vote is a drop in a bucket, sure, but at least it's a drop. They have skin in the game. But in Oregon, for example, votes in my neighborhood for Trump simply disappear as they are overwhelmed by blue votes in the Portland metropolitan area. All Oregon's electoral votes will go to Harris. Trump got six million votes in California in 2020, but every Trump voter knew full well that their vote never made its way to be part of the final tally. In 42 or 43 states out of 50, its voters are bystanders to the election. 

A national popular vote is legally and politically possible. State legislatures, by law in their states, can agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote. From the National Popular Vote Compact website:

The National Popular Vote Compact has been enacted into law by 17 states and the District of Columbia, including 5 small states (DE, HI, ME, RI, VT), 9 medium-sized states (CO, CT, MD, MA, MN, NJ, NM, OR, WA), and 3 big states (CA, IL, NY). These jurisdictions have 209 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the law.

What will it take to get the few additional states to join the compact? Perhaps one more screwy election, only this time with the Republican winning the popular vote and the Democrat winning a couple of battleground states by a tiny margin, and therefore the presidency. There is no guarantee that the Electoral College advantages Republicans, although it has done so in recent elections. A few votes in a few states would change that. If Florida or North Carolina flipped blue by a few votes, the electoral college would advantage Democrats.

Sooner or later enough people will feel fed up that the presidential election decision is made somewhere else by somebody else, and change will happen. In the meantime, keep your eye on that voter in Pennsylvania, that voter who knows nothing and cares little, and who might or might not bother to vote, depending on the weather and what is on TV. That is whose vote decides the future of the country. Not yours.

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