Five Decembers ago, on the eve of the ’16 Republican primaries, I warned about Trump: “An aspiring autocrat seeks to exploit fear and anger. Do we really want to flirt with autocracy? Are we not better than our basest instincts?”
The good news, five years later, is that a record 81,000,000 Americans have kicked the autocrat to the curb. The bad news is that he’s still a clear and present danger. In defeat, his basest instincts have been unleashed to such an extent that even a conservative Republican like Gabriel Sterling is mad as hell and can’t take it anymore.
For folks like that, I guess it’s better late than never.
Yesterday, we saw two Americas. On the one hand, President-elect Biden introduced his sane seasoned economic team and said, “Our message to everybody struggling right now is help is on the way.” On the other hand, the lame-duck loser continued to scream about non-existent voter fraud and stoke anger within his cult. Which brings us back to Gabriel Sterling, the “implementation manager” who oversees the voting process in Georgia.
It has come to this: A grassroots Republican official in the Deep South publicly rebuked a Republican president for fomenting violence and sowing distrust in our November election….on the same day that the lame duck’s Justice Department said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in our November election…on the same day that unsealed court papers revealed a potential bribe-for-pardon deal at the White House…on the same day that we learned about potential preemptive pardons for Trump’s kids and Rudy Giuliani.
Or, as I call it, Tuesday.
But I was talking about Sterling. He and his family need police protection, and he’s not happy about that. The Republican secretary of state (Sterling’s boss), is besieged by MAGA loons who come on his property and leave “sexualized threats” on his wife’s cellphone. And Sterling is particularly incensed that a young Georgia contractor for a voting systems company is getting “death threats…saying he should be hung for treason.”
This was Sterling’s message to the provocateur-in-chief:
“Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language…If you take a position of leadership, show some….Death threats, physical threats, intimidation – it’s too much. It’s not right. We’ve lost the moral high ground…
“I can’t begin to explain the level of anger I have right now over this, and every American, every Georgian, Republican and Democrat alike, should have that same level of anger.
“Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia…You have the right to go through the courts. What you don’t have the ability to do – and you need to step up and say this – is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right...
“Mr. President…be the bigger man here and stop. Step in, tell your supporters, ‘Don’t be violent, don’t intimidate. All that’s wrong. It’s un-American.‘”
It’s great that a grassroots Republican has stepped up; he’s shown more moxie than Mitch McConnell and the rest of the party’s amoral cowards. But, not to pick on Sterling, I nevertheless have to ask: Where were these Republicans years ago, when it was already obvious that Trump would be a danger to domestic peace? Didn’t they see what was going on?
Trump has long been coaxing his cultists to commit political violence. As a ’16 candidate, he urged them to “knock the crap” out of dissidents, and promised to pay their legal bills. He called the press “enemies of the people,” a Soviet term that invites violence. He praised a politician who body-slammed a reporter. He retweeted violent imagery aimed at CNN. He mused that the Secret Service should stop guarding Hillary Clinton so we could “see what happens to her.” He mused that if Hillary were to become president, perhaps the “Second Amendment people” could stop her from nominating judges.
As president, he repeatedly railed in demagogic language against Barack Obama, the Clintons, John Brennan, Maxine Waters, CNN, and George Soros – and, sure enough, in the autumn of 2018, a Trump fanboy was arrested after he mailed pipe bombs to Obama, the Clintons, John Brennan, Maxine Waters, CNN, and George Soros.
It was inevitable that someone would be sufficiently moved to plot a mass assassination. This country is littered with losers who are jonesing to make their mark by translating incendiary words into action. Witness the El Paso shooter who killed 23 Hispanics in a Walmart last year, after posting a manifesto that echoed Trump’s rhetoric about an Hispanic “invasion.” The guy even tweeted a photo of the word “Trump” spelled out in firearms.
And as Trump lurches toward the exit (and a potential future as a criminal defendant), one of his few remaining moves is to spin fake conspiracies and disturb the peace. Predictably, last night, he refused to take Sterling’s advice; in a response tweet, he lied anew to his violence-prone fans: “Rigged election…Expose the massive voter fraud in Georgia.”
Sterling said yesterday that Trump is “complicit” in what’s happening. True that. But if average Republicans had stepped up long before Sterling, we would’ve been spared this interminably toxic era. Frankly, they’re all complicit. To quote Shakespeare, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves.”