Trump's Newest Fever Dream: Hezbollah Stole The Election From Him
Yesterday, Bill Kristol and UT government professor Jeffrey Tulis asserted that the threat from Trump is worse today than it was on Jan. 6. The guardrails held and Trump’s attempted coup failed. “But,” they warned, “the fact is that the United States is closer to constitutional failure today than it was three years ago. Our political future is so precarious today partly because of the ways we have misunderstood the significance of January 6th. Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and others in Congress came dangerously close to being killed by a mob. The vote to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election came very close to being postponed. January 6th was an awful and momentous day.”
Even the shapeshifting Lindsey Graham remarked, “From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. But today . . . all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” Indeed Graham reportedly called the White House counsel to warn that if Trump did not quickly do more to tamp down the violence, “we’ll be asking you for the Twenty-fifth Amendment.”
For a moment, even Kevin McCarthy appeared to have acquired enough of a spine to admit that “the president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters” and that Trump “should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”
…We now know much more about Donald Trump’s post-2020-election plans and actions than we did in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Capitol. Yet Republican leaders and purveyors of GOP “news” no longer criticize January 6th—and much of the Republican base talks about it as if it were no big deal (calling it “overblown”), or as if it were a liberal conspiracy (a “false-flag operation”), or as if the members of the violent mob deserve our praise (calling them, rather than the police who fought them, the “J6 heroes”).
Where once there was widespread alarm and revulsion among Republicans about January 6th, today there is acquiescence or, at best, complacency. This brings home the severity of the threat to democracy posed now by the prospect of the re-election of Donald Trump.
What was once unthinkable and outrageous has become normalized over the last three years. Trump has responded to his political and legal losses by doubling down on the behavior and rhetoric for which he was denounced. His behavior was anticipated by the House managers in Trump’s first impeachment trial when they warned that if he were not convicted, he would feel emboldened to ignore or subvert the Constitution again. And he has been laying the groundwork for doing that for the last three years.
Since his second impeachment, Donald Trump has attacked every person and every institution involved in uncovering and reporting his misbehavior.
Most remarkably, Trump has embraced the notion that, if elected again, he will govern as a “dictator.” We have a detailed and very public record of how he plans to do that—including indications of the individuals he plans to appoint to key roles in his administration, a Heritage Foundation report on how to dismantle much of the federal government unilaterally without legislation from Congress, plans to use the Department of Justice to go after his critics and his political rivals, and plans to use the armed forces and larger national security apparatus for his domestic political purposes.
And Trump has the Republican party and the conservative movement in lockstep behind him. This is not one man, ostracized and shouting in the wilderness. It is not even Richard Nixon giving bitter interviews from exile, no longer a factor in American politics.
The leader of the January 6th insurrection is all but certain to be the presidential nominee of one of our two major parties. And polls suggest he has a very real chance to win the general election.
This is why we are in important ways in greater peril in January 2024 than we were in January 2021.
Our democracy is more fragile now than it was then. Three years of normalizing January 6th by the likely Republican nominee has created an unprecedentedly dangerous situation. It’s true that the Republican party went along with President Donald Trump for four long years—and caused great damage in doing so.
But critically important Republicans broke with him in the weeks after the 2020 election and on January 6th. Attorney General Bill Barr refused to back Trump’s election lies and resigned. Other top Trump appointees in the Justice Department threatened to quit if an unqualified Trump stooge were installed in Barr’s place. Lawyers in the White House counsel’s office tried to stymie Trump’s “elite strike force” of election-overthrowing lawyers. And most importantly, at the critical moment on January 6th, Vice President Mike Pence refused to bend to Trump’s will. Then, afterwards, many Republicans were willing to blame Trump for January 6th.
But those who stood up to him are now gone. The Republicans who broke with Trump have either been marginalized or returned to singing his praises. All but two of the representatives who voted for his impeachment are out of office. If he were returned to the White House, he would have only sycophants around him and none of the so-called “adults in the room” who, however ineffectually, tried in his first term to check his worse impulses.
The pro-insurrectionists, joined by anti-anti-insurrectionists, are in control of the Republican party. And the forces marshaled behind Donald Trump to subvert and overthrow important features of our constitutional democracy are stronger than they were in January 2021—or for that matter in January 2017.
Whether or not one thinks Trump’s aspirations—and those of many of his key associates, like Steve Bannon—are rightly called fascistic (we do), and whether or not one thinks Trump’s authoritarian plans could be realizable if he came to power (we do), Americans need to recognize, at a minimum, that the re-election of Donald Trump would make presidential leadership arbitrary and willful, would tilt the federal government radically toward lawlessness, and would seriously, perhaps critically, wound our constitutional democracy.
January 6th, it turns out, was a rehearsal for the true upheaval, the far deeper insurrection, that Trump now intends to lead if re-elected. January 6th was prologue. The election year of 2024 will be the decisive drama on the main stage, and its outcome is very much in doubt.
And the next step will be what Aswan Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez are calling a MAGA freak show of a trial: “Attempts to drag Nancy Pelosi into court to berate her on the stand and, hopefully, on live TV. Claims that the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was an FBI frame job, with an assist from Antifa. Conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was indeed ‘stolen,’ supposedly backed up by still-classified documents. Unhinged assertions that President Joe Biden is now secretly, personally orchestrating an unprecedented act of political persecution. Calls to publicly unmask the federal officials and lawyers investigating the former (and perhaps future) president of the United States. Efforts to blame any illegality on some of the ex-president’s closest confidants and former legal allies. Insinuations of election meddling by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. These are just some of the items that Trump and his lawyers have been discussing and planning to deploy when he goes on trial for his efforts to steal the 2020 election. The brewing defense strategy is outlandish and feral, even by Trumpland standards, to the point that it’s baffling some of the ex-president’s former lawyers and senior administration officials. One person with knowledge of these strategic and legal discussions bluntly describes the plans as a blueprint for staging a ‘MAGA freak show’ at Trump’s federal election subversion trial… a courtroom and pretrial strategy laced with conspiracy theories, Fox News-style talking points, and raging innuendo— just as the spectacle-obsessed former president craves.”
Trump wants “to use the trial to hold a conspiracy-theory-fueled referendum on the U.S. government,” much the way Hitler used his treason trial in Munich (Feb 24- April Fools’ Day, 1924) after his attempted coup in November, 2023. That trial became a platform for Hitler to promote Naziism— an older name for MAGA— to a wider audience. He used the courtroom as a stage to deliver lengthy speeches and justify his actions. Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison but served just 9 months after pressure from powerful, extreme right-wing figures in the Bavarian government like Franz Ritter von Epp, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, Bavarian Minister of Justice Ernst Pöhner and ultra nationalist Karl Haushofer.
Trump, wrote Suebsaeng and Perez, “also wants to rant at the judge in the courtroom about how the trial is one big act of ‘election interference’ designed to hobble Trump’s rising poll numbers… For the past several months, according to four of the sources, Trump has been demanding his attorneys incorporate an array of crank conspiracy theories about Jan. 6 and the 2020 election into their court filings and, eventually, performances at trial. His list of ideas has included asserting that there’s ‘evidence’ that anti-Trump elements in the FBI ‘framed’ him and MAGA protesters by using undercover agents and informants to instigate the deadly Jan. 6 riot; that anarchists and left-wing anti-fascists played a role in attacking the Capitol that day; and that Trump’s lieutenants had gathered real evidence showing ‘massive amounts’ of voter and election ‘fraud’ in 2020 in swing states and heavily Democratic urban areas, as he’s long baselessly claimed.”
Furthermore, the sources add, the former president and his legal team are trying to use highly sensitive— in some cases, still-classified— government documents to support the notion that Trump was correct to think the 2020 election was rigged against him. According to Newsweek, Trump’s lawyers have sought records of classified communications between the Department of Justice and Hunter Biden; documents detailing efforts by Russia, Iran, and even Hezbollah to influence the 2020 election; information on alleged Chinese hacking of election infrastructure; and details of all undercover agents who were present at the Jan. 6 insurrection. These court demands are widely viewed, including in the upper ranks of Trumpland, as doubling as delay tactics, since insisting on a thorough review of classified information pretrial would invariably slow things down.
Trump and his lawyers are prepared to contend, as part of a broader legal argument, that his effort to overturn the election results was no different from when some Democrats questioned the integrity of elections they had lost. They plan to hammer the message that a guilty verdict would mean a death knell for free speech in America.
…“From what I can tell— as an outside observer and former member of Donald Trump’s legal team— about how the trial strategy is taking shape, all I can say is: It is a terrible idea to try to use a criminal trial to stage a political campaign ad,” says Tim Parlatore, formerly one of the top lawyers advising Trump on the Jack Smith investigations. Parlatore was one of the attorneys who departed the legal team last year, following protracted in-fighting that caused the team to implode. “That would be incredibly detrimental to the client,” he says. “It is also a surefire way for you to quickly alienate jurors, particularly when you’re dealing with a jury pool like Washington, D.C.’s.
…In some of his recent private conversations with aides and lawyers, Trump has stated he wants his legal team to “prove” in a court of law that Biden is actually the one orchestrating the prosecution, according to two of the sources.
“[Trump] has said that during ‘the discovery process,’ there’s no way we don’t find hard evidence that Biden is pulling the strings to send Donald Trump to jail … Apparently that’s what he believes,” says one of these sources, who has discussed the matter with Trump on multiple occasions. In other conversations that Trump had with his lawyers last year, he has been insistent that the discovery process ahead of trial would help produce currently concealed names of federal officials and attorneys detailed to Special Counsel Smith’s office— which would boost Trump’s efforts to purge those people from government if he’s elected again.
…Federal courts typically do not allow cameras, but Trump and his legal counselors are pushing for his election subversion trial to be televised. “The prosecution wishes to continue this travesty in darkness,” they wrote in a legal filing. “President Trump calls for sunlight. Every person in America, and beyond, should have the opportunity to study this case firsthand and watch as, if there is a trial, President Trump exonerates himself of these baseless and politically motivated charges.”
The point of the camera demand is for Americans to witness the Trump team’s so-called “MAGA freak show” for themselves. Smith’s team has warned that Trump and his legal team are requesting camera access because they want “to create a carnival atmosphere from which he hopes to profit by distracting, like many fraud defendants try to do, from the charges against him.”
“It is clear the [former] president would like to turn the trial into a campaign ad as much as he can,” says another source who has legally advised Trump in recent years. “I mentioned to him that cameras in the courtroom is not what you’d want to do in a case like this. But he and his team see it very, very differently than I do, unfortunately … [Based on what I know], I think they’re going to make it feel like reality TV.”
Trump and his lawyers have long planned to wield an “advice of counsel” defense at the Jan. 6 trial to explain away his efforts to overturn the election results, arguing that the then-president was relying on guidance that he believed to be coming from seasoned legal experts. This would mean effectively scapegoating the attorneys— including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani— who advised Trump and served as the architects of his coup attempt.
And just as Trump has done in past legal proceedings, the former president appears determined to wield a Jan. 6 trial as a political cudgel against his many enemies, including his successor and likely 2024 opponent, Biden. For years, Trump and much of the GOP have worked relentlessly to cement his anti-democratic lies about his 2020 loss into party dogma, under the guise of an “election integrity” movement. This has included concrete, wide-ranging attempts to tilt the 2024 election in Trump’s favor, long before election day.
For Trump, though, deploying a strategy of turning a trial into a deranged media and political circus is a feature, not a bug. In 2023, for instance, Trump and his legal team working on the New York civil fraud case plotted for months how they would sow chaos into that trial. This included effectively daring the presiding judge to throw Trump into a jail cell. The stakes in that case are, however, significantly lower than in the expected trials stemming from Smith’s criminal investigations.
…But for all the tumult Trump and his legal advisers are hoping to impose on the courtroom, there’s just one problem with the strategy, according to Ty Cobb, a former federal prosecutor who also served as a top Trump White House attorney during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
“It’s not gonna work,” Cobb bluntly assesses. “Trump and his lawyers, I’m sure, would like to see [the trial] devolve into a chaotic circus, but I don’t think they’re even going to get that … The biggest problem Donald Trump and his lawyers have is that they have no evidence and they have no witnesses … I haven’t seen a single email or document that would be helpful to him … Even if Rudy Giuliani testified for Trump’s defense, Rudy could easily end up making the government’s case for them. So who can they call? They don’t have anybody!”
Despite Cobb’s prior work in Trump’s administration, the lawyer has long since lost any shred of tolerance for the former president, and nowadays uses terms to describe Trump such as “inherently evil.”
Cobb adds that “one of the key ingredients, though, in the chaos of the Chicago 7 trial was of course Judge Hoffman,” who the former Trump White House attorney says “made the fatal error of engaging in combat with the defendants and their lawyers.” Tanya Chutkan, the judge assigned to the Trump Jan. 6 case, “won’t do that— she will shut down a circus and not do anything overtly antagonistic,” Cobb predicts, adding: “She will rule on him in a dignified, appropriate way. She hasn’t said yes to everything [Special Counsel Smith and his team] are doing; I think she’ll run a tight courtroom. That’s her reputation.”