Capitulants

 

The above cartoon was created by Pulitzer Prize-winning Ann Telnaes, then spiked by Jeff Bezos' Washington Post. So she resigned. The worst is yet to come.

Last time round, Trump lost the popular vote by millions, but the antiquated Electoral College, disinformation from Russia and others, and a rightwing media conglomerate devoted to replacing truth with fiction put him in the White House. He proceeded to run up massive debt, mishandle the pandemic to the tune of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and gift world leadership to our adversaries. Then, at the end, he lied about losing a free, fair, multiply-adjudicated election and instigated an attempt to overthrow it. The lie lives on.

This time, all memory erased, Americans gave him more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris; though, as in both prior elections, more voted against than for him. Baseless claims of receiving a “mandate” notwithstanding, it was one of the narrowest margins of victory in history. But they gave him both houses of Congress, too, Republican members of which are more MAGAfied than ever. The Supreme Court was already his. It’s a four-fecta. How quickly we forget.

Well, not forget, so much as succumb to four years of concentrated whitewashing. Because they know their agenda depends on obsequious acquiescence by Congress and voters, along with the press and social media, it’s been an all-out effort by Project Trump 2025. Who remembers Trump’s words on January 7, 2021, when he said that “the demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy”? He doesn’t. He never meant it in the first place. Now he agrees with Rep Mike Collins (R-GA), who said this week, evidently without irony, “On this day in history in 2021, thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building.” And if he was being ironic, his colleagues and voters nevertheless buy the rewrite like Trump Bibles.

This Olympic-level gaslighting has been furthered by relentless attacks on big- and small- “ell” liberalism as hatred of America. Holy Mike Johnson, whose ear, by his own report, God has, just referred to Democrats as “the enemy.” Newly-elected MAGA Congressmen Brandon Gill of Texas and Riley Moore of West Virginia, on the occasion of their swearing-in, unlimbered themselves of their demagogic Trumpist bona-fides:

Gill: “We want to end the woke chaos that they have unleashed on this country, that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, and that boys should be in girls’ sports and boys should be in girls’ locker rooms.”

Moore: “My constituents have sent me here to this town not to work with Democrats but to destroy their agenda over the last four years that has crushed the American Dream and the American worker.”

After Vice-President Harris swore in three-time Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE), the senator’s husband shook off Harris’ proffered hand. Placing themselves on the side of the lawbreakers and against its defenders, Republican leaders have refused to install an authorized plaque in the capitol honoring the police who fought to stave off the riot. Thus is the division and hate Trump has stoked within his party and among his voters.

There are consequences to accepting this totalitarian repetition of lies and rejection of legitimate dissent. Before blowing up himself and a rented Tesla in front of Trump’s Las Vegas hotel, the deceased had written: “Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.” It’s all but a direct quote from Trump at every one of his rallies.

The perpetrator of the terrorist attack in New Orleans was immediately hyped on Fox “news” and the rest of rightwing dissemblers as an illegal immigrant rather than the US-born Texan he was. The truth hasn’t stopped Trump from continuing to blame it on President Biden’s so-called “open borders.”

The political inversion of America is nearly complete: an incoming administration promises to lie to us, suppress truth, and punish those who dare tell it. While claiming to be protectors of free speech. Rather than taking a principled stand, self-serving media oligarchs are pre-capitulating, donating millions to Trump’s inauguration, which, for lack of regulation, may as well have been slipped directly into his pocket. Because they knew President Biden and Democrats weren’t a threat, those same moguls gave nothing, or next to it, to his. 

Let’s assume not all Trump voters are happy with what they’re seeing now, that they’re not as enthusiastically destructive as those legislators and people like these. But, having been willing to overlook the obvious and believe the lies, they’re complicit. If it’s not already too late, they should consider Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 message to Congress as Civil War approached: 

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."