The unprovoked and unjustified Russian attack on Ukraine directed solely by Vladimir Putin is a sobering reminder of the extremes to which narcissism can lead people.
The tragedy is that others often pay the price for the actions of the narcissist to satisfy their craven appetite for attention. As of today (Monday), nearly 400 Ukrainian citizens have been killed, including many children, and over 1600 wounded. In addition, there are reports that thousands of Ukrainian and Russian military personnel have been killed.
It is reasonable to say that these deaths make Putin guilty of war crimes for which he should be tried in absentia by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Here at home Donald Trump who persists in inserting himself in the limelight has heaped praise on Putin and we all know why. That’s because he showed he is a Putin wannabe when he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6.
Because Trump won’t go away it is time for all Americans to look honestly and soberly at that moment in our history. The hard and harsh truth is that Trump committed crimes against the people of the United States by engaging in acts of both sedition and treason.
I do not use those words lightly or carelessly. Sedition means “conduct and speech to incite people to rebel against their government.” As I will show, Trump did that. Treason means “taking action that represents a betrayal of one’s country.” Trump did that, too.
Had he left office and stayed out of public view the nation could wait to see what civil and legal actions he might face, but he has chosen to try to continue agitating our political life, forcing us to talk openly, candidly, honestly, and forcefully about what he did to our nation.
Donald Trump is the only sitting president in American history to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power that makes a democracy a democracy.
It is time for all of us, including the news media, to stop pretending he didn’t commit the crimes he committed. We are far beyond the realm of speculation. By connecting the dots between the various pieces of public information we can tell the story of what he did with stunning accuracy. Here is that story.
It all started well before the 2020 November election when the Trump campaign’s internal polls began to parallel public polls in showing that his reelection bid was in serious trouble. Trump responded with a plan he believed would keep him in office even if he lost the election.
The first piece of the plan was the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him because of voter fraud.
In order to put the Big Lie into the public arena, Trump began repeating the mantra at his campaign rallies that the only way he can lose this election would be because of widespread fraud. In this way the Big Lie served as a pretext to justify Trump attempting to block the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory, if it came to that which it did.
Trump’s late election night appearance at the White House before a small group of cheering supporters was also part of the plan to create the illusion that he would lose only if fraud stole his victory. Despite the fact that the absentee and mail-in ballots in key battle ground states had not been counted, Trump essentially claimed victory anyway.
That appearance before all the votes were counted was right on cue, given the fact that it had been widely reported by the news media before election day that he would do so.
Th Saturday after the election the news media called the election for Biden and people filled the streets to celebrate. This was the point when the Trump plan to use fraud as a weapon against the legitimacy of the Biden’s victory started in earnest.
One significant move was for his political team of lawyers to begin holding press conferences touting proof of fraud, telling the public one thing and the courts something very different.
They presented no real evidence in court documents they said they had to support the claims of fraud. Instead, they used one unsubstantiated claim to buttress another as a pretense for offering actual evidence.
The courts saw through what they were doing and immediately dismissed every case, some 60 of them argued before different judges in different states.
Trump’s teams could have presented false evidence for their fraud claims, but they were smart enough to know that doing so would have put themselves in legal jeopardy. Given the facts, they chose to make themselves look silly by going to court with a case they were not prepared to prove.
By December the legal challenges to Biden’s victory had been exhausted and numerous recounts had reaffirmed the vote that Biden had won fair and square.
Trump then chose to step over the line between his legal right to challenge the results in court and a treasonous effort to use the Big Lie to persuade Republicans in Congress to refuse to certify the Electoral College vote.
One hundred forty-seven members of the House went along with him and six did in the Senate (Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, and Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville).
The person he needed most in this scheme, though, was a willing Mike Pence who would assert that the suspicion of fraud was enough to stop the certification and send the Electoral College votes back to the disputed states for further review.
This would have allowed those states controlled by Republicans to follow Trump’s lead in claiming voter fraud, have the state legislature elect new Electors who would then send ballots to Washington supporting Trump. The other option for Pence, Trump believed, was to declare the election results unresolved and put it the hands of the House of Representatives . With each state having one vote and Republicans holding the majority, Trump would have been declared the winner.
Pence refused to go along. He could have made that clear earlier than January 6 to discourage Trump from even trying to stop the transfer of power, but at least at the end of the day he stood up for the Constitution against Trump.
The key factor in everything that happened was, of course, the Big Lie. That falsehood is why everything Trump said before the election made him guilty of sedition and everything he did on January 6 guilty of treason.
Telling a lie is no justification for attempting to subvert an election. A decent president would have accepted the rulings in the court cases that declared the election free and fair and moved on. Trump was not that decent.
There is no redemption from that, which is why anyone who still supports Trump is supporting his betrayal of the country, something I don’t think I will ever understand. How can any political affiliation or view led any American to support such a betrayal as that?
That transfer of power is what makes a constitutional democracy work. Without it the United States would be a Putin style autocracy which is exactly what Donald Trump wanted.
It is possible Trump will be held accountable for engaging in sedition and treason in a court of law, though that is far from a done deal. There is a better chance that the percentage of Americans who have an unfavorable opinion of him will grow to such a strong majority and send him the message that he is finished politically. Actually, there are signs that it is already happening.
In a recent Marquette Law School poll of all adult Americans, 78% say they don’t support Trump running again, compared to 28% who do. Just as important, 65% have an unfavorable opinion of him while only 32% have a favorable one.
The poll also found that while 60% of Republicans say they support Trump running again, the number who don’t has grown from 15% a year ago to 40% today.
Taken together there is reason to think that the truth about Trump is beginning to affect the way he is viewed. Just as the world is now seeing the kind of despotic leader Putin truly is, we Americans are beginning to see Trump in the same light because of what he tried to do to our country.
We are not there yet, but we’re getting there.
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