THE ceremony held on Monday in Washington, D.C., marks the end of America as we thought we knew it. In accordance with all the laws and customs of our venerable Republic, Mr Trump peacefully assumed the position to which he was freely and fairly elected, and took a solemn vow faithfully to execute the laws and defend the Constitution. All of this was, and remains, a sham. No ceremonial dignity can mask the villainy of the man who, not half a decade hence, unleashed upon this self-same Capitol a frenzied mob: a gambler’s last, desperate, bid to overturn his own defeat in an election no less free or fair than that just gone. This defeat neither he nor his supporters have ever acknowledged. Nor have they been stinting in punishing those in their own party who have dared to do so.
It passes without comment, of course, that the transfer of power in this case – from Democrat to Republican – will proceed without obstruction. It is assumed, just as it was assumed that Mrs Harris, as candidate, would promptly and publicly concede her defeat once the election night tally was clear; and just as it was assumed that she then would, as Vice President, duly preside over a senate vote formally ratifying her own defeat. These, of course, she duly did. This double standard is taken so completely for granted that one might almost not bother mentioning it, as though it were not so blatant and unjustifiable as to be quite literally maddening. We shrug, and accept it: this is just the country we live in. And what sort of country is that? How does one describe a democracy in which one of the two major parties generally obeys the spirit and letter of the law and customs, puts service to country above partisan interest and refrains from spreading outright lies, while the other seeks to twist and corrupt both letter and spirit of the law in pursuit of power, betrays the country for the slightest partisan advantage and lies without compunction or pause?
The truth – the blatant, obvious, reeking truth – is that Mr Trump’s re-election with a broad popular mandate is a disaster for the United States. It will be remembered as the moment the “Government of Laws” fell into abeyance, at the demand of the people themselves, to be replaced by one of men. Where once Trump was crippled by his unpopularity and perceived lack of legitimacy, he now appears unstoppable. The opposition that dogged him in his first term and long after has melted into the very air. The Democratic Party, still reeling from the scale of the catastrophe, is scattered and leaderless. The oligarchs who control America’s economy have knelt at his feet and kissed his ring, and have already begun to compete with one another to anticipate and obey his commands even before they are issued. Even the once-untameable news media has fallen strangely quiet, and has (save for those loyal outlets that endlessly and loudly proclaim news of the great idol) drifted into caution and equivocation – frightened, obviously, of the inevitable retaliation to come.
How can one stay sane in a world lost to lunacy? Only by clinging ever more tightly to fact and truth. Understand, for instance, that, though freely elected, Donald Trump remains an illegitimate president. His attempt to hold onto power after his defeat in the 2020 general election – not just his use of a mob on January 6th of 2021 to launch a violent insurrection, but the campaign of pressure and intimidation he was waging behind the facade against officials such as Secretary Kemp of Georgia to falsify results – was a criminal outrage without compare in living memory. Forget, for a moment, that for this atrocity he was impeached, and would have been convicted and barred from running again for office, if not for the real and legitimate fear of many Republican senators that they or their families would be targeted with violence by his deranged cult. This failure to convict, though shocking, should not have mattered. Section 3 of the XIVth Amendment explicitly and unambiguously bars such insurrectionist leaders from seeking or holding federal office – a provision mysteriously ignored by our supposedly “textualist” and “originalist” Supreme Court majority. (This is, you will recall, the same Supreme Court majority which, out of a nakedly partisan desire to protect the then-former president, invented out of whole cloth a doctrine of perpetual presidential immunity so alien to the expressed beliefs and intentions of the Founders as to make a mockery not merely of the text and spirit of the constitution, but of the entire project of American republicanism itself).
It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of what has happened to our country over the past decade. Put aside, for a moment, the orgy of self-dealing that characterised Trump’s first four years in office. Forget the ceaseless lying; the unqualified political appointees; the refusals to co-operate with congressional subpoenas and criminal investigations; the way he and his family treated the supreme executive office as their personal property. We have endured corrupt administrations before. But the singular and unprecedented menace of this man is that this he has demonstrated – for the first time in well over a century – that the President of the United States can successfully use criminal violence to achieve political ends, and immunise himself and his agents from future prosecution.He has demonstrated not only that you can loot, steal and lie, that you can obstruct justice and buy the silence of your underlings with the promise of pardons, but that you can even try to halt the transfer of power itself if you are willing to use violence. His immediate abuse, on his first day in office, of the pardon power to release the 1,500 or so of his supporters who were convicted of violence on January 6th can only be seen by his supporters and opponents alike as an inducement to commit more and greater acts of violence to further his ends, safe in the knowledge that no court shall be suffered to convict the perpetrators.
The details of this system of immunity that he has built around himself are complex, but the tools are simple. First, you must exploit the convention (based on the assumptions of effective congressional oversight and the basic decency of any man elected president) that a serving president may not be prosecuted by the criminal law, but only by impeachment. Second, obstruct any investigations into your misconduct by withholding co-operation and by promising pardons to any of your subordinates who likewise refuse to co-operate, even if they face prosecution themselves. Third, use the threat of or actual violence by your supporters against any elected official (but especially those in your party) who might consider voting to impeach or convict you. Fourth, in the event that your supporters do use violence or break the law to achieve your aims, use the pardon power to protect them from justice. These tactics are despicable, shocking and unpatriotic and are, apparently, of little interest to the median American voter. (More’s the pity). But it is the fifth and final mechanism that will have the most profound consequences in the years and decades to come. As a contingency, in the event that you do, against your best efforts, find yourself out of office, and lose the immunity provided by serving, is to pack the courts with pliant judges. It is very important here that you pick men and women who are – like justices Cannon, Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh – more loyal to you than they are to the law or their country or their oath of office. This gambit takes time, but is worth the effort. Once you have corrupted the courts, you are safe for ever.
The sheer scale, and true horror, of Trump’s accomplishment is difficult to fully grasp. He has not merely won re-election, but has amassed immense and unprecedented personal power. He has not merely torn up the old consensus, but has utterly subjugated one of the great parties of the democratic world, and made it his cult of personality. He has not merely protected himself from prosecution in the immediate future, but has created a “law free zone” around his office, the full consequences of which are vast and are yet to even remotely be realised. He has not merely gotten away with using office for self-enrichment, but has shattered all the norms and expectations of integrity, decency and restraint.
At this point it is worth drawing breath. Comparisons made of Mr Trump to totalitarian rulers are, I think, off the mark. For all his abundant personal unpleasantness, he is not greedy for blood. Moreover, neither he nor his oddball entourage possesses anything like the coherent ideological programme or unity of will necessary to construct a truly absolute autocracy. He is reminiscent more of a medieval monarch: entirely above both the law and ordinary politics; free to profit from his position of trust; permitted and indeed expected to indulge in pomp and ceremony; protected from insults and slights by laws of lèse-majesté and enjoying the unconditional personal loyalty of all the apparatus of state. Of course, building a monarchy is difficult, and few such efforts in the modern era have been made. The way of the banana republic, though, is a well-trodden path. Indeed, it is the default state in which most of humanity has lived in the modern era.
The Republic of Laws is dead, and we have killed it. As to whether the people shall be satisfied with what comes after, I have my doubts. The doors to the treasury have been flung open, and we can only pray that not everything will be taken. We are about to learn again the bitter truth that it is easier to destroy than to preserve, and easier by far to preserve than to rebuild.
Nathan
Sunday January 26th, 2025
Thirsk
Behemoth 