Connect the Dots 101

It will take generations of journalists, graduate students and historians to connect the dots and flesh out the full extent of the criminality of the Trump administration and the damage done to American institutions.

Impeached twice and defending himself against over three dozen felony counts – so far, following the path of Donald J. Trump through the legal swamp in which he is enmired is daunting.

The third indictment of the ex-president, filed last week by the special counsel Jack Smith, is a good place to start.

In a nutshell, Trump lost the 2016 presidential election; he knew he lost but he lied about it; and he criminally conspired to push every button and pull every lever at his disposal in order to overturn the legitimate results of the election.

The peaceful transfer of power and the elections on which they are based are at the heart of how Americans see themselves.

Understanding federal legal procedure, Senate rules and American constitutional history is helpful but one doesn’t need to be smarter than a fifth grader to understand the broad strokes of the crisis. Even pre-schoolers understand elections and their consequences – cookies or cupcakes? Show of hands….

In a 2018 essay ”The Constitution of Knowledge,” Jonathan Rauch describes the information ecosystem in democracies that winnows out nonsense. “We let alt-truth talk but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review…or dominate the front pages.”

That has changed.

Trumpism is a threat to “ourselves and our posterity” because of its success in sidestepping those constraints.

Right-wing propagandists have learned that the news cycle is such that talking points and off-the-cuff gaffes command the same amount of time and space as investigations of months-long duration.

The Mueller investigation into Russian influence on behalf of the Trump campaign, for instance, took two years to conduct. Prior to the release of a redacted edition, Attorney General Bill Barr held a twenty-minute news conference to spin the conclusions in a manner which U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton “could not reconcile with the findings of the report” and led “the Court to seriously question whether…Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse…in favor of President Trump.”

Trump and his allies distilled Barr’s misleading conclusion into two words – no collusion.

An extensive body of fiction – a new national mythology – has been created by an unholy alliance between corporate right wing media – see Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News – and a professional Republican political class that has elevated party over principle; their political futures over facts.

A movement which can’t be trusted with current events has been waging a vigorous campaign against history itself – see DeSantis, et al.

Standard definitions and standards of proof have been scrapped. A growing segment of the public – driven by passion and immune to evidence and rational discourse – has created a post-Enlightenment wasteland in which anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection can distort the public record.

French philosopher Michel Foucault has said that “knowledge is an instrument of power. The relations of power within a society, not truthfulness, determines which interpretations of the past prevail.”

That is where we are now.

The failed January coup by MAGA mobs and the right-wing revisionism that has followed have substantiated the fact that the Republican Party has been, and continues to be, the biggest internal threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

Newspaper columns are anachronistic compared to the immediacy and reach of social media and online chatter. To that extent they may be part of the solution to some, at least, of what ails us.

Real people in real geographic communities need to respond to the ideas of their real neighbors, not to algorithms designed in Silicon Valley or Russian troll farms in St. Petersburg to inflame but not to inform. And without the bullhorns and sidearms that are often fixtures in the contemporary public square.

Questions and comments directed to this space will be addressed not by an AI author but by the real person responsible for what appears in it.

–August 6, 2023