[Ultimately, Trump is not the main danger. Trump was aided and
abetted by millions of co-conspirators: the MAGA Republicans who
bought his lies and still do. ]
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THE TRUMP WAR ON DEMOCRACY IS FAR FROM OVER  
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David Corn

Mother Jones
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_ Ultimately, Trump is not the main danger. Trump was aided and
abetted by millions of co-conspirators: the MAGA Republicans who
bought his lies and still do. _

,

 

_Fight disinformation: Sign up
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Even after all these years of Donald Trump’s extremist attacks on
American democracy and decency itself, the four-count criminal
indictment handed down by a federal grand jury on Tuesday that accused
the former president of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election
results still is a shocking development. It would be quite the
capstone to the Trump era. Yet despite these criminal charges, the
Trump era is not yet over. There are motions and presumably trials (in
this case and others) to come, as well as the entire 2024 election.
Trump has not left the building. And whatever happens in the various
courtrooms, a key question remains: Will this latest—and most
serious—indictment of Trump do anything to break his hold on the
paranoid and irrational imagination of tens of millions of Americans?

Of all the Trump indictments—which also cover his payment of hush
money to a porn star to cover up an alleged extramarital affair and
his alleged theft of classified documents—this new set of charges
addresses the most fundamental threat he has posed on American
democracy. He falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him.
He schemed to overturn legitimate vote counts. And he riled up his
followers to such an extent that thousands stormed the Capitol and
violently tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—a bedrock
principle of American society.

But this alleged crime was not Trump’s doing alone. He had millions
of accomplices: all those Americans who bought his bogus claims about
the election.

Trump was only able to promote the biggest con of his career because
there was an audience of Republican voters who believed his bunk. The
GOP establishment did not oppose Trump’s disinformation
operation—his assertions that he had actually won the election and
his many unsubstantiated allegations of fraud—because it feared the
party’s base. After the 2020 election, as Trump poisoned the
national discourse with his conspiracy theories, Republican leaders
did not counter his lies out of fear of alienating Trump’s voters.
This afforded Trump the political space to mount assorted and
overlapping plots to retain power. With this indictment, special
counsel Jack Smith alleges these actions were crimes. And when those
allegedly illegal schemes failed, Trump’s cultish loyalists provided
the shock troops for the January 6 insurrectionist riot that nearly
prevented the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. 

This historic indictment is a healthy sign that conspiracies to
overturn elections or mount coups will not be tolerated. Better late
than never, these charges deliver a powerful message: the man in
charge of safeguarding the Constitution criminally tried to sabotage
it. There perhaps is no better summation of Trump’s presidency. Yet,
ultimately, Trump is not the main danger. He may be brought to justice
via this prosecution. But that act alone won’t protect the
constitutional order. 

Trump will turn this indictment, as he has done so with his previous
indictments, into yet more proof that he is the target of a corrupt
and nefarious cabal aiming to destroy the country. The Deep State,
Democrats, the media, antifa, communists, Black radicals, and
pedophiles—they are, in his BS narrative, arrayed against
him _and _against real Americans. In Trump’s telling, the only way
to thwart these evildoers was to declare the election rigged and
foment the paranoia and outrage that led to the seditious January 6
attack on the US Capitol. 

Trump had no evidence of this diabolical election-stealing plot; he
had no rational argument. His claims were debunked again and again.
(His own consigliere, Rudy Giuliani, has admitted to making false
allegations of election theft.) Nevertheless, millions of Americans
accepted this false reality—and still do. They have been under a
Trump trance, transfixed by his lies and false statements and
impervious to actual facts. This latest indictment will confirm their
irrational beliefs. 

A recent poll
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that zero percent—yes, zero percent—of MAGA Republicans think that
Trump has committed serious federal crimes. Only 2 percent of his
loyalists concede that he did “something wrong” regarding the
handling of classified documents. More than 9 out of 10 of these
people said Republicans must stand behind Trump in the face of the
investigations. And three quarters of all likely Republicans voters
said Trump, following the 2020 elections, was legitimately contesting
the results. (That number went up to 83 percent for Republicans who
are heavy viewers of Fox News.)  

One survey after another shows that Republicans and conservatives are
trapped in the muck of Trump conspiracism. Half of Republicans
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that Trump did not keep classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—a sign of
willful blindness. Eighteen million Americans
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the use of force to restore Trump to the White House would be
justified—an uptick of about 50 percent over the past few months.
About 90 percent of Trump’s most radical supporters see the federal
government as run by a supposed Deep State full of immoral schemers.
Twelve percent of Americans agreed with this statement: “A secret
group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is ruling the US government.”
(A survey
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last year found that half of Republicans and more than half of Trump
2020 voters believed prominent Democrats were involved in secret
pedophilia rings.) A separate poll
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that two-thirds of Republicans still believe Trump’s bogus and
debunked claim that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election by
fraud.

Trump has encouraged and exploited all this crap. He would be nowhere
if there was not a market for his outrageous and baseless lies.
Millions of Americans who are mired in this lunacy aided and abetted
Trump’s assault on the republic. When Richard Nixon was exposed as a
crook—and named an unindicted co-conspirator—his support among
Republican voters and officeholders sharply eroded. Those Americans
eventually accepted the investigations of Nixon’s criminality and
the prosecutions of his henchmen as legitimate enterprises and turned
(somewhat gradually) against him. 

Not this time. As news of the latest indictment hit, Trump’s
campaign released a statement declaring the “persecutions of
President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in
the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian,
dictatorial regimes.” It added, “These un-American witch hunts
will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so
he can save our Country from the abuse, incompetence, and corruption
that is running through the veins of our Country at levels never seen
before.” His people will absorb and embrace this hyperbolic,
hate-mongering, demagogic junk. These Americans are threats to the
American project. 

Once upon a time, criminal indictments would stop a political campaign
dead in its tracks. Not anymore. The Trump crusade is chugging ahead,
as this narcissistic, grievance-stirring wannabe-autocrat strives to
return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and implement his out-in-the-open
plan
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transform the federal government into an authoritarian regime. And
millions will cheer him on, perhaps even more loudly after he has
become the first former president (and current presidential candidate)
to be criminally charged as a domestic enemy of the US Constitution.
The Trump spell will not be broken. The wheels of justice, which grind
exceedingly slow but exceedingly fine, are (finally!) addressing
Trump’s alleged crimes. But it will take more than justice to defeat
Trumpism. 

_David Corn [[link removed]]
is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief and an on-air analyst for
MSNBC. He is the co-author (with Michael Isikoff) of Russian
Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the
Election of Donald Trump. He is the author of three New York Times
bestsellers, Showdown, Hubris (with Isikoff), and The Lies of
George W. Bush, as well as the e-book, 47 Percent: Uncovering the
Romney Video that Rocked the 2012 Election. For more of his
stories, click here [[link removed]].
He's also on Twitter
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* Donald Trump
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* MAGA
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* Republican Party
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* conspiracy theories
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