Preview

Writing in The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg points out that many of the people being celebrated for telling the truth about Trump to the January 6th Committee are awfully late to the ball. She singles out, among others, former Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, who was hired as a China hawk in the Trump administration and worked, as she notes, “from its beginning until Jan. 7, 2021. He was one of many who didn’t resign over Trump’s defense of the rioters in Charlottesville, Va., his attempted extortion of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his claims to have won an election he clearly lost, to cite just a few milestones.” Given the crimes of the Trump administration to which Pottinger and his colleagues managed to turn a blind eye, it feels almost trivial to point out that the very act that Pottinger declared himself most proud of under his watch was both a moral and strategic disaster.

According to the hearings’ transcript, Pottinger, now at the Hoover Institution, claimed: “As an example, in late December the Iranian government attacked the US embassy in Baghdad. They did that using some of their terrorist proxies … [Trump] sent a very clear warning to the Ayatollah and his regime, which I think had a useful effect.”

Here, Pottinger was apparently bragging about Trump’s decision to go ahead with the assassination of Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani and nine others, including the deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi militia movement, at Baghdad’s international airport on January 3, 2020. If I had more space, and if we were living in more normal times where our biggest problem was, say, a presidency characterized by ideological obsession and willful dishonesty leading us into counterproductive wars—as per the Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush administrations, among others—I would spend a lot more time on these incidents: how they happened, what they mean, and whom we should never trust again as a result of their dishonesty. Instead, I am going to suggest you read about them, as you can read about the consequences of the Soleimani killing here and here, because these are, amazingly, the least of our problems. (And yes, I’ve written two books that are sort of about this: Lying in State and When Presidents Lie, and that’s enough.)

What the eighth January 6th Committee hearing last Thursday demonstrated most conclusively is that Donald Trump sought to overthrow the nation’s election system before the vote was certified, and when this strategy failed, he encouraged the violent mob he had summoned to the capital to do so by violent means, up to and including murdering his vice president. Trump did not, as President Biden intoned, do nothing to stop them. He did whatever he could do to encourage them, finally giving in only when their failure had been established. As Amy Davidson Sorkin notes: Trump “sat in a dining room near the Oval Office, watched Fox News, and called senators to tell them that they should object to the election results—in other words, they should concede to the mob’s demands. (He called Rudy Giuliani, his lawyer, too.) He also fended off pleas from various officials to stop the violence, and instead put out what the White House counsel, Pat Cipolline, described in videotaped testimony as a ‘terrible tweet’ targeting Vice-President Mike Pence, who was being hunted by the mob.”

Trump had already defended the plan to kill Pence in his August 2020 interview with Jonathan Swan, but so inured are we to his sociopathic criminality that this turned out to be a one-day story. Now, Swan has returned with a two-part series based on in-depth reporting about the plans that Trump and his allies have for a second term, should he win or—far more likely—succeed in stealing the 2024 election. Part one is here, and part two is here.

The hearings, combined with Swan’s stories, make it crystal clear that we are literally one election away from the purposeful destruction of our system of government and its replacement by the equivalent of a mafia state, run by people a lot stupider and more malevolent than those who ran the mafia. Indeed, they are telling us what other coup leaders and aspiring autocrats usually have the sense to keep to themselves.

Given what we already know, I am at a loss to find a historical precedent for a democratic nation willfully inviting such a man and his followers to return to the scene of their earlier crimes and commit far worse ones. Reading Lynn Hunt’s review of a biography of Robespierre in The New York Review of Books, I came across her description of his “peculiar hold on his fellow deputies.” She asked, “How could this unprepossessing, previously unknown lawyer come to incarnate the Revolution in its most intense period?” Hunt’s question got me thinking about Jeffrey Clark, the fellow whom Trump will likely make his attorney general should he be returned to power, to say nothing of what will happen to the country with an entire government filled with the likes of Jeffrey Clark.

I am no expert on German political history, but I wonder if people knew as much about Hitler and his cronies before allowing him to come (democratically) to power as we know about Trump and his. (I know, I know, Trump is not Hitler. Nobody is anybody else. And he probably won’t kill millions of Jews, Gypsies, and gays, and launch a series of ruinous wars—unless, of course, he comes to believe it is somehow in his interest to do so …) My point, ladies and gentlemen, as Mark Danner puts it: “We’re in an Emergency—Act Like It!”

For instance, it would be nice if articles like this one mentioned the Republican candidate’s support for the destruction of our democracy, somewhere, anywhere in the article. (I know, an informative headline is far too much to ask.)

And it would be nice if the Times’ most famous political reporter—the one with 1.6 million Twitter followers and a massive best-selling book in the works—would stop flacking for Trump’s enablers, like the barely-any-less-evil-and-stupid Jared Kushner. For instance, as last week’s hearing was being broadcast, Maggie Haberman wanted us to know that “at a diner at a restaurant in upstate Rhinebeck, N.Y., [she] was seated near Charlie Kushner, Jared Kushner’s father, who put his son on the phone on speaker to say hello to the waitstaff.”

She also felt moved to observe: “Committee is really demonstrating who it disdains through some of the footage. One example tonight was the Kushner shower clip,” as if the injustice to this poor half of the “Sources Close to the President” couple committed by the committee by mentioning that he was in the shower during their daddy’s attempted coup was somehow the most significant facet of the various horror stories visited upon the nation that evening. I fear for the book …

Meanwhile, the Trump Republican strategy to change the subject over their lies, lawlessness, and incitement to violence continues to be “I know you are, but what am I?” as evidenced by the crazy quotes reported in this piece. Thing is, it’s (largely) working. But my issue here is with this sentence authored by David Weigel: “The rhetoric is bracing, if not entirely new. Liberal commentators made liberal use of the word ‘fascism’ to describe Trump’s presidency.” Note that he does not—and cannot without undermining his purpose—discuss whether the use of the word is appropriate. I therefore have a few questions for Mr. Weigel:

David, is your fellow David, Mr. Frum, also one of these “liberals”? Because, otherwise, what’s this?
And what about the case itself? Are articles like this one and this one and this one all deserving of your blithe dismissal?
And while we’re on the topic, is it also worthy of mockery when discussing the beliefs of Peter Thiel and his puppet politicians in Ohio and Arizona?

I’m genuinely saddened to see that Weigel, a smart and hard-working reporter, has now volunteered to catch this Beltway virus. He does not address the question. He treats it as de facto ridiculous (and therefore unworthy of discussion). This sort of reporting is one of the reasons why, in a roughly 50/50 country, we may end up with a fascist government in 2024: because the people responsible for exposing it are pretending it does not exist.

Many readers have no doubt seen snippets of this already, but here is the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s re-emergence as a performer after a 20-year absence, with Brandi Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival, three years after she suffered a brain aneurysm. (“Both Sides Now” is the only form of bothsidesism we, at Altercation, can support.) Bonus: here and here is the retired-from-touring-but-not-from-guest-appearances Paul Simon, also at this year’s festival. And here’s a guy who caused quite a commotion when he brought a band and an electric guitar to the festival back in 1965. Barry Goldberg was there. And Elijah Wald has written a fine book about its implications.