We'll Know by Spring

Your new government “is a Republic, if you can keep it.” — Ben Franklin, to people assembled outside our Constitutional Convention

We’ll know by spring whether we can. Why? Because our President-elect has repeatedly sworn vengeance and persecution against his political enemies, real and perceived.

Watch his face when he so swears. Watch his eyes, perceive his affect, and notice his bearing. If you have a passing acquaintance with human emotion and desires and their outward expression, you know that he wants this above all else.

He wants the people who have challenged him, who have criticized him, who have charged and impeached him, and who have prosecuted him—politically and criminally—to suffer likewise. To reach that personal goal, he will dismantle the entire operation of the “rule of law, not men” built up so carefully, over decades, in our FBI and DOJ. He even wants to prosecute the journalists who’ve called out his lies.

That’s how democracy dies. That’s precisely how the rule of law gets perverted into rule by men. That’s also how journalism dies, as free and truthful journalists get put behind bars, fired by profit- and politics-conscious executives, or bogged down in grossly expensive litigation that has no legitimate basis.

Cross the boss man, and you suffer. It really is that simple. And that’s not democracy by anyone’s measure.

Few people are courageous enough to stand up to a rogue Chief Executive as did Liz Cheney, Bennie Thompson, Adam Kinzinger and Adam Schiff. Cheney and Kinzinger, both Republicans, are now out of office, just like Mitt Romney, who was one of a handful of Republicans who voted to convict Trump after impeachment and remove him from office.

According to PBS, half of us Americans could not meet a medical emergency costing $500 without going into debt [see placard, timer at 35:00]. How many will stand up when defending themselves in court costs $50,000-$100,000 just for their counsel’s retainer, and can go into the millions from there?

In twenty-first century America, a tyrant doesn’t have to behead people and put their severed heads on pikes outside the city walls. He doen’t have to “disappear” people like the desaparecidos in the late-twentieth-century South American dictaduras.

All he has to do is intimidate and marginalize the boldest. In the early twentieth century, it was enough for Hitler’s Brown Shirts to show what they could and would do by trashing the homes and businesses of Jews on Kristallnacht. Today, among the mostly comfortable elite that govern us, all a despot has to do is ruin a few examples to intimidate the rest, especially Republicans who’d like to keep their jobs.

Haven’t these tactics already gotten nearly all the sensible middle-of-the road Republicans to give up and retire?

So here are some signs to watch for as winter tightens its grip and slowly cedes to spring:

1. Will Kash Patel run the FBI? It would hard to imagine a man less fit to run the nation’s highest, biggest, most powerful, and most visible law-enforcement agency. He has promised to become Trump’s avenging devil multiple times.

According to David French, FBI Director Christopher Ray’s recent early resignation was hardly a capitulation to Trump appointing Patel. Instead, it was an attempt to invoke the Vacancies Reform Act, which lets a president fill a senate-confirmable position that becomes vacant only with Senate approval, or with a person who has served in a senior capacity in the same agency (G-15 or higher) for ninety or more days during the calendar year after the vacancy occurs. Since the latter category does not include Patel, he will require Senate approval to run the FBI, or he will have to work for ninety days in a subordinate senior position.

But will Patel — like so many nominees for high executive and Supreme-Court appointments — now say what Republican senators want to repeat to a gullible public? Or will enough Republican senators remember what he said to “raw-meat” voters before the confirmation battle?

2. Will Pam Bondi, albeit a more conventional pick for Attorney General, knuckle under to Trump’s lust for revenge? Will she resist and be fired, or will she manage to resist successfully, unlike many of Trump’s first-term cabinet? (Being one of Trump’s more conventional and qualified nominees, she’s unlikely to fail Senate confirmation.)

3. Will Pete Hegseth, who has never held a general command (or any rank higher than major), become Secretary of Defense, in the short chain of command for using our nuclear arsenal? Will he, in his inexperience and extremism, use the US military against our own people for the first time since the Civil War?

A recent news report suggests that Trump and his team are going all out to convince or coerce Repubican Senators to confirm Hegseth. The Trump team apprently views his nomination as a test of dominance, despot-style. It appears to be focusing on Hegseth’s past indiscretions with alcohol, erratic behavior and alleged sexual assualt.

Here’s how over-the-top Trump crony Steve Bannon, who served a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, recently described the Trump team’s approach to filling the Cabinet with extremists:

“A guy like Gaetz performs a critical function — drawing fire, meaning attention, from all other candidates.... It is critical to ‘flood the zone’ strategy to never withdraw, never retreat, double down, and overwhelm the system. That leads to victory.”

But what about Hegseth’s complete inexperience in majory military command, let alone the critical ethos of lawful, constitutional military action? Will the Senate give him a pass on his self-evident lack of character and dubious reported personal conduct, while failing to notice that this inexperienced lout should never have his finger anywhere near the Nuclear Button?

4. If the Senate fails to confirm these and other appointments, will Trump try to circumvent the Senate entirely by firing the heads of departments and trying to appoint acting heads to fill their chairs, without Senate confirmation?? Will he appoint his goons to subordinate positions for ninety days, to satisfy the letter of the Vacancies Reform Act, and then put them in the top spots?

No one but Trump himslef can know for sure what he thinks. But he gives every indication of loving power and craving domination. He likes to watch others kiss his ring (or other places). He demeans and appears to despise expertise of every sort.

It cannot have escaped his intention that he has already completely suborned and dominated a once-healthy and rational Republican party, simply by demagoguing his political opponents and supporting his loyalists. No one knows how rational or analytically smart he is because (among many other reasons) he won’t release his college grades or test scores. But his emotional intelligence is off the scale, or he wouldn’t be president-elect again, after all the lies he’s told and all he’s done and not done.

He would have to be an idiot not to see cause and effect. Punish your enemies, reward your friends and pick no underlings but loyalists, and you can be king, despite what the Constitution says. That’s what the last decade has taught him.

Will there be enough Republicans, especially in the Senate, to say him nay? Will they have the stamina to outlast the impetus of over-the-top rogues like Bannon?

The Democrats aren’t numerous enough to make a difference by themselves. So it’s up to the few Republicans who see the threat to constitutional government, not to mention a sane, law-abiding and professional military, to act. They must do so right from the beginning, before the entire federal bureaucracy, or at least its law-enforcement branches, and perhaps even our military, are suborned.

Even if applied, the Vacanies Reform Act gives us only a ninety-day respite. So we will all know by Spring. If the resistance fails before then, we will have an answer to Ben Franklin’s question. Then, I suppose, it will be all good men and women for themselves, just as under so many despotisms past.


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