Beaucoup des Coups
Campaign Quarterstaves; No Quarter Given
I. Crime and Punishment American Style
Donald Trump has been charged in 18 states with an additional 1,675 felonies and misdemeanors.
The new charges against Mr. Trump include 313 counts filed by the States of New York and California for, among other crimes, Ukraine war heresy, lèse-majesté, consorting with Republicans, poor golf putting technique, being born, and boorish displays of insensitivity.
Simultaneously, the State of Oregon charged Mr. Trump with the crimes of denying that he will lose the 2024 election, eating hamburgers cooked on a natural gas range, failure to shop-lift, and not inciting a riot or public disorder in downtown Portland.
In Washington State, the Attorney General filed dozens of additional counts against Mr. Trump including aggravated refusal to possess illegal drugs and attempted mis-gendering of unborn children. "These are very serious crimes in the State of Washington," said AG Bob Ferguson whose office has already sued Mr. Trump or his administration not less than 80 times since 2020. "These prosecutions send a clear message that the Great State of Washington will not tolerate people who flagrantly will not sell, possess, inject, smoke or ingest formerly illegal drugs, and that we will aggressively protect the pan-genderism of vulnerable unborn children before they can surgically alter their trans-sexual identities."
Jumping on the indictment bandwagon, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demanded that the U.S. extradite Mr. Trump to stand trial for crimes against humanity by conspiring with others to commit intentional acts of mis-pronomialization, a crime for which Canada has recently reinstated capital punishment.
Some citizens noted that the new criminal charges will lead Mr. Trump to hire tens of thousands of attorneys. That, in turn, will lead to a shortage of American lawyers who could otherwise be airlifted to Ukraine to help funnel U.S. aid money into the pockets of the neediest Ukrainian politicians and their families. Others observed that Mr. Trump will be on trial in multiple locations around the country every day between January 1, 2024 and Election Day in November leading to suggestions of election interference.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre poo-pooed the allegations of election interference and denied that there was any politicking involved in the charges. "In America," Press Secretary Jean-Pierre said, "no one is above The Law. So Mr. Trump will get his several trials and days and weeks and months in court just like anyone else running against Joe Biden."
In response, the Republican controlled House of Representatives voted along party lines to impeach President Joe Biden.
The vote to impeach Mr. Biden included a litany of "high crimes and misdemeanors" including consorting with Democrats, failing to "equitably" share proceeds from the Biden family's decades of bribery, corruption, graft and payola with members of both political parties; leering and sneering in public; procreative malpractice due to fathering Hunter Biden; senile stumblebummery; and delegating executive power to war-mongering out-of-control Russophobic neoliberals as opposed to delegating executive power to war-mongering out-of-control Sinophobic neoconservatives.
In reaction to the escalating events in the United States, the Peoples Republic of China and the Russian Federation reversed course and demanded that the US Government impose new and greater sanctions on their respective countries.
"In fact," Chinese and Russian foreign ministries said in a joint communique, "we now see the wisdom of complete disengagement from North America. Rather than risk infection by whatever mental disease seems to be afflicting American politics, the Chinese and Russian governments recommend that the non-western world implement a quarantine of all American exports and capital. We have also stopped issuing entry visas to U.S. citizens to prevent the further spread of this degenerative neurocognitive disorder."
The Chinese-Russian joint communique furthermore called for an international ban on the export of American style democracy until a panel of international experts can determine exactly what it is and what it's supposed to be good for; a total ban on Western Culture, clothing, movies, drugs, color revolutions, social media, and economic theory; and the vaccination of all American politicians and news pundits with anti-rabies serum.
II. January 6th - a Riot, A Set-Up or a Coup?
A) Was January 6, 2020 an attempt to overthrow the government?
I have no idea. The so-called "information age" notwithstanding, America is, and always has been, a kind of Death Valley news desert where 'facts' are few and desiccated and mostly consist of mirages. In the modern world, information is routinely withheld, turned inside-out, confabulated, distorted and cinematized.
Precisely because the facts are so often absent, we assert the right to fill in the blanks ourselves and to formulate our own narratives. After all, as Winston Churchill purportedly said when setting out to reimagine the history of WWII in a light most favorable to the Anglo-American empire: History shall be kind to us, for I intend to write it.
B) Did Donald Trump instigate, help plan and organize the so-called January 6, 2021 "insurrection?"
Probably not. A president who willingly surrounded himself with advisors and courtiers the likes of Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, John Bolton, Michael Cohen, and William Barr doesn't seem to have the wits to organize a company picnic let alone a coup d'etat.
A coup d'etat is the sudden overthrow of the government by conspiratorial means, visible or invisible, forcibly or by legal sleight of hand. It does require a fair amount of planning, coordination and skill. By default, this eliminates Mr. Trump as the January 6th maestro.
C) One Damned Thing After Another?
History is just conspiracy and coup one after another after another. Of course, they are not random events or, as the yawners like to say, 'just one damned thing after another.'
History is not random. History is the chronicle of what and where we are now, and how we got here. It is no more just one damned thing after another than a cancer diagnosis is just a random event wholly unrelated to what you ate, what you drank, what you breathed, where you lived, how you lived, what you did and did not do that may have seeded and incubated the disease.
It is not fair to say that every one of history's thousands of coups has had the fingerprints of the United States on it. Indeed, not a single coup d'etat anywhere on Earth can be attributed to the United States, in full or in part, before 1776. Thus, the CIA was (more than likely) not involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate in 44 A.D, nor did the CIA (more than likely) play a role in Oliver Cromwell's 1653 dissolution of Parliament, or the French Revolution that began in 1789 (although some prominent U.S. citizens did play an active role in promoting the goals of the French Revolution, at least in the beginning).
D) Regime Change Comme il Faut
Around the world, coups d'etat have been as common as fleas on a dog. Examples of Western-instigated coups are plentiful ranging from all over the Caribbean and Central America, to Chile, to Argentina, to Libya, to Iraq, to Iran, to Greece, to Afghanistan, to Korea, to Indonesia, and even to Hawaii (U.S. plantation owners overthrew the independent Kingdom of Hawai'i in 1893). They were sometimes accomplished violently and sometimes perpetrated under the guise of "the rule of law."
The current imbroglio in Ukraine is directly tied to the United States' instigation of the 2014 "Maidan Revolution" in Ukraine that overthrew its elected government and replaced it with a U.S. dependency that, ironically, no longer holds elections.
Not long ago, the Pakistani military (at the suggestion of the United States, of course) arranged to depose Prime Minister Imran Khan in a constitutional coup. The Pakistani courts then charged, tried and imprisoned Mr. Khan for three years for "corruption." The sentence is enough to force the very popular (except with the United States government) Pakistan politician out of the next election cycle, allowing pro-American putschists to rule the country during Khan's incarceration.
In 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French socialist politician and Lothario who was likely to be elected as France's next president, was charged with the rape of a chambermaid at a New York City hotel. As a result of the rape prosecution in the United States (most likely with the blessing of the French political establishment), Dominique Strauss-Kahn's political career ended. Due to such "election interference," no doubt, François Hollande went on to become the next President of France.
In 2017, former socialist Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was charged, prosecuted and convicted of corruption. He was legally disqualified to again run for president. Not until Brazil's highest court threw out the conviction years later was Lula allowed to run for and win public office.
In 2022, Peru's popularly elected president Pedro Castillo, a school teacher and union leader, was impeached by the ultra-conservative Congress and removed from office. Castillo was then hit with an avalanche of investigations and charges rendering him politically nonviable.
E) A Coup for You, But Not for Me
Ironically, and notwithstanding the manifold foreign election interventions by the United States, the most loathsome calumny in American politics today is to be accused of being the cats-paw of a foreign state seeking to subvert the United States (such as charges that Trump was in league with Russia or that Biden does China's bidding).
Of course, there have been many "unauthorized" coups in which Western governments were not involved. The coups in Niger (2023), Myanmar (2021) and Cuba (1959) come to mind. In those instances... contrasted with the pro-U. S. coups our government has supported... the United States government has castigated the usurpers largely because they oppose capitalism, Western domination and, interestingly, "free and fair elections."
Do any of these "foreign" events remind us of anything currently happening in the United States? Of course not. American coups are taboo. If they are taboo, then they never happened.
III. Was January 6th a failed coup d'etat?
A) Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4 - Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark
More than likely what transpired on January 6, 2001 was beaucoup des coups, multiple layers of simultaneous coups d'etat actuated by persons or groups of persons never to be known, each group seeking countervailing objectives. National politics is a nasty, brutal blood-sport. At best, it's mud wrestling. At worst, it's fencing with un-tipped foils. Like in Shakespeare's Hamlet, people die, careers are terminated and the state is overthrown. Whether the various countervailing coups of January 6, 2021 failed or succeeded depends on who actually organized them and what they really intended to accomplish. In any event, it's just too soon to tell.
The United States - just like every other state - has a long and colorful history of autochthonous election interference reaching back to its beginnings. Thus, the one thing we can say for sure is that the presidential election of 2020 was not notable for election interference.
We say this confidently because every U.S. national election of significance has, to a greater or lesser degree, involved chicanery, voter suppression, ballot harvesting, gerrymandering, fraud, bribery, electronic vote flipping, dead men voting, voter manipulation, hanging chads, Tammany Hall, machine patronage and outright theft. The second thing we can confidently say is that in America you are not allowed to acknowledge this out loud.
Indeed, the true contest is never about the actual number of votes each party's candidate receives. The contest is about the effectiveness by which the prevailing clique exercises the power needed to win and to rule, by any means necessary, notwithstanding how people vote.
I do not mean to offend. It is just a matter of seeing what is there to be seen.
Indeed, there have been several rather violent coups in the United States. One was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Lincoln's death derailed the reconstruction of the South after the U.S. Civil War and led to the presidency of Lincoln's back-up, Vice President Andrew Johnson - a Confederate sympathizer. Andrew Johnson's administration, in fits and starts, basically unraveled the Reconstruction of the South and paved the way for the de facto extension of Black political-economic slavery for at least another hundred years.
In the 1930s, reactionary businessmen planned a violent coup d'etat against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This coterie of reactionary conspirators considered Franklin Roosevelt a "traitor to his class," that is to say, the "ruling class." The conspiracy fell apart when the popular double recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler (he who rightly said from first hand experience that "war is a racket"), refused to support the conspirators.
Another violent American coup was, of course, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's death abruptly derailed his plans to avoid escalating the Vietnam War and to end the highly profitable arms race of the Cold War. Mr. Kennedy made a lot of powerful people very unhappy, and powerful people have little hesitation making their unhappiness known. Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the White House. Many of us recall being sent, or trying to avoid being sent, to Vietnam during LBJ's administration. Many decades later, we still remember the angst of waiting for our draft lottery numbers to be drawn. Thus, we survivors experienced the abrupt volte face of U.S. foreign policy after Kennedy's death.
B) Preventative Coups d'Etat
There have been many "pre-coups" or "preventative coups" in the U.S. Some of these pre-coups have been rather violent.
Early in the 20th Century, the populist wheeler-dealer and charismatic Huey Long, the former governor and senator from Louisiana, was preparing to challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1936. Long was gunned down in 1935. The alleged solo assassin died in a hail of bullets fired by Long's bodyguard. A subsequent federal investigation concluded that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. There never is.
Robert F. Kennedy was the father of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who is currently contending for the Democratic presidential nomination against Joe Biden. Robert F. Kennedy had mounted a growing challenge to then party front-runner Hubert Humphrey. In 1968, just as Robert F. Kennedy was surging in the Democratic primaries and polls, Sirhan Sirhan (allegedly another lone gunman) shot Robert Kennedy to death. Many find the official RFK "sole gunman" explanation as credible as the claim that James Earl Ray was the long gunman who assassinated Martin Luther King in Memphis earlier that same year.1
Other contenders for the American presidency have been violently removed in "pre-coups." George Wallace, running as a third party candidate for president, was shot in 1972 by a lone gunman, so we are told, while Wallace was campaigning at a Laurel, Maryland shopping center. The attack left Wallace paralyzed and derailed his third party campaign. At the time he was shot, the "peace candidate" George McGovern and Richard Nixon were polling in a dead heat at 41% apiece with Wallace polling around 18%. George Wallace understood that his candidacy would siphon southern voters away from Richard Nixon to make Wallace the proverbial king maker. With Wallace in the race, George McGovern might well have won the election in 1972 and US foreign policy would have changed dramatically. With Wallace out of the way, however, McGovern was crushed and Nixon was reelected.
C) The "Legal" Preventative Coup
A legal pre-coup, in contrast to the violent variety, is usually carried out by complicit attorneys, judges and lawmakers acting "non-violently" within the framework of the legal system.
1) Aaron Burr. The first legal pre-coup in the U.S. was the prosecution of Aaron Burr, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson. Burr and Jefferson didn't like each other, to say the least. Additionally, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, didn't like Thomas Jefferson, either. Depending on your point of view, Aaron Burr was either a potent political rival to Jefferson or a corrupt cad. In any event, in 1804 Burr killed the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel (which, depending on your point of view was, or was not, such an awful thing). In 1807, the Jefferson Administration prosecuted and tried Burr, his vice president, for treason for purportedly seeking to establish a new country west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi. However, thanks to the active judicial intervention of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in Aaron Burr's trial, Burr was acquitted, much to Jefferson's chagrin. Nevertheless, the stigma of having been charged with treason, proven or not, brought Burr's political career to a screeching halt. As was intended.
2) Eugene Debbs. Eugene Debbs wan another victim of a non-violent American pre-coup. Debbs was a pacifist and a socialist who opposed the U.S. entry into the First World War. Debbs recognized that, like most wars, World War I was a political-economic scramble for resources and colonies, and part of the ongoing class struggle.
The massive propaganda campaign notwithstanding, the United States' entry in the "Great War" had absolutely nothing to do with "making the world safe for democracy," as President Wilson put it in his speech to Congress on April 2, 1917 when he demanded a declaration of war against Germany. In those days, in the absence of the never-ending War Powers Act like we have today, the President still had to go to Congress for constitutional authority to wage war. Wilson, you will recall from your American history course, ran for reelection as a "peace" candidate who "kept us out of war"... only to immediately flip-flop post election to become a "war hawk."
Mr. Wilson's shameless turn-around was faster than a Taylor Swift concert wardrobe change. Not all were pleased. In 1918, Mr. Debbs made an anti-war speech that ruffled the aristocratic sensibilities of the now militarist President Woodrow Wilson. Eugene Debbs publicly and directly challenged Woodrow Wilson's war policy. Mr. Wilson - not generally known for his sense of humor - was unamused.
Debbs was duly charged, tried, convicted and imprisoned under the war-time sedition laws which made it illegal to publish anything disloyal, profane, or abusive about the government or that interfered with military recruiting. Others later charged under analogous laws include Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, both of whom also have been punished for publishing the truth.
Socialism in the early 1900s (the real thing, not the bourgeois wine spritzer favored by today's so-called Progressive Democrats) was actually a very powerful political movement all over the globe as well as in the United States. Prior to WWI, there were millions of well-informed, working class socialist voters in the United States. My mother's father, an ILGWU card-carrying union stalwart, was one of them. Eugene Debbs ran for president as a socialist from prison. He did very well, in terms of votes received, but his imprisonment made his campaign difficult and victory impossible. As was intended.
3) Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore. Other non-violent coups in the United States likely include the forced resignation of Richard Nixon, the defeat of Jimmy Carter's reelection and the termination of the recount of Florida's ballots that would have likely led to Al Gore elected president in 2000 instead of George W. Bush.
Ostensibly, Richard Nixon was forced out of office by the Watergate Scandal. The saga of Watergate - as well as the Daniel Ellsberg release of the Pentagon Papers, so called - seems to this author rather less the cause of Nixon's demise than the narrative that was peddled to explain it. Nixon, not the most charismatic politician, was starting to head down the same track as John F. Kennedy - trying to end the Vietnam War. Nixon, was removed, bloodlessly, in a politically fatal campaign of character assassination a/k/a "Watergate" and its associated scandals.
Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign, we remember, was sunk by media accusations of "weakness" in the face of a crisis in Iran. Barely remembered today were the strange machinations behind the scenes that led to the original hostage taking at the American embassy in Tehran and Carter's failed military venture to rescue them. Only later, in the dementia years of the Reagan administration, did it come out that certain U.S. players had engaged in the Iran-Contra affair by which the United States acted in cahoots with the Iranian government for the secret delivery of weapons, the delayed release of the American hostages until after Reagan's election, and the under-the-table funding of the anti-communist Contras' guerrilla war in Nicaragua.
As for Al Gore, thanks to Florida Governor Jeb Bush's election connivance and the infamous "hanging chad" ballot counts (and disqualifications), brother George W. Bush was selected as President by the U.S. Supreme Court instead of the likely majority vote getter, Al Gore. Be that as it may, it was George Bush who was then President on September 11, 2001, not Al Gore, and the rest, as they say, is "history" (and a mystery).
IV. More Election Interference in the offing?
A) The auto-da-fé of Mr. Trump and the Hook for Mr. Biden.
Is the courtroom auto-da-fé of Donald Trump the coup de grâce, the ultimate act of election interference? Again, it is too soon to tell.
But, query, do the Democrats actually intend to remove Mr. Trump from the campaign? Or, rather, by dint of serial prosecution, do they seek to martyr him so that Mr. Trump will, indeed, be the Republican nominee. If the latter, the Democrats likely count on the upper rank of Republican Party donors to abandon their own nominee and back Mr. Biden financially and sotto voce.
Politics is not a game of tiddlywinks. Naught but class loyalty counts. They all cheat and everyone plays dirty.
Are the current wave of civil and criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump a soft "pre-coup?" It's possible; but, if so, both parties are complicit in it.
The donor class and power brokers of the Republican Party likely want the impulsive and narcissistic Mr. Trump locked up before Election Day 2024. Those are crocodile tears shed by official Republican party-dom.
As for the donor class and power brokers of the Democratic Party, they would just as soon that the nogoodnik Joe Biden be given the old vaudevillian hook to get him off the stage before the disgusted audience leaves en masse. Thus, the Democratic Party stalwarts wouldn't mind having the bumbling, insensitive and venal Joe Biden impeached and removed from office.
In both instances, the two parties would blame the partisans of the other for the demise of their respective champions and would wave their "bloody shirts" to rally their troops. A win-win for everyone... in the ruling class.
In both instances - the incarceration of Donald Trump and the impeachment of Joe Biden - the two parties would then happily promote two other candidates more to their class likings: candidates who are genial war-mongers (oxymoronically speaking), sentient, less obviously corrupt and absolutely subservient.
B) Après nous, le déluge?
I did not watch Donald Trump's August 24th interview on "X" by Tucker Carlson. I also did not watch the FOX TV broadcast of the Republicans' candidates' beauty contest featuring Snow White and the seven dwarfs. I had more interesting things to do, like reread Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
If there were to be a live debate between Mr. Biden and his intra-party rival Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the other hand, I would pay attention. But that will no more be permitted than a third party cow jumping over the moon.
The front-runners, for the moment, remain who they are: Trump and Biden. From my perspective, Mr. Trump's greatest charms are 1) that he greatly annoys certain folks who deserve to be annoyed; and 2) that, if elected, this same class of annoyed folks will make sure that President Trump II is tied up in knots and prevented from actually doing anything -- just as happened during the hapless administration of Donald Trump I.
On the other hand, Mr. Biden's greatest charms are that 1) he owns a German Shepherd dog, Commander, that, from time to time, tends to bite Mr. Biden's Praetorian Guard; and 2) that Hunter Biden doesn't have a twin brother.
Meanwhile.
This is an epic political battle of quarterstaves standing knee-deep in mud. No quarter will be given. None will be asked. Times are tough. The stakes are high. There will be beaucoup des coups, given and received.
I wish it were true that none of this is important. I wish it were true that none of this affects you and me.
But, unfortunately, it is important. It does affect you and me. And future generations. There are no foxholes to hide in.
History is not just one damned thing after another. If so, then we are the damned.
May we all escape le déluge that could be coming during and after this election cycle. May we all escape the pummels and cudgels with no worse than bruises.
Few people know that James Earl Ray was never criminally tried because, on the advice of his lawyer, he pleaded guilty to the crime of killing MLK. There was a civil trial, however, in which a jury found that the United States government was guilty of conspiring to assassinate him.