On Monday January 25, Speaker Pelosi will send the House’s impeachment article charging Donald Trump with incitement of insurrection to the US Senate, triggering the second impeachment trial of the former host of “The Apprentice.”
The trial itself may be delayed for two weeks, giving President Biden some necessary time to get his new Administration up and running and Cabinet nominees confirmed. But even before the impeachment article gets sent to the Senate, the case that is being built against Trump is including more and more of the aging pervert’s own tiny fingerprints.
Based on a big lie
Trump’s made-for-TV insurrection would not, of course, have even been possible without the extensive pre-marketing campaign launched by the former Trump Steaks pitchman himself.
As Trump learned long ago from the book of Hitler speeches he kept on his bedside table, you can’t overthrow democracy without first brainwashing a sizable portion of the population into following your illegal directives. In the Birther-in-Chief’s case, he has spent years packing the empty spaces between the ears of racists, poorly educateds and wrestling fans with a steady stream of bullshit, then added a sprinkling of “Fake News” pesticide to kill any pesky truth or facts that tried to enter.
As psychologist Vince Greenwood, Ph.D., wrote on Medium recently, Trump was able to exploit, “a media landscape that was user-friendly for a candidate skilled in the beyond truth and shame expressive style.” His reality-TV fame and his embrace of WWE fakery allowed him to seize control of the megaphone offered “by Fox News and right-wing talk radio, as well as the bottom-up social media world, exemplified by Twitter.”
Long before things finally came to a head on January 6, the brains of the Fox News audience were already primed for the kind of “emotionally provocative content” Trump was ready to deliver, with no concern for how untethered from reality that content might be.
Over the past five-plus years, Trump discovered that making low-info losers believe whatever fairytale he was telling them was as easy as it was for Pavlov to make dogs salivate by just ringing a bell.
Funded by the Ringmaster himself
The mob was primed to act as soon as Dear Leader rang his bell. But paid agitators were required as well. And, as we now know, the seed money for the terrorist attack on the US Capitol came directly from Ringmaster Trump himself.
As OpenSecrets.org reported, “Trump’s presidential campaign aides played key roles orchestrating” the January 6 rally and has disclosed paying more than $2.7 million to the individuals and firms who organized it, including Maggie Mulvaney, the rally’s “VIP Lead,” who is a niece of former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. But that may just be the tip of the iceberg. As Open Secrets also notes: “The full extent of the Trump campaign’s ties to the protests may not be not fully known due to its use of shell companies that hide details of its financial dealings and the central role ‘dark money’ played in the protests.”
This was a carefully planned attack
The seeds of the insurrection were planted over many months, starting with Trump’s claims that he could only lose in November if the election were “rigged,” supplemented by his Presidential debate command that Proud Boys and white supremacists should “stand by,” and culiminating in Trump’s and ‘Borat 2’ costar Rudy Giuliani’s ridiculous post-election, Kraken-free legal shenanigans.
During the insurrection and later in courtrooms, many of the Trump terrorists have explicitly claimed, like the good Nazis they are, that they were “just following orders.”
But when the attack happened, many of the participants came prepared to kill for Trump. They wanted to overthrow US democracy on the orders of a frantic psychopath.
As the Washington Post has reported, the extremist group Oath Keepers “made plans to storm the U.S. Capitol days in advance of the Jan. 6 attack, and then communicated in real time as they breached the building on opposite sides and talked about hunting for lawmakers.” Communications quoted by the Post include:
“We have about 30-40 of us. We are sticking together and sticking to the plan.”
“Tom all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3floors down,”
“Go through back house chamber doors facing N left down hallway down steps.”
“All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas.”
Meanwhile, having funded and marketed the event, Trump stirred up the mob and even promised to march on the Capitol with them. But by the time the breach occurred, he was comfortably ensconced in a private dining room at the White House. As Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin told CNN, he was “watching it on TV, an insurrection tailgate party.”
The Insurrectionist-in-Chief
As Vanity Fair now reports, the Capitol Insurrection came as no surprise to Trump. The day before it happened, he told the acting defense secretary, “You’re going to need 10,000 people.”
When the attack happened though, Trump refused to send help. He was fiddling with his remote while defense department leaders “couldn’t get through.”
(As one) senior defense official remembered… “They tried to call him”—meaning the president. The implication: Either Trump was shell-shocked, effectively abdicating his role as commander in chief, or he was deliberately stiff-arming some of his top officials because he was, in effect, siding with the insurrectionists and their cause of denying Biden’s victory.
While Orange Mussolini had many accomplices, there’s no doubt that the Capitol Insurrection was, from start to finish, a Donald J. Trump production. With his active encouragement, five people died. And even when he finally asked his zombie hordes to “go home,” he couldn’t help adding, “We love you, you’re very special.”
The facts are clear and the punishment must be severe, including conviction in the Senate and a ban from ever again seeking public office. Otherwise, history tells us what might happen. Like the Trump Insurrection, Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923 was a failure. Hitler slunk out of town and was later arrested. But after a lenient punishment, he emerged from the botched putsch as a more popular national figure. Within a decade, he would install the Third Reich.
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