TRUMP INCITES VIOLENCE – “REPUBLICANS MUST GET TOUGHER”

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

The criminal behavior of Donald J. Trump, since he stole the US presidency in 2016, reached a crescendo last week, when Trump and 18 co-conspirators were indicted by a Grand Jury of 23 citizens of Fulton County, State of Georgia, one of the most conservative of Republican states in the nation. The indictment was brought by the District Attorney of Fulton Country, Fani Willis, as a criminal enterprise by Trump under the State’s racketeering (RICO) laws.

The Georgia indictment brought Trump’s personal criminal score to an astounding record, in cricketing parlance, of 4 for 91 – four indictments, four separate jurisdictions, four months, with a total of 91 felony charges.

Trump’s reaction to the Georgia indictment was, “I have four now, the presidency is mine”. He also said that the Republicans must fight harder, get tougher, a veiled incitement to violence.

The playbook he has used for seven years, that he gets stronger the more charges he faces, is belied by election results since 2016.

The Republican Party lost the Senate in the 2018 midterms, during his presidency; he lost the presidency in a landslide to President Biden, together with the House, in the general election of 2020; the Party performed abysmally in the 2022 midterms, losing the Senate and winning the House with a most disappointing wafer-thin majority; most of the candidates he endorsed for the Senate and the House were defeated handily in 2022. These national election results show that while Trump may retain the support of the radical section of the Republican Party, he is not at all popular with moderate conservatives and Independents.

Republicans, even those who are running against him for the 2024 presidency, pretend to fall for this lie. They send this self-acclaimed billionaire donations in the millions to help pay his legal fees. They dare not anger him and his violent MAGA (Make America Great Again), radical red base, whose support they believe would be essential for a Republican victory in 2024, when not only the presidency, but 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats will be at stake.

The continuing support of Trump by over 50% of the Republican Party, after his public demonstration of racism, criminal incompetence and violent crimes of sedition, is not difficult to understand. There are many people of white European heritage who still believe in the dominance of their racial heritage, and are prepared to resort to any means, including violence, to preserve their Christian God-given right of white supremacy.

The names of the Grand Jurors in Georgia who testified against Trump have been released to the public, and they have already received death threats. As are the judges, members of the prosecution and witnesses known to be against Trump. The Fulton County Sheriff is investigating these threats and making every effort to ensure the safety of these people, who are merely doing their jobs. In spite of these efforts, they live in terror on a daily basis. It is only a matter of time before someone is killed by a member of the Trump white supremacist cult.

Trump is facing serious criminal charges. The campaign finance felony of hush money payments to a porn star; the stealing, for nefarious purposes, of top-secret documents from the government; and inciting an insurrection to overturn the results of a legitimate election, with a violent attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power; these have seen him arraigned and arrested, presently on release on bail, with extremely lenient conditions.

However, he will probably not receive any special treatment on the latest charges he faces in Georgia. Trump and his co-conspirators have been ordered to surrender on or before August 25 at Fulton County jail, where they, including Trump, will be fingerprinted, photographed and, on a plea of not guilty, released on bail, with conditions which may not be as lenient as those enjoyed by him on the other indictments. His lawyers are currently negotiating the terms of his surrender at Fulton County jail next week.

He is guilty of all these indictments, with incontrovertible evidence against him, but the sheer volume of his caseloads works for him. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that any of these trials will reach the verdict/conviction stage before the presidential election in November 2024.

Conventional wisdom is terrifying. The richest and most powerful nation in the world is grappling with the unthinkable. A twice-impeached criminal former president, burdened with four pending indictments and 91 felony charges, arrested and on bail, is, amazingly, the prohibitive favorite for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, with an even money chance of winning the 2024 presidency outright.

And if he wins, he erases all his criminal, indeed treasonous convictions with a presidential self-pardon, and throws out all federal cases against him. This will give him a clean slate to complete the job he started, of destroying the democracy in the oldest democracy in the world, and installing himself as President for Life, surrounded by his equally treasonous cronies.

There is one small problem, which makes the above scenario a mere fantasy. If, even after he is elected to the 2024 presidency, he is convicted on the Georgia indictment (a state crime over which he has no control), then he will have to serve a minimum of five years in prison, without the option of probation. State crimes cannot be pardoned by the President or the State Governor. He will have to function as president for his full second term from behind bars. The Leader of the Free World will himself not be free!

Of course, he may attempt to use his dictatorial powers and make the necessary amendments to the Constitution to keep him in power. Which may well result in America’s second civil war!

To return to reality, Trump will never be able to contest any election in the United States of America in the future because of a few eternal golden linings, “where the positive will always prevail over the negative, where the unwavering truth will always stand apart from the lies”.

One of those golden linings is the aforementioned fourth Georgia indictment against Trump and 18 co-conspirators, charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. An indictment which is brimming with damning evidence. In announcing the charges, District Attorney Fani Willis said:

“Their indictment alleges that rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result”.

The RICO Act was originally enacted for the purpose of prosecuting criminal organizations like the Mafia. “The power of RICO lies in its conspiracy provision…that allows tying together apparently unrelated crimes committed by different individuals with a common objective into one prosecutable pattern of racketeering”. RICO also imposes severe penalties for substantive violations of the Act, and provides for a defendant to be convicted and separately punished for any of the underlying crimes”.

For example, Trump’s recorded telephone call to Georgia State Attorney General threatening him with criminal charges if he did not “find” 11,780 votes which he needed to win the State of Georgia in the November 2020 election; accusations that Dominion voting machines were fraudulently designed to favor Biden, made by Trump attorneys Rudi Giuliani, Sydney Powell and Jenna Ellis, subsequently proved to be false in a court of law; attempts by Giuliani and others to create alternative, fraudulent slates of Electoral College electors for the State of Georgia and other swing states; some co-conspirators had even advised Trump to order the military to seize the Dominion voting machines. All these crimes were committed in the pursuance of one larger objective, the overturning of the results of the legitimate presidential election of November 2020 and installing Trump as the President of the United States of America. That was the ultimate criminal enterprise.

D.A. Fani Willis’ indictment has been hailed as “the most far-reaching response to Trump’s assault on democracy”. The New York Times acclaimed it as “ingenious”; Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC anchor and writer, described it as “the single most important document detailing the attempt by the criminal enterprise of Donald Trump to destroy American democracy, and to destroy any person standing in the way of this enterprise”.

District Attorney Willis has now requested the trial to begin on March 4, 2024. If the trial begins around that date, there may be a possibility of reaching a verdict before the November election. Predictably, Trump’s lawyers have proposed that trial date of the federal election date begins in April 2026 (yes, 2026!) and are negotiating for trial dates, post mortem, three months after Trump’s death, for the other three indictments.

In reality, the trials on all four indictments will probably start in the early months of 2024. Unfortunately, according to federal law, court proceedings of federal trials cannot be televised. But the proceedings of the state trial of Georgia will have no such restriction, and the public will have a daily dose on television of the criminality of the actions of Trump and his co-conspirators.

If the villainous details that such proceedings will reveal on a daily basis do not capture the minds of moderate Republican and independent voters, then nothing will.

Finally, two conservative constitutional lawyers, members of the far-right Federalist Society, published last week an “audacious argument” that Trump is constitutionally prohibited from running for president, that state officials have “not only the authority but the legal obligation to prevent his name from appearing on the ballot”.

The legal opinion, authored by University of Chicago Law Professor William Baude and University of St. Thomas Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, is based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that “Former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack”.

Also, Trump’s lawyers indicate that Trump will not participate in the first presidential debate under the aegis of Fox News, scheduled for Friday, August 25. A debate which will be an exercise in futility if the front runner, by a mile, for the nomination of the Party presidency in 2024 chooses not to attend.

The latest news from the Trump camp is that the name of first term New York Congresswoman and lunatic QAnon spokesperson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is being touted (by herself) as a possible Vice-Presidential candidate for the 2024 election. A Trump-Greene ticket which will make the Republican Party seem even more like a circus within a zoo.